Film Screenings / Programs / Series
BLACK TIME, QUEER TIME: PART 1
January 9 – January 21
January 9-21, 2026
Black and queer time contradicts the conventional time of calculation and chronology. Never monolithic and always multiple, it repeats, returns, and escapes the constraints of linear progression and binary division. As a medium distinguished by its capacity to create and manipulate time, cinema is an ideal form for remaking, reimagining, and reordering black and queer ways of being in time – channeling temporalities that are kaleidoscopic, dissident, cyclical, fragmented, and fluid. Time is stretched, socialized, and stolen (back).
“Black Time, Queer Time” presents a rebellion against the domineering standardized time of antiblackness and heterosexism on film, taking shape as narrative feature, documentary study, video-essay, archival experiment, avant-garde vision, and hybrid non-fiction. The series invites a global black cinema that cannot be captured or controlled or closed off, and confronts historical, contemporary, material, and psychic violence as a problem of time. As they defy both the clock and the camera, these audiovisual works remain suspicious of coloniality, visibility, and respectability. Moving through political spaces, intimate refuges, and relational histories, they operate through the time of the earth and the cosmos, the everyday and the nation, the dead and the living, order and improvisation, grief and pleasure. “Black Time, Queer Time” refuses regulation and desires another way.
Guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who wrote the introduction above. Part 2 of “Black Time, Queer Time” will take place this spring.
Special thanks to all the artists, and to Amy Aquilino (Women Make Movies); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Hanan Coumal (LUX); Marcus Hu & William Gruenberg (Strand); Susan Lord (Vulnerable Media Lab); Emily Martin & Kristin MacDonough (Video Data Bank); Liza Mackeen-Shapiro (Joy Harris Literary Agency); Karl McCool & Jooyoung Park (Electronic Arts Intermix); Madeleine Molyneaux (Picture Palace Pictures); Jake Perlin & Andrew Adair (Cinema Conservancy); Julia Petrocelli (Film-Makers’ Coop); JT Takagi, Roselly Torres, and Shu Wang (Third World Newsreel); Matthew Wong (Frameline), and The Zora Neale Hurston Trust.
The series will feature several Q&As and introductions, as follows:
“Queer Time” on Fri, Jan 9 at 7:00pm will be followed by a Q&A with Yasmina Price and artist, writer and curator Daniella Brito.
“Earth Time” on Sat, Jan 10 at 4:45pm will be introduced by artist and filmmaker Miatta Kawinzi.
“Haunted Time” on Sat, Jan 10 at 7:30pm will be followed by a Q&A with Yasmina Price and artist and archivist Shan Wallace.
“Black Time” on Jan 16 at 7:00pm will be followed by a Q&A with Yasmina Price, artist and filmmaker Miatta Kawinzi, and scholar Erich Kessel, Jr.
QUEER TIME
Marlon Riggs
TONGUES UNTIED
1989, 55 min, video
“TONGUES UNTIED was a life-changing event for me. It was the first time I had seen such an honest, raw and powerful film that uncompromisingly tackled the interplay of desire, race and racism, homophobia, sexuality, gender, HIV and class – from a Black Queer perspective. Formally, the film was groundbreaking. It gripped me in its surreal mix of first-person testimonial, poetry, staged performances, dance and activism. The blend was made more exhilarating by Riggs’ interweaving of vignettes with his on-camera declarations, dynamic composition and riveting editing style. In some ways the film is an ethnography of the Black Queer literary and arts movement that was flourishing in the 1980s and early ’90s and affecting the culture through language, fashion, dance, music, scholarship, cinema and politics, just as the specter of HIV and AIDS was rapidly decimating its members.” –Thomas Allen Harris, DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE
Preceded by:
Sedat Pakay JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE 1973, 12 min, 35mm-to-DCP
Sedat Pakay OUTTAKES FROM SEDAT PAKAY’S “JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE” 1973/2022, 10 min, 35mm-to-DCP
“Turkish artist Sedat Pakay designs an intimate, luminous sketch of James Baldwin during a stay in Istanbul. From leisurely moving about his room to the activity of the city and its curious denizens, the author/activist comfortably expounds on his sense of privacy, sexuality and expat tendencies. New facets of this encounter are revealed in the recently compiled and restored OUTTAKES FROM SEDAT PAKAY’S ‘JAMES BALDWIN: FROM ANOTHER PLACE’.” –Brittany Gravely, HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
Tourmaline & Sasha Wortzel HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARSHA! 2017, 14 min, digital
A film about iconic transgender artist and activist, Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson, and her life in the hours before she ignited the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Fri, Jan 9 at 7:00 and Thurs, Jan 15 at 6:30. The screening on Fri, Jan 9 will be followed by a Q&A with Yasmina Price and artist, writer, and curator Daniella Brito.
