IN CINEMA

Drylongso
Friday, September 8 at 7pm
Tickets: $15 General Admission/$7 Reduced Price 


Cauleen Smith, 1998, 81 min.
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.

Introduction by Mars Kere, founding curator of Ways of Seeing (WOS)

Ways of Seeing (WOS) is a curatorial project that canonizes, archives, and curates the work of Black women and women of color filmmakers. It is a film hub and micro-cinema that collaborates with respective institutional spaces to demystify mysteries around filmmaking practice in an effort to create burgeoning and active film cultures in NYC. WOS can be located at @Waysofseeingfilm for access to their digital library.

Mars Kere is a curator and film programmer. Her first curatorial program "FEMMES" premiered at NYC Cultural Institutions Group, Weeksville Heritage Center. She has collaborated with the Schomburg Center for Black Research, Los Angeles Philharmonic assisted the Brooklyn Academy of Art, and has been a program assistant for the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington. She is invested in the liberatory relevance of African cinema and the amassed legacies of Afro-diasporic film cultures, invested in the speculative, the transcendental, the flying Africans, and the unseen burial grounds of the diaspora.