Programs
Join us IRL or URL.
FINDING FELA Screening
Finding Fela, 2014
US, 120min, English
Dir. Alex Gibney
Finding Fela tells the story of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s life, his music, his social and political importance. He created a new musical movement, Afrobeat, using that forum to express his revolutionary political opinions against the dictatorial Nigerian government of the 1970s and 1980s. His influence helped bring a change towards democracy in Nigeria and promoted Pan Africanist politics to the world.
The power and potency of Fela’s message is completely current today and is expressed in the political movements of oppressed people, embracing Fela’s music and message in their struggle for freedom. Directed by Academy Award winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side).
Synopsis and stills courtesy of Kino Lorber.
Screening at Northwest Film Forum
FRIDAY June 16th
⏰ 8.30pm PDT
SATURDAY June 17th
⏰ 5.30pm PDT, 8.30pm PDT
SUNDAY June 18th
⏰ 5.30pm PDT, 8.30pm PDT
💰
$14 General Admission
$10 Student/Child/Senior
$7 NWFF Member
DRYLONGSO screening in partnership with Black Cinema Collective, LANGSTON, and SIFF
DRYLONGSO (Dir. Cauleen Smith) screening in partnership with Black Cinema Collective, LANGSTON, and SIFF
June 9 - *11th, 2023
@ SIFF Theater
511 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA 98101
SYNOPSIS:
A lost treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying—indeed, “becoming extinct,” as she sees it—brash Oakland art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett), experiencing love and loss, and being drawn into the search for a serial killer who is terrorizing the city. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.
DRYLONGSO TRAILER:
USA | 1998 | 86 mins | Director. Cauleen Smith
Opens June 9, 2023
Drylongso follows a woman in a photography class who begins taking pictures of Black men out of fear they will soon be extinct. New 4k restoration.
Principal Cast: Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power
Producer: Salim Akil
·Screenplay: Salim Akil, Cauleen Smith
Cinematographers: Andrew Black
Editors: Cauleen Smith
Music: Curt Harpel, Pat Thomi
Language: English
Distribution by Janus Films.
*SUPPORT BLACK LED ORGS:
Co-sponsors Black Cinema Collective and LANGSTON will each receive 25% of the proceeds from all Sunday, June 11 screenings.
SHOWTIMES
FRIDAY, JUNE 9, 2023
4:30 PM 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 10, 2023
1:30 PM. 4:30 PM. 7:30 PM
* SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 2023
1:30 PM 4:30 PM 7:30 PM
25% of tix sales for Sunday screening will go, each,
to BCC and LANGSTON
BLACK SONIC EVOLUTIONS 2023
An annual programming that recognizes Black Music Month and AfroDiasporic sonic contributions to the world.
NEPTUNE FROST Screenings
Screening at NW Film Forum
In-person only
March 29th – April 2nd
Dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman
Co-presented with Black Cinema Collective,
Meany Center for the Performing Arts
& UW Simpson Center for the Humanities
France, Rwanda, USA
105 min · Kino Lober | Dedza Films
Languages: Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French and English with English subtitles
Amidst the hilltops of Burundi, a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community, a result of the romance between a miner and an intersex runaway. Set between states of being—past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience—Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.
This program pairs with the West Coast premiere of Saul Williams's The Motherboard Suite which brings to life a suite of his music and poetry, directed and produced by Bill T. Jones in partnership with New York Live Arts.
Surprise Screening | AUDRE LORDE: THE BERLIN YEARS 1984-1992
Did you know the incisive and instructively brilliant Audre Lorde spent her last years in Germany?
Come celebrate her birthday weekend* with a screening of this very special documentary, which explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life.
Dir. Dagmar Schultz (2012)
Germany, 79min
In English and German
(with English subtitles)
*Audre Lorde was born on Feb 18, 1934, and died Nov 17, 1992
FEBRUARY SCREENING SURPRISE!!
Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984-1992
Grand Illusion Cinema
Sunday, Feb 19th
2:00 pm matinee
7:30 pm evening
Film selection by Black Cinema Collective for screening at Grand Illusion Cinema - two orgs holding it down with labors of film love.
Abderrahmane Sissako’s African Worlds
A four-film series and lecture by Abderrahmane Sissako in conversation, holding the transformational poetics of humanitarian cinema.
ABOUT SISSAKO & THE SERIES
What is the place of West Africa in the world and of the world in West Africa? These are the questions that the Oscar- and Palme d’Or-nominated filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako asks insistently in films that address the impact of World Bank and IMF policies in Mali and beyond (Bamako, 2006), the confrontation between extremist and moderate Islam in the southern Sahara (Timbuktu, 2014), and exile in Europe and the difficulties of returning home (Life on Earth, 1999). In all of his films, Sissako brings a worldly sensibility to the representation of the most pressing concerns of the continent, but always with an eye for the beauty and tenderness in everyday life, no matter how difficult, and for the moral ambiguities and linguistic complexities that evade so many representations of West Africa.
SCHEDULE
Apr. 22 at 1:00pm: Life on Earth (1998, 61 mins), at Henry Art Gallery Auditorium, Program Introduction by James Long
Apr. 23 at 3:00pm: Waiting for Happiness (2002, 95 mins) at Henry Art Gallery Auditorium, Film Introduction by Richard Watts
Apr. 24 at 1:00pm: Bamako (2006, 117 mins) at Northwest Film ForumApr. 25, 6:00 –8:00pm: Timbuktu (2014, 97 mins) at NW Film Forum, followed by Q & A with Sissako, Introduction by Berette S Macaulay, Interpretation by Richard Watts
Apr. 26, 7:00 -8:30pm: Translating African Worlds: A Conversation with Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, Kane Hall at UW
Abderrahmane Sissako is the 2022 University of Washington Katz Distinguished Lecturer.
He will be joined in conversation on April 26th by Berette S Macaulay (founder of Seattle’s Black Cinema Collective) and Maya Smith (Dir. of African Studies at UW). This public conversation will be in English + French with Richard Watts as interpreter.
REGISTRATION CLOSED.
ABOUT THE FILMS
La Vie Sur Terre (Life on Earth), 1998 (trailer)
Set in the rural village of Sokolo on the eve of the 21st century, Dramane (Abderrahmane Sissako), a Malian who lives in Paris, returns to his family's African village to visit his father (Mohamed Sissako). Dramane realizes how different and stagnated his village is compared to the ever-changing modern world, especially at the dawn of a new millennium. While home, he strikes up a friendship with beautiful villager Nana (Nana Baby), with whom he contemplates the future.
(Sources: Wikipedia & Rotten Tomatoes)
Mali / 61 minutes / Comedy Drama / Bambara and French with English subtitles
Screening in person at Henry Art Gallery Auditorium, April 22nd, 1:00 pm
Heremakono/Waiting for Happiness, 2002 (trailer)
Hassania Nouadhibou is a small coastal Mauritanian city that acts as a transit point to the West. Abdallah returns home on his way to Europe. Having forgotten how to speak in his mother’s tongue, he becomes a mute observer of village life and its minor intrigues. His mother and Khatra, an orphan boy apprenticed to an aging electrician, try to help him adapt, but to little avail. Abdallah, with his eyes fixed on the horizon, awaits the arrival of hypothetical happiness.
Source: African Film Festival NY
Mali and Mauritania / 95mins / Drama / French and Hassania with English subtitles
Screening in person at Henry Art Gallery Auditorium, April 23rd, 3:00pm
BAMAKO, 2006 (trailer)
An extraordinary trial is taking place in a residential courtyard in Bamako, the capital city of Mali. African citizens have taken proceedings against such international financial institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whom civil society blames for perpetuating Africa’s debt crisis, at the heart of so many of the continent’s woes. As numerous trial witnesses (schoolteachers, farmers, writers, etc.) air bracing indictments against the global economic machinery that haunts them, life in the courtyard presses forward. Melé, a lounge singer, and her unemployed husband Chaka are on the verge of breaking up; a security guard’s gun goes missing; a young man lies ill; a wedding procession passes through; and women keep everything rolling – dyeing fabric, minding children, spinning cotton, and speaking their minds.