EARTH TIME
Cauleen Smith
THE VOLCANO MANIFESTO
2025, 50 min, digital
“Cauleen Smith’s THE VOLCANO MANIFESTO brings together three recent films – MY CALDERA (2022), MINES TO CAVES (2023), and THE DEEP WEST ASSEMBLY (2024) – in an astonishingly ambitious, densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic time, on the wild abyss of volcanoes and the womb of mines and caves (pregnant with meaning!), and on the prelapsarian and the postdiluvian (Deluzian?).” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
The Otolith Group
MEDIUM EARTH
2013, 41 min, digital
The accumulation of moving images and sounds that make up MEDIUM EARTH comprise an audiovisual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, MEDIUM EARTH participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval. The desire to evoke the hidden substrata of the planet gives way to a morphological interpretation of the face of the earth. As an experiment in channeling the system of fault lines buried below California, MEDIUM EARTH animates the stresses and strains of physical geographies undergoing continental pressures.
Miatta Kawinzi
TO TRUST THE GROUND MIGHT FREE US (BEGIN AGAIN)
2024, 13 min, digital
This experimental film meditates on the reach towards liberation as an ongoing process through the language of landscape and the body, engaging the intersecting historical and contemporary threads linking the West African nation of Liberia and the United States through a visual and textual poetics. Inter-woven imagery of New England forests, Liberian cotton trees and historic sites such as Dozoa (Providence Island), the Atlantic Ocean, gesture, sun beams, color fields, Vai language logograms, and archival findings invite viewers to consider the multiple resonances of landscapes as sites of refuge, sites of violence, sites of reparation, and sites of healing.
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Sat, Jan 10 at 4:45 and Wed, Jan 14 at 8:45. The screening on Sat, Jan 10 will be introduced by artist and filmmaker Miatta Kawinzi.
HAUNTED TIME
Keisha Rae Witherspoon T 2019, 14 min, digital
A film crew follows three grieving participants of Miami’s annual T Ball, where folks assemble to model R.I.P. T-shirts and innovative costumes designed in honor of their dead.
Crystal Z Campbell GO-RILLA MEANS WAR 2017, 19 min, digital
GO-RILLA MEANS WAR is a filmic relic of gentrification featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After finding the film unfinished and un-canned on the floor of The Slave Theater, Campbell collaborated with the unknown director (presumably amateur filmmaker Judge John Phillips who owned the Slave Theater) to finish the film. A secret Black fraternal organization dominates the visual narrative, accompanied by a parable that binds intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure.
Edward Owens REMEMBRANCE: A PORTRAIT STUDY 1967, 6 min, 16mm
“A filmic portrait of the artist’s mother, Mildered Owens, and her friends Irene Collins and Nettie Thomas, set to a score of 50s and 60s hit songs. Using Baroque lighting techniques, Owens captures the three women drinking and lounging one evening.” –TATE MODERN
Edward Owens PRIVATE IMAGININGS AND NARRATIVE FACTS 1968-70, 9 min, 16mm
“A montage of still and moving images, mixing and alternating black people and white people, fantasy and reality, a presidential suite and a mother’s kitchen: a sensitive, poetic evocation in the manner of the film-maker’s REMEMBRANCE. Brilliantly colored and nostalgic, it comprises a magical transformation of painterly collage and still photographic sensibility into filmic time and space.” –Charles Boultenhouse
Isaac Julien
LOOKING FOR LANGSTON
1989, 45 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“LOOKING FOR LANGSTON, shot in sumptuous black and white, is a lyrical exploration – and recreation – of the private world of the poet, novelist, playwright, columnist, and social activist Langston Hughes (1902-67) and his fellow Black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. At the time of its making, Julien was part of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective which was set up to promote the development of independent Black filmmaking. He was supported by the film critic and curator Mark Nash, who worked on the original archival and film research. The result is a landmark film in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire and the reciprocity of the gaze which became a key work in what B. Ruby Rich named ‘New Queer Cinema’.” –BERLINALE
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sat, Jan 10 at 7:30 and Thurs, Jan 15 at 8:45. The screening on Sat, Jan 10 will be followed by a Q&A with Yasmina Price and artist and archivist Shan Wallace.
