IN CINEMA
QUEERING THE ARCHIVE: DIASPORA, BELONGING, AND SPIRITUALITY
Screening: Tuesday, March 4 at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General admission / $7 Reduced Price
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Osadolor Osawemwenze, 2024, 25 min. Digital
Across Dallas, the Bay Area, and New York City, eleven Blackqueer folks engage in layered conversations and candid everyday moments of joy, melancholy, introspection, euphoria, loneliness, and community-in-active-formation. Their complex minds revel in the journey of becoming Blackqueer and exploring their endless coming of age.
THE ARCHIVE: QUEER NIGERIANS 2023
Simisola Akande, 25 min. DCP
This poetic film documents the experiences of queer Nigerians, expanding our contemporary understanding of how queerness is expressed.
STORIES OF OUR LIVES, 2014
Jim ChuChu, 62 min. DCP
Two young women are in trouble for their ‘peculiar’ relationship; a farm hand is tormented when his crush begins courting a woman; a young DVD seller is intoxicated by the smoke and sounds of a clandestine gay bar. These are among the tales featured in this beautifully rendered collection of narratives from LGBTI Kenyans.
QUEERING THE ARCHIVE: DIASPORA, BELONGING, AND SPIRITUALITY furthers our consideration of anthological, black diasporic, spiritual and archival, themes as explored in Maysles’ November 2024 screening of Thomas Allen Harris’ works. The three featured films expand viewers’ conceptualization of belonging, as subjects in Osawemwenze’s film, a_blurred_fluxx_00.avi negotiate the politics of passing and queer nightlife in trans spaces across the Bay Area, NYC, and Dallas. Osawemwenze utilize Lo-Fi and DIY audiovisual aesthetics, shielding the film subjects from an essentializing gaze. Akande’s QUEERING THE ARCHIVE: DIASPORA, BELONGING, AND SPIRITUALITY similarly experiments with form, anonymizing five Queer Nigerians living in the UK as they reflect upon the erasure of queerness from national and cosmological narratives in Nigeria. Finally, the boundary between narrative and documentary filmmaking is contested in ChuChu’s STORIES OF OUR LIVES, an anthological re-presentation of the stories found in ChuChu and The Nest Collective’s archive of queer Kenyan stories.
Curated by Nia Whitmal.
Post-screening discussion TBA!
