i ran from it and was still in it

Darol Olu Kae / USA, 2020, digital, 11 min.

A poetic meditation on familial loss and separation, and the love that endures against dispersion.

Darol Olu Kae, (b. 1984). Artist and filmmaker from and based in Los Angeles. Kae’s artistic practice disrupts conventional narrative structures of storytelling through its dynamic treatment of sound and image. His collaborative, research-based approach to art and filmmaking grounds itself in the precarious, yet generative power of the black experience in America. Kae has collaborated with visionary filmmakers such as Kahlil Joseph and A.G. Rojas. And his own film work has screened at festivals and institutions worldwide including BlackStar Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, MoCA Los Angeles, and Sundance Film Festival. He was awarded the Pardino d’oro for Best International Short Film in 2020 at the Locarno Film Festival for his film i ran from it and was still in it. And in 2021, i ran from it… earned Special Jury Recognition for Poetry at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival. Kae is currently in pre-production for his next short-form project, Keeping Time, and developing his feature directorial debut, Without a Song.

10:28,30

Paige Taul / USA, 2019, digital, 5 min., Los Angeles Premiere

As a part of the larger constellations of works concerning familial relationships, 10:28,30 examines the relationship between myself and my sister, and our relationship to our mother. I am interested in the dissonance of our lives apart and the tension in the desire to be together.

Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She currently resides in Chicago, IL.

An Ecstatic Experience

Ja'Tovia Gary / USA, 2015, digital, 7 min.

A meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.

Ja’Tovia Monique Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across film, video art, sculpture, and installation. Gary aims to destabilize notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity in films and installations that serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black sociality, familial bonds, the interiority of Black women and femmes, and the global efforts towards liberation often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works. The artist has exhibited at the Hammer Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, the Schomburg Center, Anthology Film Archives, Locarno Film Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Centre Pompidou, Film at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Film Archives, among others. Gary has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Creative Capital, and Field of Vision, and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.

For Our Girls

Michèle Stephenson & Imani Dennison / USA, 2020, digital, 10 min., Los Angeles Premiere

The film is a love letter to Black daughters — acknowledging the sacred, and at times, tense relationship mothers and daughters share as they face challenges and accept each other’s flaws.

MICHÈLE STEPHENSON

Filmmaker, artist and author, Michèle Stephenson, pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots to think radically about storytelling and disrupt the imaginary in non-fiction spaces.  She tells emotionally driven personal stories of resistance and identity that are created by, for and about communities of color and the Black diaspora. Her stories intentionally reimagine and provoke thought about how we engage with and dismantle the internalized impact of systems of oppression. Stephenson draws on fiction, immersive and hybrid forms of storytelling to build her worlds and narratives. Her feature documentary, American Promise, was nominated for three Emmys and won the Jury Prize at Sundance. Her more recent feature documentary, Stateless, was nominated for a Canadian Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.  Stephenson also collaborated as co-director on the magical realist virtual reality trilogy series on racial terror, The Changing Same, which was recently nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Interactive Media Innovative category and premiered at Sundance Film Festival. It also won the  Grand Jury Prize for Best Immersive Narrative at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.  Along with her writing partners, Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, Stephenson won an NAACP Image Award for Excellence in a Literary Work for their book, Promises Kept.  She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, a Guggenheim Artist Fellow and a Creative Capital Artist.

IMANI DENNISON

Imani Dennison, she/they, is an experimental documentary filmmaker and DP based in Brooklyn, NY. Imani graduated from Howard University where she studied Political Science and Photography. Imani’s work interrogates stories of Black people in the South and the African diaspora, usually centered in folklore, fantasy, and oral histories. Imani’s most recent film, They Say The People Can Skate, is a documentary told through the reminiscence and reflection of Black Louisvillian’s recollection of roller skating culture in Louisville, KY. Imani Co-Directed For Our Girls, a love letter to Black daughters — acknowledging the sacred, and at times, tense relationship mothers and daughters share as they face challenges and accept each other’s flaws which went on to receive major distribution in the U.S. Imani has created commissioned documentary works for PBS, Black Tag, ITVS, and For Africans. Imani’s first film, Garden of Eden, premiered at The Cannes Film Festival in 2016.  Imani is head Curator and Programmer at Black Science Fiction, a creative collective invested in the future, liberation, and pleasure of Black and brown folx. Black Science Fiction hosts community workshops, live music experiences and film screenings.

