Dee Rees’s Eventual Salvation
On Friday, November 10, the Black Film Center/Archive and the IU Libraries’ Liberian Collections present a rare screening of Dee Rees’s first documentary feature, Eventual Salvation (2008). This free screening will take place at 3pm in The Media School’s Franklin Hall Screening Room (304C).
Founded in 1847 as a home for former African-American slaves, the West African nation of Liberia has welcomed generations of expatriate Americans fleeing racism. One such immigrant was Earnestine “Amma” Smith, who settled in the capital, Monrovia, in 1958. An educator and landowner, Amma fled her new home during the recent deadly civil wars. Smith’s granddaughter, filmmaker Dee Rees, accompanies Amma on her return to a new Liberia governed by Africa’s first woman president, as she attempts to rebuild her life. Featuring cinematography by Bradford Young, who also collaborated with Dee Rees on her 2011 feature, Pariah.
IU Libraries African Studies Librarian Mireille Djenno will be present to introduce the screening. Special thanks to Mireille Djenno, Garrett Bird, Craig Kestel, and Dee Rees for making this event possible.
Dee Rees series at IU Cinema: Choosing the Hard Things
Next week, IU Cinema will be among a select few theatrical venues given the opportunity to screen Dee Rees’s Mudbound on the big screen before its Netflix premiere on November 17. Regretting her absence, Dee Rees will provide a special video introduction to the film. Also showing will be Rees’s 2011 feature, Pariah, and her 2015 Bessie Smith biopic.
For more information, see Dee Rees: Choosing the Hard Things at IU Cinema’s website.
New: A Virtual Film Quarterly Reader
This week, the journal Film Quarterly published a selection of its recent articles online to introduce members of the American Studies Association to its work. Among the articles selected was BFC/A director Terri Francis’s “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afrosurrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris,” Other selected articles include Racquel Gates on Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man, and Joseph Livesy on Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves.
IU Libraries presents Get Out
Thursday, November 9, at 6:00pm, BFC/A director Terri Francis will introduce the IU Libraries screening of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and conduct a post-screening discussion. This free event takes place in the IU Libraries Screening Room, Wells Library 048. Refreshments will be provided.
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