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 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.

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.

A four-film series and lecture by Abderrahmane Sissako in conversation,holding the transformational poetics of humanitarian cinema. April 22nd – 26th, 2022.

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 Forum

• Apr. 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 born in Sierra Leone, and raised in Jamaica.  Her work engages complex cultural negotiations of be/longing, trans*national personhood, coded identity-performance, memory, and mythmaking.  Exhibition and sharing spaces include Melkweg Expo (Netherlands), Art Alive (India), SP-Arte (Brazil), Memorial ACTe Museum (Guadeloupe), and Annenberg Space for Photography (USA).  Permanent collections include National Gallery of Jamaica and Int’l Center for Photography (as ‘SeBiArt’).  She received the UW Ottenberg-Winans Fellowship for African Studies (2019) for her ongoing research on Afro-gestural vocabularies Embodied Witness: Performing Memory for Black (re)Cognition, recently presented as a film essay and participatory engagement at the 2022 Black Portraitures VII Conference: Play & Performance at Rutgers University. Her work has been supported with artist grants and residencies from the National Performance Network (NPN), Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Shunpike Arts, and 4Culture. Her curatorial projects include the permanent exhibition Mystic of a Woman on Rita Marley at the Bob Marley Museum, illusive self at Taller Boricua Gallery, NY, and MFON in Seattle (2019-2020), a five month-long series of exhibitions and talks she conceived and organized in partnership with MFON Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Frye Art Museum, and Photographic Center NW.  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.

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 Eeksaurus

• KAALA (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.

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.

Moderated discussion led by Dr. Nalini Iyer

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

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, Canada

• RECOILED (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