Co-executive produced by Danny Glover (who also provides a cameo in the film). Director Sissako, who grew up in the courtyard that the film is set in, hired professional lawyers and judges along with “witnesses” to express their true feelings. Bamako voices Africa’s grievances in an original and profoundly moving way.
Stills courtesy of Icarus Films
Mali and France /117 mins / Political Drama /French, Bambara, English & Hebrew with English subtitles
Screening in person at Northwest Film Forum, April 24rd, 1:00 pm
TIMBUKTU, 2014 (trailer)
Not far from Timbuktu, now ruled by the religious fundamentalists, Kidane lives peacefully in the dunes with his wife Satima, his daughter Toya, and Issan, their twelve-year-old shepherd. In town, the people suffer, powerless, from the regime of terror imposed by the Jihadists determined to control their faith. Music, laughter, cigarettes, even soccer have been banned. The women have become shadows but resist with dignity. Every day, the new improvised courts issue tragic and absurd sentences.
Kidane and his family are being spared the chaos that prevails in Timbuktu. But their destiny changes when Kidane accidentally kills Amadou, the fisherman who slaughtered “GPS,” his beloved cow. He now has to face the new laws of the foreign occupants.
Timbuktu was featured in the Palme d’Or main competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, earned the 2015 Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, and won seven 2015 Cesar Awards in France, including Best Director and Best Film.
Stills and synopsis courtesy of Cohen Media.
Mauritania, France and Qatar /97 mins / Drama / French, Arabic, Bambara, English, Songhay and Tamashek with English subtitles
Screening in person at Northwest Film Forum, April 24rd, 6:00 pm, followed by Q & A with Abderrahmane Sissako
About Interviewers
Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer. Her work engages complex cultural negotiations of be/longing, personhood, memory, and mythmaking. Berette is the Curatorial Fellow at On the Boards where her collaborative performance project ‘[UN- TITLED]’is in development, co-commissioned by BRIC Arts New York. She serves as professor/Art Liaison Program Manager at Henry Art Gallery and is the founder of Black Cinema Collective – a project of i•ma•gine e•volve.
Maya Smith completed her undergraduate and master’s degree at New York University in the joint MA/BA program with the Institute of French Studies. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in Romance Languages and Linguistics. Her scholarship broadly focuses on the intersection of racial and linguistic identity formations among marginalized groups in the African diaspora, particularly in the postcolonial francophone world. Her book, Senegal Abroad: Linguistic Borders, Racial Formations, and Diasporic Imaginaries, was published with the University of Wisconsin Press in January 2019. Through a critical examination of language and multilingual practices in qualitative, ethnographic data, Senegal Abroad shows how language is key in understanding the formation of national, transnational, postcolonial, racial, and migrant identities among Senegalese in Paris, Rome, and New York. This is a book about language attitudes, how they influence people’s local and global interactions with the world, how they change through the experience of migration, and how in turn they affect migrants’ language use. Senegal Abroad received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies at the MLA 2021. In addition to the Senegalese Diaspora, Maya focuses on how blackness is constructed in the French Caribbean and is also interested in language pedagogy. She is also devoting time to public scholarship seen in her recent publication in Yes! Magazine: “Enunciating Power: Amanda Gorman and My Battle to Claim My Voice.” Maya has been the recipient of various grants including the Camargo Foundation's Author-in-Residence Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, the UW Research Royalty Fund Fellowship, the Simpson Center Society of Scholars.
Partnered Films series organized in collaboration with BCC's lead organizer Berette S Macaulay, NWFF's Artistic Dir. Rana San & team, and UW French Lecturer Richard Watts, with the Henry's Youth & Public Programs Manager and Curator, Ian Siporin and Mita Mahato.