COSMIC TIME
John Coney
SPACE IS THE PLACE
1974, 85 min, 35mm-to-DCP
“If Afrofuturism has a key player, it’s Sun Ra. Born Herman Poole Blount in segregated Alabama in 1914, Ra spent years developing a diverse portfolio as a musician with his legendary Arkestra (jazz, big band, blues, proto-electronica); and an opaque, mythical persona which blended cosmological ideas with ancient Egyptian mysticism. In 1971, Ra served as artist-in-residence at California’s UC Berkeley and offered a course entitled African-American Studies 198 (also known as Sun Ra 171, The Black Man in the Universe or The Black Man in the Cosmos). The teachings of his course inspired his one and only feature film – the cult classic SPACE IS THE PLACE. In it, Ra engages in a cosmic card game with a blindingly white-suited megapimp (the hilariously oleaginous Ray Johnson) to determine the fate of the black race. What follows is a brilliant and bizarre melange of comedy, musical performance and occasionally lurid blaxploitation aesthetics. It also, crucially, has a number of serious points to make about the plight of young urban blacks in a harsh, post-civil rights climate: ‘Space’ is unambiguously posited by Ra as a utopian refuge for African Americans.” –Ashley Clarke, THE GUARDIAN
Preceded by:
Ephraim Asili POINTS ON A SPACE AGE 2007, 33 min, digital
“Described as ‘A Video Film on Space and the Music of the Omniverse,’ POINTS ON A SPACE AGE is an appropriately free-form documentary about musician and poet Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Deriving its title (as well as the text for its intertitles and chapter headings) from Sun Ra’s poetry and writing collection ‘The Immeasurable Equation’, Asili’s film mingles video footage of the contemporary Arkestra (helmed by Marshall Allen since Sun Ra’s death in 1993) with video interviews about Sun Ra, the cosmic potential of jazz and music more generally, and archival sources, most prominently audio of John F. Kennedy detailing the US’s interstellar ambitions.” –Jesse Cumming, CINEMA SCOPE
Cauleen Smith THE CHANGING SAME 2001, 9 min, 35mm-to-DCP
“Interweaving science fiction, noir, and tragic romance with touches of documentary naturalism, Smith imagines a disorienting vision of Earth on which two extraterrestrials are stationed to assimilate with unseen ‘incubators.’ THE CHANGING SAME is a brief but intricately layered commentary on the boundaries impressed on race, and between the natural and the alien.” –FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER
Total running time: ca. 130 min.
Sun, Jan 11 at 5:00 and Sat, Jan 17 at 5:30.
NATION TIME
Ousmane Sembène
CEDDO
1977, 116 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Wolof with English subtitles.
In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe caught in the middle. Yet when the victor prevails, conflict still doesn’t end – and the return of the princess and her still-revered power may very well topple the new order. Banned in Sembène’s native Senegal upon its original release, CEDDO is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible interstices among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political opportunism, and individual freedom.
Sun, Jan 11 at 8:00 and Sat, Jan 17 at 8:30.
DOUBLE TIME
Zeinabu irene Davis
COMPENSATION
1999, 92 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Newly restored!
