My Brother's Wedding

African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett has been making movies about the black experience in America since the late 1960s. His 1983 independent film My Brother's Wedding is about Pierce, a black man in an impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood whose best friend is an ex-con. But the film's topic is not life on the hard streets. Pierce has a good job in the family dry cleaning business, and his brother is a lawyer. Pierce resents his brother's materialistic, social-climbing approach to life, preferring to stay in the world he knows. But Burnett makes it clear by the film's end that Pierce's loyalty is misplaced — refusing to better himself is no better than being greedy. The St. Louis Public Library's Central Cinema is screening a selection of Burnett's best films in the next few weeks. My Brother's Wedding is shown at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the St. Louis Public Library's Central branch (1301 Olive Boulevard; www.slpl.org).