Barely released in 1982 and all but unseen for over three decades, Kathleen Collins’ “Losing Ground” follows philosophy professor Sara Rogers and her bohemian artist husband Victor, who rent a summer country house to celebrate his museum sale. “Within Our Gates” is included in Kino’s “Pioneers of African American Cinema” five-disc Blu-ray set of at least a dozen feature-length “race films” from the early half of the 20th century. The young couple confront class and color divisions in a lyrical, visionary film that lays bare the tensions between two groups both descended from slaves but of disparate opportunity: the light-skinned, property-owning Creoles, and the darker-skinned, more disenfranchised families of the area. Black Women Film! © 2020 Sundance Institute | Photo by Azikiwe Aboagye. Canada is both a leadership program and new collective dedicated to forwarding the careers, networks and skills of  filmmakers and media artists who are Black female identified of the Canadian African diaspora. A graduate of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, the new filmmaker is on a roll, as last year, she directed the short film “Hands To The Sky”, that featured an autistic protagonist. © 2019 Sundance Institute | Photo by Jen Fairchild. Fostering artists at the convergence of film, art, media, live performance, music & technology. The film may be outmoded, but the issues it raises still exist. The theater still stands today and was recently purchased by IUPUI for renovations. Ekwa Msangi’s Farewell Amor, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, speaks to the delicate relationship of an Angolan family that’s been separated for 17 years. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The neutrality of this article is disputed. “Cane River” was an independent-film curio: a race and colorism-themed love story with an all-Black cast, written and directed by a Black filmmaker, and financed by wealthy Black backers. Award-winning filmmaker Melissa Haizlip is the National Black Programming Consortium’s current artist-in-residence. Black women directors have created some of the most powerful, nuanced, and layered stories of our time. 37 wins & 85 nominations. “It’s not only about filmmakers in North America,” said Pola Changnon, TCM general manager. A restored “Ganja & Hess” is available on Blu-ray with bonus features via Kino Classics. Search for "Hidden Figures" on Amazon.com, Title: These films, Bowser declares, "offered a visual record of women's work history" and the "development of cottage Industries." 20th Century Fox. [21], Kathleen Collins wrote, produced and directed, Losing Ground (1982) her landmark film, after writing her 1977 manifesto "A Place in Time and Killer of Sheep: Two Radical Definitions of Adventure Minus Women" which "charged that films like Shaft and Superfly did nothing more than reproduce, in a different hue, the phallocentric conventions of white Hollywood cinema".[22]. Hidden Figures [[ (item.title || item.description) | stripTags ]], [[ item.price != 0 ? She is set to direct New Gods, a Warner Bros. and DC Comics film.[32]. Filmmakers Without Borders supports independent filmmakers around the world via grants and other funding initiatives. From Ayoka Chenzira to Gina Prince-Bythewood to Ava DuVernay and Radha Blank, the women you'll read about below are blazing a new … Hidden figures is a drama loosely based on the people at NASA ... See full summary ». Hamilton is a Jamaican born talent that came to America at 8 years old with her mom. Riggs’ rallying cry, which could conjure a life into being, declares: “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act.” The film still speaks to some of the most basic cultural struggles of the present. Katherine runs across campus just to find a bathroom that she is allowed to use and never once complaining about it until she is publicly berated about her use of time. [3][4][5], The film industry has been difficult for black women to break into. Jacqueline Bobo establishes that black women filmmakers have been productive throughout the twentieth century. These artists have worked to portray the intricate lives of Black women, bring into focus cultural aspects of the African diaspora, and express socially relevant themes through film. The British-Ghanian filmmaker brought the unknown, real-life story of biracial aristocrat Dido Elizabeth Belle to the big screen in “Belle” starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Black women filmmakers. A restored “Killer of Sheep” is available on DVD with bonus features via Milestone Films. A restored “Daughters of the Dust” was distributed by Cohen Media for its 25th anniversary. The oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director, Oscar Micheaux’s silent film “Within Our Gates,” was a noteworthy response to Griffith’s racist “The Birth of a Nation.” Micheaux’s landmark film provided a rebuttal to Griffith’s depiction of Black violence and corruption, with a story of the injustices faced by African Americans. The film was nominated for the Berlin International Film Festival’s top Golden Bear. Dramatic and Documentary competitions. Her work has included the 2013 short You’re Dead to Me and the feature-length doc Mr… Julie Dash’s groundbreaking 1991 historical drama is arguably one of the most significant films in the last 30 years. In 2017, she blew audiences away with her beautifully depicted, raw Southern tale, Mudbound, which garnered her a 2017 Sundance Vanguard Award. For those same reasons, it was vilified by homophobic audiences who used it to rebuke government funding of the arts. The first U.S. feature film written and directed by an African American woman to receive a wide theatrical release, the story, which is set in the early 1900s, paints a vivid portrait of Gullah Geechee culture — communities descended from enslaved Africans who settled along the coast and Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. She also directed the TV biopic on “Ruby Bridges.”. It opened up opportunities for dialogue across communities, while being lauded by critics for its bold vision. Leadership Program is made possible with support from the. Black Women Film & Video Artists. [8] Therefore, when looking at Hollywood's industry Black women filmmakers become the most unnoticeable, they become existent only in the periphery of the industry. (The answer isn't as simple as you may think)", "The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston", "L'Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma 1984 Best First Work acceptance video", "Ava DuVernay is the First African-American Woman to Direct a $100 Million Film", "Netflix and Ava DuVernay Win Dismissal of Defamation Suit", "The New Gods - Internet Movie Database tt8145762", "Mati Diop becomes first black female filmmaker to compete in Cannes", Historical Timeline of Feature Films Directed by African American Women, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Black_women_filmmakers&oldid=971417457, Wikipedia articles with style issues from December 2017, Articles with topics of unclear notability from December 2017, All articles with topics of unclear notability, Articles needing additional references from September 2017, All articles needing additional references, Articles with multiple maintenance issues, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, "All They Know Is Shoot" by Tripp Sticc featuring Ricky Moncler (2016) - music video, Amen: The life and music of Jester Hairston (2015), This page was last edited on 6 August 2020, at 01:04. Skip In 00 : 02 prev next. It broke new artistic ground by mixing poetry, music, performance with Riggs’ autobiographical revelations. This is the true story of three African-American women who worked for NASA on the Mercury program in the early 1960s. Despite the cult love for the Sundance-winning “I.R.T,” Harris wouldn’t release another film until 2013’s “I Love Cinema.”, Maya Angelou made her directorial debut with “Down In The Delta,” starring Alfre Woodard, Wesley Snipes (here together at the ’98 premiere) and Loretta Devine. Kevin Costner's character appears to be a generally good person who doesn't care about race, and yet still never even thought about the difficulty of being forced into a certain bathroom half a mile away. While Griffith represented Black male offensives on white female purity, Micheaux’s film sets the historical record straight with its depiction of the attempted rape of a Black woman by a white man. Treated as the doyenne of Black female filmmakers, Dash’s 1991 debut “Daughters of the Dust” was praised for his history-laced storyline, gaining wide distribution.