Co-presented with The Luminal Theater and Speller Street Films as part of their monthly BLK Docs series.
“The archive” has never been a neutral body of material. Documents, images, and ephemera—often viewed as objective witnesses of history—themselves reflect the power dynamics and material conditions under which they were made and collected. Tension between what’s been captured and, more tellingly, what’s been excluded, renders the archive a site of both presence and absence.
Drawing on a wide range of archival material, the filmmakers in this program attempt to cohere questions of Black identity that have been obscured, suppressed, or erased by white supremacy and other dominative forces. These films move seamlessly between personal and political—between family albums, home movies, text correspondences, official documents, news clips, historical footage, and advertisements.
Like the narrator of The Otolith Group’s In the Year of the Quiet Sun, we use the phrase “instant ancestry” with knowledge of the limits of excavating identity from what's been institutionally preserved. The series attempts not to instantaneously recover lost and retrievable histories, but to illuminate gaps in the archive and these filmmakers’ ongoing efforts to fill them.
On Friday November 13th, at 11AM EST with The Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar
On Tuesday, November 17th at 7PM EST a Q&A with Terence Price II, Ephraim Asili, and Cat Jones
Meditation on Migration, Vonnie Quest, 2010, 5:23 min.
Movie Tote, Ephraim Asili, 2006, 8 min.
All That You Can't Leave Behind, Ufuoma Essi, 2019, 14 min.
I’ll Finish When I Can, Cat Jones, 2020, 13 min.
King of Sanwi, Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2020, 7 min.
Halimuhfack, Chrisptopher Harris, 2016, 4 min.
Dancing in the Absence of Pain, Terence Price II, 2018, 25 min.
In The Year Of The Quiet Sun, The Otolith Group, 2013, 34 min. Special livestream screening November 17th at 7pm EST [This event has passed]
