"Cinderella" debut.

Even before the scheduled October 1994 release of her feature film writing and directing debut, "I Like It Like That," Darnell Martin has won accolades from the critics. Her film about a young Black and Latino couple raising three children in the South Bronx was an official selection of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival.

New York Daily News film critic Jami Bernard declared, "Every year at the Cannes Film Festival, there is at least one Cinderella story. This year, Cinderella was an African-American woman from the Bronx named Darnell Martin."

The film was shot in the neighborhood where Martin grew up, using the schoolyard, streets, and buildings as central elements in the piece.

Martin's artistic influences include Italian cinema and the literature of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams.

She attended Fordham University, Sarah Lawrence College, and graduate film school at New York University. Between classes, she worked as many as three jobs at a time, in film labs and camera rental houses, and as a non-drinking bartender at a nightclub. She gained extensive experience behind the camera, which led to assistant camera jobs on a feature film and on Nike and Levi 501 commercials.

Her short film "Suspect" won critical acclaim at the New York Public Theater's Young Black Cinema showcase in 1992, and that success led to her selection as one of eight directing fellows at the Sundance Institute's 13th annual filmmakers laboratory. "Suspect" also earned the Director's Choice Award at the 1992 Edison Black Mafia Film Festival.

In 1992 Martin sent her script of "I Like It Like That" and her short film to Columbia Pictures. The studio agreed to make the movie last year, making Martin the first African-American woman to direct a major studio movie.

New Films

Filmmaker St. Clair Bourne is working on a new documentary, "The Black West," which examines the African-American role in shaping the American Western frontier. The film will be produced through Bourne's company, The Chamba Organization, and will be released in January 1995.

"Higher Learning," John Singleton's movie about a semester in the lives of a handful of students as they deal with issues of identity, diversity, sexism, and escalating racial tension on a college campus, is scheduled for release at the beginning of 1995. The film, written and directed by Singleton, stars Omar Epps, Tyra Banks, Kristy Swanson, and Laurence Fishburne.

The cast and crew of this fall's "Drop Squad," about an ambitious young advertising exec who "sells out" the African-American community to further his career, includes alumni of Howard University, Hampton University, Morehouse College. Richmond College, Mills College, Marymount Manhattan College, and the Julliard School. Spike Lee is executive producer. David Johnson is director.

"Chocolate City," a film by the Florida A&M University Cinema Club, premiered in September. The movie, written, produced, and directed by FAMU Cinema creator Rob Hardy, is about students at a fictional historically Black school, King College.

Radio & TV Group Names New Director

Terri Dickerson-Jones is the new executive director of the American Women in Radio and Television. AWRT recruited Dickerson-Jones from her position as associate director of the American Press Institute, where she had built a strong industry reputation as an expert on diversity in the workplace. She is the author of a book, 50 Activities for Managing Cultural Diversity, published in 1993.

Douglass Biography Slated for PBS 

"Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History" is a 90-minute documentary produced and directed by veteran filmmaker Orlando Bagwell ("Malcolm X: Make it Plain," "Eyes on the Prize"). The production, the first television biography of Douglass to cover the scope of his life and career, airs November 2, 1994 on PBS.

Bagwell remarks, "Douglass lived in a time when there was no more radical example of racial polarization and inequality than in the institution of slavery. It was a traumatic time for the country. Douglass was very much a part of that. So he's witnessing and experiencing real racial problems and angst that are similar to what we are looking at today."