$75,000

Moïse Togo / France/Mali, 2020, digital, 14 min., Los Angeles Premiere

A look at the biological aspect of albinism, which is a genetic and hereditary condition that affects not only the pigmentation of sufferers but also, and above all, their physical and mental health. These people are victims of discrimination, mutilation, and ritual crimes in Africa.

Moïse Togo was born in Mopti, Mali, in 1990. He studied at the local university’s department of law and political science before attending the conservatory in the capital, Bamako. There he graduated with a master's degree in multimedia arts. He is a recipient of the Bakary Diallo Prize and a fellow at Le Fresnoy – National Studio of the Contemporary Arts. His short film, $75,000, premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2021 and went on to screen at other festivals, including Annecy International Animation Festival (2021) and Sundance Film Festival (2022).

Standing at the Scratching Line

Julie Dash / USA, 2016, digital, 11 min.

Traveling between Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, to Mother Bethel AME in Philadelphia, Julie Dash creates a cinematic tone poem about returning to sacred spaces of departure and arrival.

Thirty-one years ago, filmmaker Julie Dash broke through racial and gender boundaries with her Sundance award-winning film (Best Cinematography) Daughters of the Dust. She became the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of her feature film. Dash recently designed two rooms for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and VOGUE, In American: An Anthology of Fashion, featured at the NYC Met Gala 2022. She directed Kerry Washington’s upcoming new drama series Reasonable Doubt. Dash is known for having directed multiple episodes of the award-winning drama series, Queen Sugar, Season 2, created and produced by Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, for OWN Television. Her most recent museum installations include Standing at The Scratch Line, at the Philadelphia Museum of African American History, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Shine a Light, a large-scale video mapping projection for the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit. Dash has several documentary projects in the works, including Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, a feature-length documentary in-progress about Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, a world-renowned author, performer, and chef from rural South Carolina. She earned an MFA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies, an MFA in Theater Arts (Film & Television Production) at UCLA; and she received a BA in Film Production from CCNY. Julie Dash is a Diana King Endowed Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College.

BLACK TO TECHNO

Jenn Nkiru / United Kingdom, 2019, digital, 21 min.

BLACK TO TECHNO is a music documentary charting the anthropological, socio-economical, geopolitical roots of techno from Detroit and how it traveled and translated into becoming the soundtrack to fall of the wall in Berlin.

Jenn Nkiru is an award-winning visionary artist and director from London. The relationship between the spiritual, visual, sonic, somatic, music and movement, are central concerns of her work in how they intersect and work together to expand the possibilities of film language. Pushed through a surrealist lens, her works are grounded in the history of black music, afro-surrealism, the aesthetics of experimental film, international art cinema, the black arts movement and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the black diaspora and their distinct experimentation with the politics of form. She has steadily created a collection of works with her distinctive visual style and powerful use of sound through her short films, commercials and music videos for the MET, the Whitney, Gucci, Frieze, as well as artists such as Beyoncé, Rage Against the Machine, Kamasi Washington and Neneh Cherry amongst others. She is the 2021 Grammy Award Winner for Best Music Video for her direction on Brown Skin Girl by Beyonce. She is, additionally the winner of a CICLOPE, Soul Train, Cannes Lion and NAACP award for the same video. Her latest piece, OUT / SIDE OF TIME, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is currently on show as part of their exhibition: Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.

TAYLOR RENEE ALDRIDGE (Moderator LA Screening)

Curator and writer Taylor Renee Aldridge joined the California African American Museum (CAAM) in August 2020. Her first project at CAAM was Enunciated Life, a contemporary art exhibition in which Black spiritual beliefs—as well as the movements, sounds, and other bodily expressions that have engendered communication within and beyond Black churches—operate as a point of departure for considering modes of surrender. Aldridge has organized critically acclaimed exhibitions with the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Artists Market, Cranbrook Art Museum, and The Luminary (St. Louis). In 2015, along with art critic Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, an influential journal of art criticism for Black perspectives. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, Canadian Art, Contemporary And, Detroit Metro Times, Hyperallergic, and SFMOMA’s Open Space. She is the recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She holds an M.L.A. from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and B.A. from Howard University with a concentration in Art History

ruth gebreyesus (Moderator SF Screening)

ruth gebreyesus writes, edits, & produces work centering cultural production and power.