Latest news with #KillerofSheep
Los Angeles Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Still quietly radical, ‘Killer of Sheep' showcases an unvarnished side of 1970s L.A. life
For decades, Charles Burnett's best film was little more than a rumor. Shot over weekends in the early 1970s with a mostly nonprofessional cast and a budget that didn't hit five figures, 'Killer of Sheep' wouldn't receive its first public screening until the fall of 1978 at New York's Whitney Museum. Sporadically playing only at festivals, colleges and museums, the movie failed to garner a proper theatrical release until 2007, its complicated music clearances seemingly dooming it to obscurity. Before then, many of us had never seen 'Killer of Sheep' but, in fact, we still hadn't fully seen it. Now hitting theaters in a gorgeous 4K restoration, 'Killer of Sheep' is, at last, complete, with Dinah Washington's version of 'Unforgettable,' which couldn't be cleared for the 2007 release, returned to the movie's poignant final stretches. Because of its towering reputation — lauded as one of our city's finest films, a hallmark of American neorealism and the pinnacle of the Black independent filmmaker movement dubbed the L.A. Rebellion — the movie can confuse first-time viewers who assume that all masterpieces must be swaggering, visionary totems. Not so. Some can be gentle and tender, attuned to the rhythms of the everyday. According to the program notes that accompanied the film's Whitney premiere, Burnett sought to 'try to recreate a situation without reducing life to a simple plot.' Many small things happen in 'Killer of Sheep,' nothing of much consequence. But the enlargement of life itself is profound. Burnett was a UCLA graduate student in his late 20s when he fashioned his story of Stan (Henry G. Sanders), a Watts-dwelling husband and father of two who's employed at a slaughterhouse. His grim work handling dead sheep gives the movie its title, but little time is actually spent at Stan's job. Those juxtaposed scenes of bleating livestock and skinned carcasses still leave an impression, but they're just one strand in a tapestry of threads, none of them given more importance than the others. Instead of a conventional narrative, 'Killer of Sheep' presents us with a mood. Stan's face is one of perpetual exhaustion, matched by that of his unnamed wife (Kaycee Moore), who projects a silent sadness. In fragments, we get a sense of a family and the impoverished community around them. There's a scene in which Stan's friends unsuccessfully recruit him for an illicit scheme. In another, Stan and a different friend try to move a heavy car engine onto the back of a truck, with comically pathetic results. Elsewhere, a white store owner flirts with Stan, suggesting he ought to work for her. Each scene is a separate tiny episode, but they all connect back to the nagging pain and resilience that define Stan's existence. Early on, Stan complains about his woes to his pal Oscar, who replies, 'Why don't you kill yourself? You'll be a lot happier.' Stan resists that notion, although as he looks at his young daughter wearing a goofy rubber dog mask, he admits, 'Got a feeling I might do somebody else some harm, though.' The tone is more bone-tired than menacing, and it carries throughout 'Killer of Sheep,' which contains no tragedies or major twists, just an unerringly calm remove as its black-and-white 16mm images, shot by Burnett himself, chronicle working-class people getting by. The film's deceptively modest approach belies a radical strategy to depict ordinary Black life at a time when such images were hardly in abundance. Shots of kids aimlessly throwing rocks at passing freight trains are plainspoken, presented with documentary-like simplicity. And the dialogue is largely functional, Burnett never building to some grand thesis, refusing to reduce Watts to inner-city clichés or its denizens to doe-eyed saints. In the place of stereotypes, 'Killer of Sheep' offers an understated paean to the Great Migration and the Black families who made their way from the South to Los Angeles, seeking a fresh start but finding an inhospitable landing spot. Featuring blues, R&B and jazz on the soundtrack (the music often expresses the sorrow and joy that the characters bottle up), the film is a marvel of accidental beauty, the occasional stunning sequence manufactured with a minimum of fuss. Sanders, who had appeared in a few films before 'Killer of Sheep,' deftly plays a man whose depression extends beyond a lack of money. Adrift and emasculated, Stan is less a patriarch than the defeated captain of a sinking ship, drowning in his futility. But the performance allows no room for pity, a feat even truer of his costar Moore, a crucial figure in future L.A. Rebellion films such as 'Bless Their Little Hearts' and 'Daughters of the Dust.' Moore, who died in 2021, could say everything with a look, and as Stan's wife, she communicates both the disappointment and sturdy love this woman feels for her embattled husband. When she takes a second to examine herself in the reflection of a pot lid, she illuminates so many unappreciated mothers. And when Stan and his wife quietly slowdance in their living room, scored to Dinah Washington's 'This Bitter Earth,' their brief respite devastates. 