Katz Lecture organized by Simpson Center's Director Kathleen Woodward and Programs & Events Manager, Caitlin Palo.
Sponsored by Simpson Center for the Humanities in co-presenting partnership with UW African Studies Program, Black Cinema Collective, Henry Art Gallery, and Northwest Film Forum.
AFTER DARK 2021 - watch party + live commentary feat. eat. HIS HOUSE with special guests Isabella Price and Sade’ Sellers
AFTER DARK is an annual program that delves into the creative, spooky, and speculative world of horror and sci-fi storytelling. Witness how African + Black Diasporic filmmakers, writers, artists, and characters are contributing to the cult circuit while flipping the script on these mind-bending genres.
Join us for a series of watch parties with live commentary by special guests on contemporary Black horror featuring HIS HOUSE (2020, USA/UK, 93 mins), Directed by Remi Weekes, with special guests Isabella Price and Sade’ Sellers.
HOW TO WATCH
Open Chrome + download the Scener extension
Log-in to Scener.com or register a new account
Visit Scener.com/blackcinemacltv to join the party via Netflix
For additional help, visit scener.com/faq
Organized and designed by Chile Dulce
Presented by Black Cinema Collective (BCC)
#blackcinemacollective #bccafterdark
ABOUT THE FILM + GUEST
HIS HOUSE (2020, USA/UK, 93 mins)
Directed by Remi Weekes
A refugee couple makes a harrowing escape from war-torn South Sudan, but then they struggle to adjust to their new life in an English town that has an evil lurking beneath the surface.
ISABELLA PRICE
ISABELLA PRICE is a filmmaker, writer, podcaster, host, performer and youtuber from the PNW. She has worked on CUT’s 100 Years of Beauty series, produced a horror film burlesque live show called Nocturnal Emissions, and directed a virtual national run of Mae West’s play SEX in 2020. Currently she works with Langston Seattle, as the Film Programs Manager curating their Fade to Black series, focused on Black filmmakers and the Black image in media and as the Seattle Black Film Festival Programs Manager.
Follow Isabella on Twitter+ IG @Izzyvonghoul
SADE’ SELLERS
SADE’ SELLERS is a screenwriter and producer based in Burbank, California. Originally from Michigan’s capital, Sade’ has been working in the entertainment industry since 2009. In 2017, Sade’ was a finalist for Tv One’s Screenwriting competition for her teleplay, The Replacement. This achievement motivated the network to hire her as a writer for their upcoming movie of the week event, Deadly Dispatch, which premiered on the platform in the summer of 2019. Through that process, Sade’ met casting director Leah Daniels-Butler who was in the midst of staffing her production company, 1oneninety5. Sade’ then rose to the role of Vice President of Content Acquisitions and Development and spent the next year learning the ecosystem of film and television development from pitching to production. Using that experience, and bound at home due to COVID-19, Sade’ made a return to her first love, screenwriting, utilizing her free time to write new content. Currently, Sade’ is practicing social distancing with her beloved dog, Majon, in Burbank. At the same time, she is recording her monthly horror review podcast, Afro Horror, which was recently adapted into a weekly blog series for Final Draft. She enjoys cooking, baking, and catching up on programs such as The Undoing and The Morning Show.
Follow Sade’ on Twitter @IAMSadeSellers @afrohorror + IG @sadesellers @afrohorror
Learn more about Sade’s work at sadesellers.com and afrohorror.com
AFTER DARK 2021 - watch party + live commentary feat. SWEETHEART with special guest Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman
AFTER DARK is an annual program that delves into the creative, spooky, and speculative world of horror and sci-fi storytelling. Witness how African + Black Diasporic filmmakers, writers, artists, and characters are contributing to the cult circuit while flipping the script on these mind-bending genres.
Join us for a series of watch parties with live commentary by special guests on contemporary Black horror featuring SWEETHEART (2019, USA, 82 mins), directed by JD Dillard, with special guest Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman.
