U People
Mar 24, 2011
(Hanifah Walidah and Olive Demetrius, USA, 2008, DV, 77 min)
Co-Presented by Central District Forum
Sponsored by KBCS 91.3FM
Post-film discussion moderated by Ralina Joseph of the University of Washington
Winner of the Jury Award at the IMAGE+NATION LGBT Film Festival in Canada, U People is an accidental documentary that brings you behind the scenes of an atypical music video shoot. Featuring an entire cast and crew of 30 gay and straight women, and transsexual people of color, the images the camera caught introduce a hilarious, candid and very human voice into the discussion of gender, race and sexuality within the black community.
“Hanifah Walidah speaks about black people and the gay community with a passion we associate with Zora Neale Hurston and Amira Baraka.” —Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Isn’t Enough
Post-film discussion moderated by Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor, Department of Communications at UW. Dr. Joseph is broadly interested in contemporary representations of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States. She recently completed her book manuscript, Transcending Blackness: Reading Mixed-Race African American Representations in the New Millennium. Transcending Blacknesscritiques anti-black racism in 1998-2008 era pop culture representations of multiracial African Americans in television, film, the internet, and a memoir. This year, with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, she is working on her second book project, Speaking Back: How Women of Color Resist Post-Identity Culture, an examination of iconic and “everyday” women of color’s resistance to “post-identity,” the ostensibly “after” moment of race and gender.