'Today you're young,' Washington laments. 'Too soon you're old.' Burnett selected his film's songs with care, curating a fittingly soulful counterpoint to his critical portrait of inequality — not just in L.A. but in the country as a whole. Political activist and singer Paul Robeson, who died a year before 'Killer of Sheep' was completed, is all over the soundtrack, his booming voice serving as a moral compass, never more so than on 'The House I Live In,' which hovers over a scene of Black children playing in a Watts littered with dirty streets and abandoned buildings. 'What is America to me?' Robeson wonders. 'A name? A map? Or the flag I see?' The film asks the same question and Robeson provides the answer: 'All races, all religions / That's America to me.' 'Killer of Sheep' shows us a part of that America, the invisible rendered visible, from sea to shining sea.
San Francisco Chronicle
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Charles Burnett on the never-ending battle of 'Killer of Sheep'
NEW YORK (AP) — Charles Burnett has been living with 'Killer of Sheep' for more than half a century. Burnett, 82, shot 'Killer of Sheep' on black-and-white 16mm in the early 1970s for less than $10,000. Originally Burnett's thesis film at UCLA, it was completed in 1978. In the coming years, 'Killer of Sheep' would be hailed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and one of the finest film debuts, ever. Though it didn't receive a widespread theatrical release until 2007, the blues of 'Killer of Sheep' have sounded across generations of American movies. And time has only deepened the gentle soulfulness of Burnett's film, a portrait of the slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his young family in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood. 'Killer of Sheep' was then, and remains, a rare chronicle of working-class Black life, radiant in lyrical poetry — a couple slow dancing to Dinah Washington's 'This Bitter Earth,' boys leaping between rooftops — and hard-worn with daily struggle. A new 4K restoration — complete with the film's full original score — is now playing in theaters, an occasion that recently brought Burnett from his home in Los Angeles to New York, where he met The Associated Press shortly after arriving. Burnett's career has been marked by revival and rediscovery (he received an honorary Oscar in 2007), but this latest renaissance has been an especially vibrant one. In February, Kino Lorber released Burnett's 'The Annihilation of Fish,' a 1999 film starring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave that had never been commercially distributed. It was widely hailed as a quirky lost gem about a pair of lost souls. On Friday, Lincoln Center launches 'L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,' a film series about the movement of 1970s UCLA filmmakers, including Burnett, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry, who remade Black cinema. The Mississippi-born, Watts-raised Burnett is soft-spoken but has much to say — only some of which has filtered into his seven features (among them 1990's 'To Sleep With Anger') and numerous short films (some of the best are 'When It Rains' and 'The Horse'). The New Yorker's Richard Brody once called the unmade films of Burnett and his L.A. Rebellion contemporaries 'modern cinema's holy spectres.' But on a recent spring day, Burnett's mind was more on Stan of 'Killer of Sheep.' Burnett sees his protagonist's pain and endurance less as a thing of the past than as a frustratingly eternal plight. If 'Killer of Sheep' was made to capture the humanity of a Black family and give his community a dignity that had been denied them, Burnett sees the same need today. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. AP: The most abiding quality in your films seems to me to be tenderness. Where did you get that? BURNETT: I grew up in a neighborhood (Watts) where everyone was from the South. There was a lot of tradition. It was a different culture, a different group of people living there — people who had experienced a great deal and kept their humanity. And they had a work ethic. It was a nice atmosphere. People looked after you. I grew up with people who were very gentle. There were the Watts riots when you couldn't walk down the street without police harassing you. Police would stop me and do this forensic search and call you all kind of names while doing it. But in the riots, it wasn't that people got braver. They