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Jongnic Bontemps, also known as JB is an American composer and musician who has worked on over 50 projects in film, shorts, documentary films, TV series and video games. He is the music director for 2016 skateboarding-focused drama film The Land The soundtrack features collaborations with Erykah Badu and Nas including the song "This Bitter Land". He also wrote the music for the 2018 roller skating documentary United Skates. The hip hop influenced documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bontemps is a classically trained composer with roots in the church and jazz world as a pianist. He was born in Brooklyn to a Jamaican mother and a Haitian father, who met in New York in the 1970s. He studied music at Yale University, Berklee College of Music and the University of Southern California. becoming a graduate of the Scoring for Motion Picture and Television program at USC. He worked as a software developer and startup executive in New York City and later Silicon Valley before specializing in music. He was selected as a Sundance Lab Composer Fellow in 2013 and received a Time Warner Artist Fellowship in 2014. Bontemps' film Faith Under Fire, premiered on Lifetime in January 2017. His work has been heard in various award winning films at Cannes Film Festival, Warsaw International Film Festival, Pan African Film Festival, American Black Film Festival, as well as on television networks like HBO, BET, Disney and in various cinemas worldwide.
Coonskin is a 1975 American adult animated satirical crime film written and directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film references the Uncle Remus folk tales and satirizes the blaxploitation film genre as well as Disney's racially controversial film Song of the South, also adapted from the Uncle Remus folk tales. The film's narrative concerns three anthropomorphic Uncle Remus characters, Br'er Rabbit (referred to as Brother Rabbit), Br'er Fox (referred to as Preacher Fox), and Br'er Bear (referred to as Brother Bear). They rise to the top of the organized crime racket in Harlem, encountering corrupt law enforcement, con artists, and the Mafia, in a satire of both racism within the Hollywood film system, and America itself. Originally produced under the titles Harlem Nights and Coonskin No More... at Paramount Pictures, Coonskin encountered controversy before its original theatrical release when the Congress of Racial Equality accused the film of being racist. When the film was released, Bryanston gave it limited distribution and it initially received mixed reviews. Later re-released under the titles Bustin' Out and Street Fight, Coonskin has since been re-appraised, recontextualizing the film as the condemnation of racism that the director intended, rather than a product of a racist imagination, as its detractors had claimed.