HOW TO WATCH
Open Chrome + download the Scener extension
Log-in to Scener.com or register a new account
Visit Scener.com/blackcinemacltv to join the party via Netflix
For additional help, visit scener.com/faq
Organized and designed by Chile Dulce
Presented by Black Cinema Collective (BCC)
#blackcinemacollective #bccafterdark
ABOUT THE FILM + GUEST
SWEETHEART (2019, USA, 82 mins)
Directed by JD Dillard
Jenn has washed ashore a small tropical island and it doesn't take her long to realize she's completely alone. She must spend her days not only surviving the elements, but must also fend off the malevolent force that comes out each night.
DR. ROBIN R. MEANS COLEMAN
DR. ROBIN R. MEANS COLEMAN is Vice President & Associate Provost for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, and the Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. An award-winning scholar, Dr. Coleman’s work focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness. Dr. Coleman is the author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011, Routledge) and African-American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (2000, Routledge). She is co-author of Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014, Wiley-Blackwell). She is the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002, Routledge) and co-editor of Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (2008, Peter Lang). She is also the author of a number of other academic and popular publications. She has three new books about Black horror soon to be published. Dr. Coleman is featured in, and co-executive produced, the critically acclaimed, award-winning documentary film Horror Noire which is based on her book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. The film features a ‘who’s who’ cast, to include: Jordan Peele (Get Out; Us), Tananarive Due (My Soul to Keep), Ashlee Blackwell (graveyardshiftsisters.com), William Crain (Blacula), Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood), Rachel True (The Craft), Ernest Dickerson (The Walking Dead; Bones), Keith David (The Thing), Mark Harris (blackhorrormovies.com) and a host of other horror stars and experts.
Follow Dr. Coleman on Facebook + Twitter @MeansColeman
Learn more about Dr. Coleman’s academic work at bit.ly/3CeKHKV
BETWEEN THE FRAMES: Virtual Screening + Discussion
BETWEEN THE FRAMES is a film program in Redmond that uses visual storytelling to promote and deepen our understanding of different histories, traditions, and cultures.
These films, situated in the Black North American and South Asian contexts, are linked by themes of memory, acceptance, self-love, and the complexities of the diasporic experience. In particular, they explore and disrupt the deep connections between internalized racial biases and colorism within and between Black and South Asian communities.
Rewatch the program on YouTube
This program features:
WHAT’S YOUR BROWN NUMBER? (2015, India, 4:31 mins)
Directed by Vinnie Ann Bose; Produced by Studio EeksaurusKAALA (2019, India, 15:24 mins)
Directed by Tarun Jain; Produced by Nasira Khan
ABOUT THE FILMS + ARTISTS
WHAT’S YOUR BROWN NUMBER? (2015, India, 4:31 mins)
Directed by Vinnie Ann Bose; Produced by Studio Eeksaurus
What's Your Brown Number? is an animated satire on colorism that questions the nuances of idealized beauty based on skin tone in India.
VINNIE ANN BOSE
VINNIE ANN BOSE is an Indian born animator, living and working in France since 2018. She holds a Bachelors in Animation Film Design from the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, India and a Masters in Animation film direction from Joined École de la poudrière, Valence, France.
What is your Brown Number? was part of an incubation student project that Vinnie made while studying at NID under the mentorship of Suresh Eriyat of Studio Eeksaurus.
She is currently working on a short film project titled "Sulaimani" and a TV series project for children titled "Mousse & Bichon", as author and director.
KAALA (2019, India, 15:24 mins)
Directed by Tarun Jain; Produced by Nasira Khan
Kaala (Black in Hindi) is a short socio-political film specifically on hate crimes against African nationals that occurred in New Delhi, India in 2016 and 2017.
TARUN JAIN
TARUN JAIN is an acclaimed filmmaker from New Delhi, India. His short film, Amma Meri has screened in over 48 festivals including the Oscar Qualifying Tampere Film Festival, IFFI Goa, MIFF, IDSFFK, and Dharamshala, India.
