Gina Belafonte
Gina Belafonte is an actor.
Being Harry Belafonte's youngest daughter explains some of Gina Belafonte's career and almost none of it. Her mother, Julie Belafonte, was a dancer and an activist; her father was a singer, actor and activist too. The acting credits gathered here are small parts spread thin across four decades: Elizabeth in the 1984 hip-hop film Beat Street, Molly in Tokyo Pop and Kathy in Bright Lights, Big City in the same year, a hostess at the Hey-Hey Club in Robert Altman's Kansas City, and Gina B. in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman.
The real work sits elsewhere, and she has never pretended otherwise. She produced Sing Your Song, the 2011 documentary about her father. She co-founded The Gathering for Justice, a nonprofit working to end child incarceration and the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and she is chief executive of Sankofa.org, a social justice impact organisation. Read the filmography as the visible edge of a working life spent mostly on the other side of the camera, and often outside the industry entirely.
Movies (5)
Where to start with Gina Belafonte
Begin with BlacKkKlansman. It is the best film she appears in and the one where a small role sits inside something worth two hours of anyone's evening. For a clearer sense of her as a performer, Beat Street is the pick: an early hip-hop picture shot while the culture was still being documented rather than packaged.
After that the returns are honest but slim. Tokyo Pop and Bright Lights, Big City both arrived in 1988 and pull in opposite directions, one a fish-out-of-water story set in Japan, the other a chilly New York night. Kansas City is worth it for Altman's jazz club atmosphere, though her part is small. If you want the person rather than the parts, her producing credit on the documentary Sing Your Song is the file to open.