The University of Chicago’s film society Doc Films, which has been remarkably in continuous existence for 75 years, screening films every day of the school year, from late September to June, has begun a ten week film series, called Sisters in Cinema:
African-American Women Writers-Directors,
which will continue until the end of the winter quarter.
The series, which
started yesterday, with Gina Prince-Bythewood’s
Love and Basketball, will screen films every Thursday until March 13th
starting at 7PM, at the Max Palevsky Cinema located at 1212 E. 59th St. on the U of Chicago
campus.
The screenings,
which are open (as are all Doc Films screenings) to everybody, and which was programmed by fourth-year student Brittany Williams, is intended to
highlight “two huge blights on the face of mainstream cinema: the extreme gender
disparity at the top of the film industry, and the misguided notion that black
cinema is a monolith presided over by Tyler Perry and Spike Lee.”
However Ms. Williams is sure to state that she has nothing “against these two film giants, but insists that the goal of her series was truly to show the “black experience in
a new light.” The masses of movie-going Americans have probably not yet seen
moviegoing in this light.“
Among the
other films that will be shown along with Love and Basketball are A Different Image and Your Children Come Back To You (Alile Sharon
Larkin), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash), The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl
Dunye), Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons), Drylongso (Cauleen Smith), Something New
(Sanaa Hamri), Pariah (Dee Rees) and
Middle of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay).
And on Feb 6th will be a rare screening of the late Kathleen
Collins’ pioneering 1982 film Losing
Ground.
For more info on the series, visit its web page on Doc Films’ website (HERE)
