Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and some music

Sunday is Juneteenth, a day to honor the emancipation of enslaved African Americans and to celebrate African American culture. While Juneteenth has been celebrated in the United States since 1865, it was not until 2021 that Juneteenth was formally recognized as a federal holiday. If you are looking for something to watch this weekend, OVID’s ever-growing Black Lives Now collection offers nearly forty titles celebrating and exploring the Black experience at home and abroad. Highlights include Charles Burnett’s tragicomic classic My Brother’s Wedding and They Are We, a documentary offering an entirely new perspective on the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade.

It’s also Father’s Day weekend. Some of our favorite dads on OVID include Howie Snyder, the struggling pizzeria owner in Family Business (part of our Middletown series), and cab-driving patriarch Tony from 56 Up. And if you’d like to dive deeper into our films about fatherhood and parenting, check out From This Day Forward, A Kid, and Old Dog.

And finally, we invite you to kick off the weekend with some of the catchiest psychedelic sounds you’ll ever hear. Co-produced by Paul McCartney, here’s “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” by Do Not Adjust Your Set house band The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.