Thursday, Oct 30 7Pm at the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Les Blank "is a master of movies about the American idiom... one of our most original filmmakers“, writes Vincent Canby in the New York Times.

Born in 1935 in Tampa, Florida, Les Blank attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received a B.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in theatre. Major retrospectives of Les Blank's films have been mounted in Los Angeles at FILMEX in 1977; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1978 and 1984; New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1979. Among Blank's numerous awards are the British Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, 1982, (Burden of Dreams); the Golden Gate Award "Best of Festival", San Francisco Film Festival, 1982 (Burden of Dreams).

In 1990, Les Blank received the American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement as an independent filmmaker. In 1993 Garlic Is As Good As Good Mothers, and in 2004 Chulas Fronteras were selected by the U.S. Library Of Congress for inclusion in The National Film Registry. Les joins Fred Wiseman and the Maysles brothers as the only documentatians to be honored with two films on the list. His work has been supported by The National Endowment For the Arts, The American Film Institute, The National Endowment For the Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, PBS and the BBC.