A landmark of independent cinema, COMPENSATION is a moving, ambitious portrait of the struggles of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of loving relationships at the bookends of the 20th century. In extraordinary dual performances, Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks play Malindy and Arthur, a couple in 1910 Chicago, as well as Malaika and Nico, a couple living in the same city almost eighty years later. Their stories are deftly interwoven through the creative use of archival photography, an original score featuring ragtime and African percussion, and an editing style both lyrical and tender. Malindy, an industrious, intelligent dressmaker, falls for Arthur, an illiterate migrant from Mississippi, along the shore of Lake Michigan. On the same beach in the present, Malaika, an inspired and resilient graphic artist, softens before a brash yet endearing children’s librarian, Nico. Each pair faces the obstacles of their time as Black Americans, including structural racism and emerging pandemics. COMPENSATION remains a groundbreaking story of inclusion and visibility that bears witness to the social forces and prejudices that stand in the way of love.
Preceded by:
Cauleen Smith CHRONICLES OF A LYING SPIRIT (BY KELLY GABRON) 1992, 2 min, 16mm
“[This film] is less a depiction of ‘reality’ than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male-dominated American history (and American film history). […] The film’s barrage of image, text and voice is repeated twice, and is followed by a coda. That most viewers see the second presentation of the imagery differently from the original presentation demonstrates one problem with trusting any media representation.” –Scott MacDonald
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Mon, Jan 12 at 6:30 and Sun, Jan 18 at 6:00.
DOWN TIME
Cheryl Dunye
THE WATERMELON WOMAN
1996, 84 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Cheryl Dunye made cinematic history with THE WATERMELON WOMAN, the first American feature to be directed by a Black lesbian as well as an incisive, humorous critique of classic Hollywood’s racist stereotypes. Dunye plays a video store employee and burgeoning filmmaker who sets out to make a documentary on the Watermelon Woman (Lisa Marie Bronson), an actress who specialized in “mammy” roles for Hollywood productions of the 1930s and 40s. As Cheryl uncovers the Watermelon Woman’s identity she not only learns about a secret behind-the-scenes interracial romance but also begins one of her own with Diana (Guinevere Turner), a white woman who arouses the ire of Cheryl’s best friend Tamara (Valerie Walker). A landmark of the New Queer Cinema, THE WATERMELON WOMAN testifies to the power of excavating legacies of oppression and in the process creates a progressive legacy of its own.
Preceded by:
Cheryl Dunye SHE DON’T FADE 1991, 24 min, video
SHE DON’T FADE chronicles the sexual pursuits of Shae Clarke, a single Black lesbian. Clarke, played by Dunye herself, defines and readily demonstrates her ‘new approach to women.’ Dunye cleverly combines humor and storytelling to relay a tale of adventure and conquest within the realm of sexuality.
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Mon, Jan 12 at 9:00 and Mon, Jan 19 at 7:00.
ASSEMBLY TIME
Shari Frilot
BLACK NATIONS/QUEER NATIONS?
1995, 52 min, video
“This experimental documentary chronicles the groundbreaking March 1995 conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora. The conference brought together an array of dynamic scholars, activists, and cultural workers including Essex Hemphill, Kobena Mercer, Barbara Smith, Urvashi Vaid, and Jacqui Alexander to interrogate the economic, political, and social situations of diasporic lesbians, gay men, bisexual, and transgender peoples. The video brings together the highlights of the conference and draws connections between popular culture and contemporary black gay media production. The participants discuss various topics: Black and queer identity, the shortcomings of Black nationalism, and homophobia in Black communities. Drawing upon works such as Isaac Julien's ‘The Attendant’ and Jocelyn Taylor's ‘Bodily Functions,’ this documentary illuminates the importance of this historic conference for Black lesbians and gays.” –THIRD WORLD NEWSREEL
Tues, Jan 13 at 6:45 and Tues, Jan 20 at 8:45.
BLACK QUEER TIME
Maureen Blackwood & Isaac Julien
THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE
1986, 80 min, 16mm-to-DCP. Newly remastered by the BFI National Film Archive!
“A landmark work in British avant-garde film and video, the Sankofa collective’s greatly influential first film, THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE, ambitiously explores themes of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generational tensions as embodied in the reality known by a Black British family over the years. Interweaving two narrative threads – one in which a man and a woman discourse on their own experiences living in the UK, another in which events from three decades in the lives of the Baptiste family are staged – Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien tease the accumulated fragments into a spellbinding, heterogeneous mosaic that powerfully evokes the multiplicity of Black experience and identity and critiques the British state’s treatment of its marginalized residents.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Tues, Jan 13 at 8:30 and Tues, Jan 20 at 6:30.