just got tired. When people got together, they always had the perspective of: Let the kids eat first. AP: In 'Killer of Sheep,' like your short 'The Horse,' you seem to be giving a great deal of thought to the future of these children, and their preparation for the cruelty of the world. BURNETT: In 'Killer of Sheep,' kids were learning how to be men or women. The changing point was when Emmett Till and his picture was being shown everywhere in Jet magazine. All of a sudden, it was no longer this fantasy. You were now aware of the cruelty of the world. I remember a kid who had come home abused, who supposedly fell down the stairs. You learned this dual reality to life. AP: When you watch 'Killer of Sheep' again, what do you see? BURNETT: Life going by. A life that should have been totally different. In high school, I had a teacher who would go walking down the aisle pointing at students saying, 'You're not going to be anything, you're not going to be anything.' He got to me and said, 'You're not going to be anything.' Now, (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis wants to destroy Black history. It's always a battle. AP: What could have been different? BURNETT: Young kids were capable of so much more. We were all looking for a place where you felt like you belonged. America could have been so much greater. The whole world could have been better. AP: In thinking about what could have been different after 'Killer of Sheep,' would you include yourself in that? You're acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking American filmmakers yet the movie industry often wasn't welcoming. BURNETT: You do the best you can with what you have. There are so many things you want to say. What you find is that sometimes you work with people that don't see eye to eye. Even though I didn't do more, it's still more than what some people made, by far. I'm very happy about that. On the flip side, a lot of times you hear, 'Your films changed my life.' And if you can get that, then you're doing good. One of the things that I found is that people will take advantage of you and make you make the film that they want to make. You need to be somehow independent where you can tell them, 'No, I'm not doing this.' I had to do that a number of times. So you don't work that often. AP: To you, what's the legacy of 'Killer of Sheep'? BURNETT: One of the reasons I did 'Killer of Sheep' the way I did, with kids in the community working in all areas of the production, was to show them that they could do it. I made the film to restore our history, so young people could grow from it and know: I can do this. Even when I was in film school, there was a film production going on in my neighborhood. I was on my bike and I rolled over to see. I asked a guy, 'What set is this?' and he acted like I wouldn't understand. It's changed a bit but there's still this attitude. You look at what Trump and these guys are doing with DEI. It's this constant battle. It can never end. You have to constantly prove yourself. It's a battle, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing.
The Independent
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Charles Burnett on the never-ending battle of 'Killer of Sheep'
Charles Burnett has been living with 'Killer of Sheep' for more than half a century. Burnett, 82, shot 'Killer of Sheep' on black-and-white 16mm in the early 1970s for less than $10,000. Originally Burnett's thesis film at UCLA, it was completed in 1978. In the coming years, 'Killer of Sheep' would be hailed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and one of the finest film debuts, ever. Though it didn't receive a widespread theatrical release until 2007, the blues of 'Killer of Sheep' have sounded across generations of American movies. And time has only deepened the gentle soulfulness of Burnett's film, a portrait of the slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his young family in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood. 'Killer of Sheep' was then, and remains, a rare chronicle of working-class Black life, radiant in lyrical poetry — a couple slow dancing to Dinah Washington's 'This Bitter Earth,' boys leaping between rooftops — and hard-worn with daily struggle. A new 4K restoration — complete with the film's full original score — is now playing in theaters, an occasion that recently brought Burnett from his home in Los Angeles to New York, where he met The Associated Press shortly after arriving. Burnett's career has been marked by revival and rediscovery (he received an honorary Oscar in 2007), but this latest renaissance has been an especially vibrant one. In February, Kino Lorber released Burnett's 'The Annihilation of Fish,' a 1999 film starring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave that had never been commercially distributed. It was widely hailed as a quirky lost gem about a