"Lamp Post Media together with The Ephraim Group and Winnetoon Productions is currently in post production on the video documentary: Discovering Canada Lee.
Discovering Canada Lee is a one-hour digital video documentary that follows former newspaper reporter-turned-award-winning playwright Mona Z. Smith through the process of researching, creating and staging her play Becoming Something: Canada Lee. It shows how a white woman in her early forties from Winnetoon, Nebraska, population 62, responds to a once renowned African-American actor from Harlem almost fifty years after his elimination from U.S. cultural memory.
Mona Smith's subject and invisible companion on her journey - Canada Lee (1907-1952) - was an exceptional man of diverse talents. A violin prodigy, a professional prize fighter, a respected Broadway and Hollywood actor, and civil rights activist, Mr. Lee was identified by Time magazine as one of the most "vital screen and stage actors in America, of the order of Paul Robeson." At the zenith of his career in 1950, he had the name recognition we now associate with Denzel Washington. Then, he was placed on the FBI's blacklist as a suspected Communist. Resisting McCarthyism as it played out even through his friend, newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan, Lee also continued speaking out about ongoing segregation, Jim Crow laws and lynchings in the Cold War U.S. For this he suffered unimaginable loss: his reputation, his passport, his opportunity to work in the U.S. and overseas. Impoverished and increasingly ill, he died of heart failure in an apartment on East 4th Street in Greenwich Village at age 45. Few remember him today.
Discovering Canada Lee shows how the intersection of the lives and work of Lee and Smith reaches far beyond their personal circles. Through her humble off-off-Broadway production marking the 50th anniversary of Lee's death and a soon to be released biography of Canada Lee (Faber and Faber), Mona Z. Smith has set in motion ripples of recognition that promise to restore Lee's legacy: his unusually courageous commitments to art, freedom, and social justice.