His latest film Kaala (2019) is based on the racist attacks on the Africans in New Delhi, India. Kaala (2019) had its world premiere at the Oscar Qualifying Cinequest Film and VR Festival in the USA and also played at Rapid Lion Film Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was screened at the Coalition of South Asian Film Festivals (CoSAFF), a first of its kind event that brought together seven well-established South Asian film festivals across North America in 2020.
Moderated discussion led by Dr. Nalini Iyer
DR. NALINI IYER
NALINI IYER is Professor of English at Seattle University and current holder of the Theiline Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair for the Humanities. She teaches postcolonial studies including South Asian and African writing, and courses on postcolonial and transnational feminisms. Her research focuses on three interrelated areas: the hegemony of Anglophone writing in South Asia, South Asian diaspora studies, and Partition Studies. Her publications include the following: Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (co-edited with Bonnie Zare, Rodopi 2009); Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (co-authored with Amy Bhatt, University of Washington Press 2013); and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (co-edited with Amritjit Singh and Rahul K. Gairola, Lexington 2016/Orient Blackswan 2016). She is the Chief Editor of South Asian Review and the first woman to hold that position in the journal’s forty-year history.
This program was organized by Savita Krishnamoorthy
Media design by Chile Dulce
Presented by Black Cinema Collective (BCC)
www.blackcinemacollective.org
This project is supported in part by grants from the City of Redmond and 4Culture
BETWEEN THE FRAMES: Outdoor Screening
BETWEEN THE FRAMES is a film program in Redmond that uses visual storytelling to promote and deepen our understanding of different histories, traditions, and cultures.
These films, situated in the Black North American and South Asian contexts, are linked by themes of memory, acceptance, self-love, and the complexities of the diasporic experience. In particular, they explore and disrupt the deep connections between internalized racial biases and colorism within and between Black and South Asian communities.
This program features:
BLACK SOUL (2002, Canada, 9:50 mins)
Directed by Martine Chartrand; Produced by National Film Board, CanadaRECOILED (2019, USA, 8:02 mins)
Directed by Claire Grim; Produced by Shalom Simmons
September 2021 @ the Buoyant Pavilion in Downtown Park, Redmond
Available every Tues, Wed, & Thurs
8 – 10 pm PST
*Films will play on loop
ABOUT THE FILMS + ARTISTS
BLACK SOUL (2002, Canada, 9:50 mins)
Directed by Martine Chartrand; Produced by National Film Board, Canada
Black Soul an animated short, is a lyrical discovery through constantly shifting images into the journeys of Black peoples through Africa and North America. A grandmother’s memory becomes the gateway into stories of defining moments in Black History, a legacy bequeathed to the next generation to never forget, to safeguard, and to pass on.
MARTINE CHARTRAND is a Canadian Haitian filmmaker who directed the award-winning short film T.V Tango (1992) for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). She made her second film for NFB entitled Black Soul (2000), an animated short tracing the memory of Black History, which garnered 23 awards, including the Golden Bear at the Berlinale 2001. Her third film, MacPherson (2012), inspired by a song from Quebec singer-songwriter Félix Leclerc, won the First Prize and the Best Canadian Short Film Public Award at the Montreal International World Film Festival in 2012.
RECOILED (2019, USA, 8:02 mins)
Directed by Claire Grim; Produced by Shalom Simmons
Recoiled unpacks themes of stereotypes, disrupting hegemonic standards of beauty, and the stigmatization of black hair. It reiterates the importance of valuing one’s authentic self, pride in your culture, and in the positive representation of Black voices.
This animated short is produced by 6 students in the Electronic Arts Program at Missouri State University; Claire Grim (Writer/Director), Shalom Simmons (Writer/Producer), Shelby Corely (Art Direction), Matt Fuller (Technical Direction), Brandon Huddleston (Original Music), and Kersten Schatz (Producer/Screenplay). Recoiled won the Broadcast Education Association’s 2019 Best of Festival award in the Screenwriting category.