pair of lost souls. On Friday, Lincoln Center launches 'L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,' a film series about the movement of 1970s UCLA filmmakers, including Burnett, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry, who remade Black cinema. The Mississippi-born, Watts-raised Burnett is soft-spoken but has much to say — only some of which has filtered into his seven features (among them 1990's 'To Sleep With Anger') and numerous short films (some of the best are 'When It Rains' and 'The Horse'). The New Yorker's Richard Brody once called the unmade films of Burnett and his L.A. Rebellion contemporaries 'modern cinema's holy spectres.' But on a recent spring day, Burnett's mind was more on Stan of 'Killer of Sheep.' Burnett sees his protagonist's pain and endurance less as a thing of the past than as a frustratingly eternal plight. If 'Killer of Sheep' was made to capture the humanity of a Black family and give his community a dignity that had been denied them, Burnett sees the same need today. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. AP: The most abiding quality in your films seems to me to be tenderness. Where did you get that? BURNETT: I grew up in a neighborhood (Watts) where everyone was from the South. There was a lot of tradition. It was a different culture, a different group of people living there — people who had experienced a great deal and kept their humanity. And they had a work ethic. It was a nice atmosphere. People looked after you. I grew up with people who were very gentle. There were the Watts riots when you couldn't walk down the street without police harassing you. Police would stop me and do this forensic search and call you all kind of names while doing it. But in the riots, it wasn't that people got braver. They just got tired. When people got together, they always had the perspective of: Let the kids eat first. AP: In 'Killer of Sheep,' like your short 'The Horse,' you seem to be giving a great deal of thought to the future of these children, and their preparation for the cruelty of the world. BURNETT: In 'Killer of Sheep,' kids were learning how to be men or women. The changing point was when Emmett Till and his picture was being shown everywhere in Jet magazine. All of a sudden, it was no longer this fantasy. You were now aware of the cruelty of the world. I remember a kid who had come home abused, who supposedly fell down the stairs. You learned this dual reality to life. AP: When you watch 'Killer of Sheep' again, what do you see? BURNETT: Life going by. A life that should have been totally different. In high school, I had a teacher who would go walking down the aisle pointing at students saying, 'You're not going to be anything, you're not going to be anything.' He got to me and said, 'You're not going to be anything.' Now, (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis wants to destroy Black history. It's always a battle. AP: What could have been different? BURNETT: Young kids were capable of so much more. We were all looking for a place where you felt like you belonged. America could have been so much greater. The whole world could have been better. AP: In thinking about what could have been different after 'Killer of Sheep,' would you include yourself in that? You're acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking American filmmakers yet the movie industry often wasn't welcoming. BURNETT: You do the best you can with what you have. There are so many things you want to say. What you find is that sometimes you work with people that don't see eye to eye. Even though I didn't do more, it's still more than what some people made, by far. I'm very happy about that. On the flip side, a lot of times you hear, 'Your films changed my life.' And if you can get that, then you're doing good. One of the things that I found is that people will take advantage of you and make you make the film that they want to make. You need to be somehow independent where you can tell them, 'No, I'm not doing this.' I had to do that a number of times. So you don't work that often. AP: To you, what's the legacy of 'Killer of Sheep'? BURNETT: One of the reasons I did 'Killer of Sheep' the way I did, with kids in the community working in all areas of the production, was to show them that they could do it. I made the film to restore our history, so young people could grow from it and know: I can do this. Even when I was in film school, there was a film production going on in my neighborhood. I was on my bike and I rolled over to see. I asked a guy, 'What set is this?' and he acted like I wouldn't understand. It's changed a bit but there's still this attitude. You look at what Trump and these guys are doing with DEI. It's this constant battle. It can never end. You have to constantly prove yourself. It's a battle, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing.