OVER TIME
Kevin Jerome Everson
QUALITY CONTROL
2011, 71 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“In Kevin Jerome Everson’s captivating and hypnotic feature, several issues are raised but never spoken: what is the role of the human body in contemporary mechanized labor? How can cinema represent the intricacies of daily work outside conventional narrative structures? How can documentary subvert the traditional objectifying gaze, whilst also drawing the spectator into a different sort of everyday intrigue? This is the kind of observational documentary that refuses to give away much of the filmmaker’s stance, allowing the repetitions and rhythms of human bodies to create meaning and stimulate reflection on worlds rarely represented on screen. In a radical act of de-dramatization, Everson’s films focus on the quotidian, the mundane, the unremarkable. Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, and making use of long, static takes, the filmmaker turns a large dry-cleaning site in Alabama into an audio-visual choreography of bodies and machines.” –VIENNALE
Preceded by:
Kevin Jerome Everson WORKERS LEAVING THE JOB SITE 2013, 7 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“The Lumière brothers’ now-iconic first film is reimagined at a job site in Columbus, Mississippi.” –CINÉMA DU RÉEL
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Wed, Jan 14 at 6:30 and Sun, Jan 18 at 8:30.
BLACK TIME
Zora Neale Hurston FIELDWORK FOOTAGE ca. 1928, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust.
“Under the tutelage of anthropologist Franz Boas (her former Columbia professor) and Harlem Renaissance arts patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, Zora Neale Hurston spent nearly two years, from 1927 to 1929, studying the folkloric customs, work songs, spirituals, and vernacular language of African American communities along the River Road and from New Orleans to Florida – observations that culminated in her 1935 collection ‘Mules and Men’.” –MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER
Miatta Kawinzi SWEAT/TEARS/SEA 2017, 6 min, digital
“[A] meditation on alternative temporalities of feeling, experience, and linguistic unfolding. Here movement (bodily, textual & spatial) becomes a way of thinking through questions of positionality regarding the self and environment.” –Miatta Kawinzi
Sara Gómez I’M GOING TO SANTIAGO / IRÉ A SANTIAGO 1964, 15 min, 35mm-to-digital
“Sara Gómez (1943-74) was Cuba’s first woman filmmaker, making 19 documentaries that offer uniquely intimate and inquisitive portraits of those whom history could forget: women, Afro-descendent people, the young and the very old. One of her first films, IRÉ A SANTIAGO portrays the city of Santiago de Cuba in a highly energetic and playful style of direct cinema, connecting the contemporary people, and spaces of this eastern city, to a past of slavery and resistance music, dance, and daily life.” –Susan Lord
Darol Olu Kae KEEPING TIME 2023, 32 min, digital
“KEEPING TIME is a meditation on what it means to maintain continuity with the past – told through the kaleidoscopic journey of a young drummer who must learn how to guide a multi-generational band into the future after being named their new bandleader. The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (The Ark) has been a legend in Los Angeles’s avant-garde jazz community for over 60 years. But since the death of its founder, pianist and composer Horace Tapscott, the band has spent the last three decades ebbing with the tide of history. KEEPING TIME follows Mekala Session as he struggles to honor his musical forebears while establishing a new path forward.” –Darol Olu Kae
John Akomfrah
LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY
1995, 45 min, video
“Crafted by the influential British outfit Black Audio Film Collective (now Smoking Dogs, and still making great films), The Last Angel of History is a tantalising blend of sci-fi parable and essay film which also happens to be a crucial primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism – it’s the first film to include the recently minted term. Compelling interviews with musicians, writers and cultural critics – plus archival video and photography – are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief”, who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future. It all adds up to a strange and moving invocation for the international black diaspora to discover its own histories, so long kept hidden from official records.” –Ashley Clarke, THE GUARDIAN
Total running time: ca. 115 min.
Fri, Jan 16 at 7:00 and Wed, Jan 21 at 7:15. The screening on Fri, Jan 16 will be followed by a Q&A with Yasmina Price, artist and filmmaker Miatta Kawinzi, and scholar Erich Kessel, Jr.
