Crusader Vance Furbert, who makes his home in Toronto, has written and produced, along with his friend Eric McKay, another innovative film that is getting good reviews in New York where it is currently showing.

Titled 4 Our Sons, the documentary is aimed at inspiring young black males as well as females to aspire to greatness. The premiere screening of this film in Bermuda will be at the Liberty Theatre on Sunday, March 9 at 2.30 p.m. under the patronage of Premier Ewart Brown and his wife Wanda as a fund-raising event.

A special invitation has gone out to middle and senior schools to see the film during the week of March 10 and funds raised from those screenings will be donated to Tomorrows Voices, a support group for parents with autistic children.

We photographed Vance Furbert and his wife (above) during a recent visit to Bermuda. He is the son of journalist LaVerne Furbert, who ran for the PLP in Pembroke South West in December's General Election.

She provided us with the following synopsis of the film:

Set to the irrepressible visual and musical rhythms of New York City, 4 Our Sons takes as its subject the plight of newly-born and even unborn young black men in America. The story centres on the horrendous statistic that in the United States, one out of every three mostly fatherless black sons born in this decade will end up in prison.This film seeks to stem that flow.

Before tennis star Arthur Ashe died he wrote down some life lessons for his young daughter to have after he had passed away. Similarly, this film 4 Our Sons is a cinematic letter of life lessons for the fatherless black boys in America who are in danger of becoming a statistic.

It consists of 15 powerful and important interviews with 15 powerful and "important" black men from different walks of life, men who have "been through the fire" of growing up black and male in the often hostile environment of the inner city but through strength and perseverance built for themselves their own versions of the American dream.

The film employs insightful interviews, contemporary images and archival footage, the biographical life lessons of men such as novelist Trey Ellis, Columbia professor Dr. Ronald Mincy and BET personality Jeff Johnson, as well as Rev. Thomas Wendell Foster, who pastored AME churches in Bermuda ,among others, to create a moving and engaging narrative of what it means to go from black boyhood to black manhood in America today.

Hip-hop vernacular often describes life as a young black man in America as war-like. And like the classic war film, Fog of War, the documentary 4 Our Sons is an illustration of a powerful distillation of life lessons from the point of view of the veterans of this social war who have been there.

The documentary is a cinematic helping hand for the black sons about to enter the war zone from the veteran black sons who have been there and triumphed over society's ills on these battlefields of poverty and crime.