IN CINEMA
Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage + Losing Ground

screening Thursday, June 15th at 7PM

Tickets: $15 General Admission/$7 Reduced Price 

Zora Neale Hurston Fieldwork Footage (Zora Neal Hurston, 1928, 7 min.)

Under the tutelage of anthropologist Franz Boas (her former Columbia professor) and Harlem Renaissance arts patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, Zora Neale Hurston spent nearly two years, from 1927 to 1929, studying the folkloric customs, work songs, spirituals, and vernacular language of African American communities along the River Road and from New Orleans to Florida—observations that culminated in her 1935 collection Mules and Men.

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982, 86 min.)

The inimitable Kathleen Collins' second film tells the story of two remarkable people, married and hurtling toward a crossroads in their lives: Sara Rogers, a Black professor of philosophy, is embarking on an intellectual quest just as her painter husband, Victor, sets off on an exploration of joy. Victor decides to rent a country house away from the city, but the couple’s summer idyll becomes complicated by his involvement with a younger model. One of the very first fictional features by an African-American woman, LOSING GROUND remains a stunning and powerful work of art for being a funny, brilliant, and personal member of indie cinema canon.

With introductory reflections by Akeema Anthony and Ajay Ram in honor of Juneteenth