This program was organized by Savita Krishnamoorthy
Media design by Chile Dulce
Presented by Black Cinema Collective (BCC)
www.blackcinemacollective.org
This project is supported in part by grants from the City of Redmond and 4Culture
#blackcinemacollective #betweentheframes
SHAPESHIFTERS - Special Film Program for “Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem” exhibition
Nari Ward. Still from Jaunt, 2011, video (color, sound); 7:52 mins. © Nari Ward. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul.
The Frye celebrates the final weekend of the landmark exhibition Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem with a special screening program of artist videos and short films curated by Berette S Macaulay of Black Cinema Collective. With a view to expanding and “refracting” The Studio Museum in Harlem’s focus on art of the African diaspora, the screening features works by artists both in and beyond the Black Refractions exhibition.
SHAPESHIFTERS artists + program order:
Cloudscape, 2004, Lorna Simpson
Native Sun, 2011, Terence Nance + Samuel “Blitz the Ambassador” Bazawule
Mango Mango, 2015, Tiffany Smith
Autumn, 2016, Deborah Anzinger
Jaunt, 2011, Nari Ward
Boneshaker, 2013, Nuotama Frances Bodomo
for those who mispronounce my name, 2018, Maya Cozier
Sopera de Yemaya: Olokun, 2020, Courtney Desiree Morris
Escaped Lunatic, 2010/11, Steffani Jemison
Crusader, 2006, Nari Ward
Afronauts, 2014, Nuotama Frances Bodomo
“Our program brings together a distinctive gathering of artists and filmmakers from a wide range of cinematic and video art vocabularies which speak to the boundless cultural, historical, mythological, and spiritual refractions of the Black diaspora. Among them are Lorna Simpson, Nari Ward, and Steffani Jemison, three of the artists included in Black Refractions: Highlights from the Studio Museum in Harlem, who in this screening present works not on view in the exhibition at the Frye. The newly selected works by each artist, Cloudscape, 2004 (Simpson), Jaunt, 2011 and Crusader, 2006 (Ward), and Escaped Lunatic, 2010/11 (Jemison) anchor the program’s three acts, taking us through loosely-defined chapters devoted to memory/knowledge/play; hybridity + shapeshifting; and imaginary futures im/material. A selection of shorts from multidisciplinary practitioners Deborah Anzinger, Maya Cozier, Courtney Desiree Morris, and Tiffany Smith round out the program, in conversation with longer pieces from filmmakers Nuotama Frances Bodomo and Terence Nance + Samuel “Blitz the Ambassador” Bazawule.
There are multiple worlds of memory and mourning, histories, beliefs, myths, and material cultures, which suggest that loss and the trauma of erasure and ruin can be forces that also bring about invention and renewed forms of thriving liberation. There can be delight in "third-worlding"—coopting and redirecting—whatever is deemed by the status quo as fixed or legitimate, and in so doing, moving beyond the prescribed maps and mistaken territories of the dominant narrative. If we consider memory not only as recordkeeping but as an act of imagination, fragmented identities can shapeshift through speculative ecologies of community, environment, knowledge, land, and language to become whole. The films in this program explore ruin, reclamation, and survivalist methods of existence across multiple spaces of catastrophe and hope, dreaming and invention, and simple acts of playfulness and love. They break free of borders and minimizing categories so we can conjure the mythic and invent our way beyond colonial ruin.”
— Berette S. Macaulay for Black Cinema Collective
SHAPESHIFTERS is curated by Berette S. Macaulay for Black Cinema Collective, and organized on behalf of Frye Art Museum by Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator, and Erin Langner, Exhibitions and Publications Coordinator. The program is presented in partnership with Jazmyn Scott, Program Manager at Langston Seattle. Partner presentation with Murmurations, a Seattle-wide Arts Collaboration.
Support for this program is provided in part by Art Bridges. Additional support is provided by the Frye Foundation and Frye Members.
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem is organized by the American Federation of Arts and The Studio Museum in Harlem. This exhibition is curated by Connie H. Choi, Associate Curator of the Permanent Collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The presentation at the Frye Art Museum is coordinated by Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator, with David Strand, Associate Curator.
