Black on Screen: Debt, Dependency, and City Stories
Join the Schomburg Center for Program 4: Debt, Dependency, and City Stories, as part of our October and November Black on Screen series, guest-curated by writer and film programmer, Yasmina Price. The screening includes Le Franc (1994), directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty and Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera (One Way or Another) 1974/1977. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Price and Dr. Nzingha Kendall, Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
November 25th, 5:30 PM at the Schomburg!
SCHEDULE
5:30 PM | Le Franc 1994, dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty
Djibril Diop Mambéty unleashed his exuberant and poignant cinema against the craven conditions of neocolonialism and financial deprivation on the African continent. Le Franc (1994) is one part of an unfinished trilogy dedicated to the minoritized experiences he always championed as meaningful and revelatory. The protagonist is a penniless musician, Marigo—played with lanky, languid charm by Dieye Ma Dieye—whose anarchic trek through Dakar with a lottery ticket in hand unfolds as both a deeply moving journey and an indictment of the colonially imposed CFA franc monetary system.
Running Time: 69 minutes
Language: French, English
6:35 PM | De cierta manera (One Way or Another) 1974/1977, dir. Sara Gómez
Working in revolutionary Cuba, the fearless Sara Gómez upheld but also expanded the state’s vision of liberation to fully address ongoing issues of racialized economic disparity and marginalization in her hybrid documentary De cierta manera (1974/1977). Blending stark documentary footage and a knotted fictional love story, her monumental film is a lucid examination of education, labor, poverty, racism, sexism, and popular religion from the perspective of an Afro-Cubana.
Running Time: 74 minutes
Language: Spanish, English
PARTICIPANTS
Yasmina Price (Guest Curator) a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anti-colonial cinema and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, D.C. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, with essays in The Nation, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Criterion’s Current, Film Quarterly and World Records Journal.
Nzingha Kendall is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on black women filmmakers from across the diaspora. Her project, “Imperfect Independence: Black Women Filmmakers and Experimental Filmmaking” investigates the liberatory potential of black women’s experimental film practices. She has a PhD in American Studies from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she programmed films for the Black Film Center and Archive and the Indiana University Cinema. Nzingha was also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is currently an assistant professor of film and screen studies at Pace University in New York City.