Four Portraits: Films by African American Women Directors
Feb 9 - Feb 24, 2022
4 Films
About
** Co-presented with Sankofa Film Society. **
This February, we present four cinematic portraits, written and directed by African American women directors. The stories told in the series – of a college professor, a queer filmmaker and historian, an aspiring pro basketball player, and a teenage girl coming of age in a Louisiana family thick with secrets and history – shout out the broadly different experiences of Black women living in the United States.
This palette of historically and artistically significant films – all but Love & Basketball were recently selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress – are a salute to the past, present, and future of Black women in cinema.
“Four Portraits” is the first full film series programmed by Hana Peoples, our new Cinema Programmer.
Feb. 9 | Losing Ground (1982), the first dramatic feature directed by an African American woman since the 1920s. (NFR selection: 2020)
Feb. 10 | The Watermelon Woman (1996) (NFR selection: 2021)
Feb. 23 | Love & Basketball (2000), just added to the Criterion Collection in 2021.
Feb. 24 | Eve’s Bayou (1997) (NFR selection: 2018)
About Sankofa Film Society
Founded by Karen Toering and Jackie Moscou, former Artistic Director of Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, Sankofa Film Society continues Moscou and Toering’s advocacy of independent films by people of color and women filmmakers. Sankofa Film Society believes that those most impacted are the best caretakers of their own stories.
Sankofa Film Society is also the Seattle home for films from ARRAY, the independent distribution company founded by Ava DuVernay.
Look here first for provocative indie film and discussion, opportunities for membership, travel and a wide variety of ways to connect in community with melanin-rich films.