IN CINEMA
African Spiritualities Double Feature!
VOICES OF THE GODS + AI: AFRICAN INTELLIGENCE
Friday, February 7th at 6PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission/ $7 Reduced Price
Presented with African Film Festival and Third World Newsreel
Join us for a special double feature of two films portraying new and old encounters between African cultures, religions, and spiritualities, and confront the legacies of colonialism and imperialism.
VOICES OF THE GODS
Al Santana, 1985, 60 min.
New 2K Digitization
VOICES OF THE GODS foregrounds the Akan and Yoruba religions, two West African traditions practiced within the United States. It looks at their cosmologies, use of music, dance, and medicine in various ceremonies and rituals. The film includes historical and contemporary applications and influences of these religions not only in Black culture but also in secular and mainstream American society and politics more broadly.
AI: AFRICAN INTELLIGENCE
Manthia Diawara, 2023, 110 min.
New Release
Granted rare access to Ndeup, a spiritual healing ceremony practiced by Lebou peoples in Senegal, filmmaker and writer Manthia Diawara–with input from a cadre of scientists and academics–wonders what connections, if any, can be made between the possession ritual and Western logic. AI: AFRICAN INTELLIGENCE imagines generative ways of utilizing and thinking about “machine learning,” which Diawara fears might otherwise elide specific cultural practices like Ndeup.
Post-screening discussion with filmmaker Al Santana and Rico Speight!
AL SANTANA is a visual artist, independent filmmaker, cinematographer, and still photographer. Over the past 40 years, he has worked on numerous award-winning documentaries, public affairs films and videos including In The Spirit of Peace (2002) Military Option (2005), One People (2007), Blues People (2007), and Salty Dog Blues (2012). Santana holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the CUNY BA program in Sociology and Film, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from National University in Digital Cinema.
RICO SPEIGHT is a producer/director/writer/editor of film, theatre and digital media. His documentary WHO'S GONNA TAKE THE WEIGHT? on African American and black South African young people at the fall of Apartheid, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999. A follow-up sequel WHERE ARE THEY NOW? was broadcast nationally in South Africa in 2007 on SABC-TV. Speight’s first documentary THE PEOPLE UNITED, now distributed by the Criterion Collection, profiles reactions of Boston's black community to anti-black racism in Boston, including a series of murders of young black women in the 1980s. Speight’s short documentary NEW GENERATION (2006) chronicled the views of Congolese young people on the crisis in the Congo during the 2nd Congo War (1998–2003). His narrative credits include CHOICES, an original narrative short starring Samuel L Jackson and Hilary Martin Jones. In 2010 and 2013, Speight directed a multi-media theatrical presentation of Aime Cesaire’s "A Season in the Congo" at Theater Row and at LaMaMa. In 2017, he wrote, produced and directed ROBESON AND DUNHAM: ART & ACTIVISM 101, a multi-media play presented at the Gene Frankel Theatre in New York. Speight is currently producing REDISCOVERING FANON, a feature documentary on the life, ideas and contemporary influence of Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary psychiatrist, philosopher, and political theorist who inspired the Battle of Algiers.
