The first two festival events coordinate with the celebrations of Black History Month. On Friday, February 4, we pay tribute to Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety, who died in July 1998, by screening his last two films, Le Franc and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun. These films dramatize the attempts of the Senegalese people to struggle against economic devaluation and poverty in an increasingly global economy. While Mambety is unyielding in his depiction of oppressive economic conditions, he conceives his cinema as a means of transforming oppressive realities by imagining new possibilities for the future of his country. Both films are screened in Wolof, with English subtitles.
NOTE: The Mambety films will be presented in a projected video format, using a high-quality master tape.
On February 25 we will present Nightjohn, by the celebrated African-American director Charles Burnett. The moving story of a plantation slave who risks his life by teaching a fellow slave to read, Nightjohn focuses upon human connection and imaginative transformations as means of personal and social empowerment. The film was awarded a special citation in 1997 by the National Society of Film Critics.
NOTE: Nightjohn will be presented in a projected video format, using a high-quality master tape.
Our third screening, feminist filmmaker Yvonne Rainer's most recent work MURDER and Murder (1996), will take place on March 24, in conjunction with Women's History Month. Focusing upon the transformations arising from female aging and newly discovered sexuality, Rainer's film concerns a middle-aged woman's sexual awakening with her realization that she is in love with another woman, and the personal and interpersonal complications that take place when she is diagnosed with breast cancer.
MURDER and Murder will be screened in 16mm.
On April 28 we will screen German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. A brilliant study of the ways in which "impossible" human connections form, flourish, and struggle against social taboos and economic hardships, Ali concerns a middle-aged German widow and the much younger, Moroccan immigrant worker with whom she forms an intimate bond. Personalizing German economic and social history through the form of melodrama (the film is based upon Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows), this uncharacteristically hopeful Fassbinder film attests to the tranformative properties of human resilience and devotion.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul will be screened in 16mm.
For our final program on May 19, we will screen noted French director Robert Bresson's masterful 1983 film L'Argent (Money). Returning to the themes of materialism and economic hardships developed in other festival screenings, Bresson's study of the consequences resulting from one man's counterfeiting activities develops into a powerful examination of morality, responsibility, and the struggle for spiritual transformation and transcendence.
L'Argent will be screened in 16mm.