** Co-presented with Sankofa Film Society. **

Funny, brilliant and personal, Losing Ground should have ranked high in the canon of indie cinema. But the early 1980s was not an easy time for independent filmmakers – much less Black, independent, women filmmakers – and the film was never theatrically released. It was shown once on PBS’s American Playhouse, and then it effectively disappeared. Twenty-five years after her mother’s death, Nina Collins rescued the original negative and created a beautiful new digital master of her mother’s film. Losing Ground now looks and sounds as fresh, bracing and complex as it did when it was first filmed. It is a testament to Kathleen Collins’ incredible talent and a lasting treasure of African American and women’s cinema. – Stills and partial synopsis courtesy of Milestone Films.

(Kathleen Collins, US, 1982, 86 min, in English)

“The film ends in a way few films about black life do: on a note of ambiguity. Black people are emotionally tangled, intelligent, stylish, hungry, barbed. In Losing Ground, they are neither saints nor sinners — they are achingly, beautifully human.” – Vulture

“As an East Coaster, Collins didn’t emerge from the celebrated L.A. Rebellion film movement of the time, but her work certainly contributed to a new generation of upstart African and African American filmmakers responsible for an emerging “Black Cinema” that acted as an alternative to dominant classical Hollywood moviemaking – especially where representations of people of African descent were concerned. And for a black woman, that was a noteworthy feat, when black women filmmakers were all-but invisible.” – Tambay Obenson, IndieWire