Associated Press
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Charles Burnett on the never-ending battle of 'Killer of Sheep'
NEW YORK (AP) — Charles Burnett has been living with 'Killer of Sheep' for more than half a century. Burnett, 82, shot 'Killer of Sheep' on black-and-white 16mm in the early 1970s for less than $10,000. Originally Burnett's thesis film at UCLA, it was completed in 1978. In the coming years, 'Killer of Sheep' would be hailed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and one of the finest film debuts, ever. Though it didn't receive a widespread theatrical release until 2007, the blues of 'Killer of Sheep' have sounded across generations of American movies. And time has only deepened the gentle soulfulness of Burnett's film, a portrait of the slaughterhouse worker Stan (Henry G. Sanders) and his young family in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood. 'Killer of Sheep' was then, and remains, a rare chronicle of working-class Black life, radiant in lyrical poetry — a couple slow dancing to Dinah Washington's 'This Bitter Earth,' boys leaping between rooftops — and hard-worn with daily struggle. A new 4K restoration — complete with the film's full original score — is now playing in theaters, an occasion that recently brought Burnett from his home in Los Angeles to New York, where he met The Associated Press shortly after arriving. Burnett's career has been marked by revival and rediscovery (he received an honorary Oscar in 2007), but this latest renaissance has been an especially vibrant one. In February, Kino Lorber released Burnett's 'The Annihilation of Fish,' a 1999 film starring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave that had never been commercially distributed. It was widely hailed as a quirky lost gem about a pair of lost souls. On Friday, Lincoln Center launches 'L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,' a film series about the movement of 1970s UCLA filmmakers, including Burnett, Julie Dash and Billy Woodberry, who remade Black cinema. The Mississippi-born, Watts-raised Burnett is soft-spoken but has much to say — only some of which has filtered into his seven features (among them 1990's 'To Sleep With Anger') and numerous short films (some of the best are 'When It Rains' and 'The Horse'). The New Yorker's Richard Brody once called the unmade films of Burnett and his L.A. Rebellion contemporaries 'modern cinema's holy spectres.' But on a recent spring day, Burnett's mind was more on Stan of 'Killer of Sheep.' Burnett sees his protagonist's pain and endurance less as a thing of the past than as a frustratingly eternal plight. If 'Killer of Sheep' was made to capture the humanity of a Black family and give his community a dignity that had been denied them, Burnett sees the same need today. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. AP: The most abiding quality in your films seems to me to be tenderness. Where did you get that? BURNETT: I grew up in a neighborhood (Watts) where everyone was from the South. There was a lot of tradition. It was a different culture, a different group of people living there — people who had experienced a great deal and kept their humanity. And they had a work ethic. It was a nice atmosphere. People looked after you. I grew up with people who were very gentle. There were the Watts riots when you couldn't walk down the street without police harassing you. Police would stop me and do this forensic search and call you all kind of names while doing it. But in the riots, it wasn't that people got braver. They just got tired. When people got together, they always had the perspective of: Let the kids eat first. AP: In 'Killer of Sheep,' like your short 'The Horse,' you seem to be giving a great deal of thought to the future of these children, and their preparation for the cruelty of the world. BURNETT: In 'Killer of Sheep,' kids were learning how to be men or women. The changing point was when Emmett Till and his picture was being shown everywhere in Jet magazine. All of a sudden, it was no longer this fantasy. You were now aware of the cruelty of the world. I remember a kid who had come home abused, who supposedly fell down the stairs. You learned this dual reality to life. AP: When you watch 'Killer of Sheep' again, what do you see? BURNETT: Life going by. A life that should have been totally different. In high school, I had a teacher who would go walking down the aisle pointing at students saying, 'You're not going to be anything, you're not going to be anything.' He got to me and said, 'You're not going to be anything.' Now, (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis wants to destroy Black history. It's always a battle. AP: What could have been different? BURNETT: Young kids were capable of so much more. We were all looking for a place where you felt like you belonged. America could have been so much greater. The whole world could have been better. AP: In thinking about what could have been different after 'Killer of Sheep,' would you include yourself in that? You're acknowledged as one of the most groundbreaking American filmmakers yet the movie industry often wasn't welcoming. BURNETT: You do the best you can with what you have. There are so many things you want to say. What you find is that sometimes you work with people that don't see eye to eye. Even though I didn't do more, it's still more than what some people made, by far. I'm very happy about that. On the flip side, a lot of times you hear, 'Your films changed my life.' And if you can get that, then you're doing good. One of the things that I found is that people will take advantage of you and make you make the film that they want to make. You need to be somehow independent where you can tell them, 'No, I'm not doing this.' I had to do that a number of times. So you don't work that often. AP: To you, what's the legacy of 'Killer of Sheep'? BURNETT: One of the reasons I did 'Killer of Sheep' the way I did, with kids in the community working in all areas of the production, was to show them that they could do it. I made the film to restore our history, so young people could grow from it and know: I can do this. Even when I was in film school, there was a film production going on in my neighborhood. I was on my bike and I rolled over to see. I asked a guy, 'What set is this?' and he acted like I wouldn't understand. It's changed a bit but there's still this attitude. You look at what Trump and these guys are doing with DEI. It's this constant battle. It can never end. You have to constantly prove yourself. It's a battle, ongoing, ongoing, ongoing.
Chicago Tribune
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Killer of Sheep,' a poetic-realist masterwork, returns sharper than ever
Of all the memorable feature film debuts, Charles Burnett's 'Killer of Sheep' may be the freest from contrivance, disinterested to a lovely degree in conventional story machinery or in anything more than moments in time and the daily lives of people Burnett knew in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Like Burnett himself, whose family relocated from Mississippi to LA, many of these people feel the pull of the place they knew, in this place they have come to know. That neither here-nor-there feeling is everywhere in 'Killer of Sheep.' Burnett shot it on black-and-white 16mm film in the early 1970s, then released it in a very small way in 1978. The velvety 4K digital restoration of what began as Burnett's UCLA thesis project runs April 18-24 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It's 80 minutes of evanescent yet concretely specific beauty, from a great American artist. There is a narrative framework, spacious enough to make the movie Burnett had in him. It co-stars the streets, vacant lots, alleys and interiors he knew well, captured a few years after the deadly Watts clash between citizens and police. The media of the time called it the Watts riots; the people closer to the bloodshed called it, and call it, the Watts rebellion. None of this is addressed directly in 'Killer of Sheep.' Yet in his traversing of the urban landscape here, often wordless, Burnett is paying attention to the past in every piece of the present. The family at the core of the story consists of Stan (Henry G. Sanders), who works nights at the slaughterhouse indicated by the movie's title. It's a wearying job; his wife, played by Kaycee Moore, feels pushed to the margins of their increasingly distant life together. Moore, who died in 2021, was (like Burnett) a key member of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers movement. And in its poetic-realist eye for environment as well as character, 'Killer of Sheep' reminds us there's more than one way for artists to rebel. The film spends time with this family's children and other kids, chasing freight trains; battling each other with sounds, fistfuls of parched dirt and busted plywood shields; and, in one of many casually perfect compositions, a ground-level view of three neighborhood kids leaping from building to building. Dropping in on this conversation or that confrontation, Burnett gathers some evidence of what's eroding this family's stability, much of it economic. At one point, Stan's offered the chance by a local fixture to make a little money as an accessory to a murder, which he declines. This life does not make things easy; Stan's struggles between paychecks weigh heavily, though the way this filmmaker makes films, the heaviness is conveyed with a magically light touch. Burnett, now 81, went on to make some wonderful work with A-list actors: 'To Sleep With Anger,' 'Devil in a Blue Dress' and the recently recirculated 'The Annihilation of Fish' among them. In 'Killer of Sheep,' so much of his talent was right there, at the start, in the way the locations and compositions envelop the nonprofessional cast members without competing with them. Burnett has said he made his film partly as a corrective to the attempts of working-class 'gritty realism' his white, privileged fellow UCLA film school students were turning out in the 1970s. For decades, 'Killer of Sheep' stayed nearly out of sight, tied up with some complicated and costly music-rights issues resolved only recently. Burnett's fantastic soundtrack selections, underscoring intimate moments and raucous ones, can now be heard in their best-yet audio quality and their fully legal glory. Dinah Washington, Paul Robeson, Earth, Wind and Fire, George Gershwin, bluesman Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup — every choice makes sense, and adds a fuller dimension to these people's lives. The film ends not with an ending, really, but a humane acknowledgment of how much of life feels like a daily string of middles, pulling us along. 'Killer of Sheep' — 4 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (some language)
