News

In May, the British Film Institute will hand long-overdue UK premieres to two landmark features of American cinema, Jessie Maple’s Will, the first feature-length independent film produced by a Black American woman, and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, a time-hopping fable often described by critics as among the greatest independent films in U.S. history.

Both titles will arrive in London in newly minted 4K form. They will screen as part of an intriguing repertory season at the BFI titled Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors, curated by independent writer, critic, and programmer Rógan Graham.

The season will also include rare UK screenings of titles like Cauleen Smith’s seminal, indie favorite Drylongso (1998), Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982), and Naked Acts by Bridgett M. Davis (1996).

In her curatorial notes, Graham cites a broad frustration with the absence of Black women directors with filmographies robust...

Looking for a way to stay dry during the rainy month of April? What better place to cozy up than your local repertory cinema. For those based in New York and Los Angeles, the offerings over the next few weeks are some of the best of the year thus far, with multiple series being held on both coasts that put a light on some of cinema’s unsung heroes. Starting in the east, Film at Lincoln Center will be paying homage to UCLA’s L.A. Rebellion movement of the 1970s and ’80s. Revitalizing Black cinema after the market for Blaxploitation began to dwindle, this collective included filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Larry Clark, Zeinabu irene Davis, and many more.

On the west coast, not only will the Eagle at Vidiots be celebrating the late Gene Hackman with showings of two of his films, but American Cinematheque will...

Because I had loved so deeply, Because I had loved so long, God in His great compassion Gave me the gift of song. Because I have loved so vainly, And sung with such faltering breath, The Master in infinite mercy Offers the boon of Death. — “Compensation” (1906) by Paul Laurence Dunbar Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) tells dual stories of pairs of lovers (both played by Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks) at the beginning and end of the 20th century. The film is uniquely attuned to deaf culture, American prejudice and two distinct pandemics. Creative in her […]

The post “It Took 31 Years”: Zeinabu irene Davis on Compensation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Because I had loved so deeply, Because I had loved so long, God in His great compassion Gave me the gift of song. Because I have loved so vainly, And sung with such faltering breath, The Master in infinite mercy Offers the boon of Death. — “Compensation” (1906) by Paul Laurence Dunbar Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) tells dual stories of pairs of lovers (both played by Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks) at the beginning and end of the 20th century. The film is uniquely attuned to deaf culture, American prejudice and two distinct pandemics. Creative in her […]

The post “It Took 31 Years”: Zeinabu irene Davis on Compensation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Compensation” was well-received when it premiered at the 1999 Toronto and 2000 Sundance Film Festivals. But the black-and-white film about two Black couples, played by the same actors, living in Chicago during two different time periods, didn’t entice distributors. With a film half-set at the beginning of the 20th century while capturing the everyday life, love, and struggles of deaf characters, director Zeinabu irene Davis adopted the cinematic language of silent films of the era — which was apparently was a non-starter for potential buyers.

“In the film’s first 15 minutes, distributors were running out of the room because I didn’t have any dialogue,” said Davis on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ but they had no interest in it at that particular time.”

By all accounts, the film was warmly embraced by its first audiences, receiving positive reviews, including from hometown critic Roger Ebert. But without a distributor,...

Zeinabu irene Davis’s 1999 film Compensation transcends its modest methods, leaping between genres and time periods with the aid of little more than some costume changes, a bevy of archival photographs, and techniques informed as much by silent film as by the informal, relaxed indies of its time. Following and spiritually linking the fates of two separate couples (both played by John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks) in 1910 and 1990 Chicago, Compensation, written by David and her husband Marc Arthur Chéry, sketches an image of Black history at once ever-shifting and frustratingly locked into cycles of pain and perseverance.

At first, panning shots over still photographs of 1900s life in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and figures like poet Charles Laurence Dunbar (whose 1905 poem lends the film its title) make Compensation seem like the kind of PBS documentaries that proliferated in the wake of Ken Burns’s The Civil War. The...

Recently set to be preserved at the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as a film that represents important cultural, artistic and historic achievements in filmmaking, Zeinabu irene Davis’ Compensation premiered back at 1999 at the Atantla Film Festival and would go on to screen at Sundance, TIFF, and more, culminating in a new restoration at New York Film Festival last fall. Following the life of a deaf African American woman in the early 1900s that parallels with another living in the 1990s, Janus Films will now give the landmark film a theatrical release beginning February 21 at Film at Lincoln Center. Ahead of the release, the new trailer has arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “A landmark of independent cinema, Compensation is Zeinabu irene Davis’s moving, ambitious portrait of the struggles of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of loving relationships at the bookends of the twentieth century. In extraordinary dual performances,...

Following their intial announcements, the 62nd New York Film Festival has now unveiled its final film section: Revivals, featuring significant works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners. Highlights include World premieres of restorations of Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar, Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, Raymond Depardon’s Reporters, John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Northern Lights, and Robina Rose’s Nightshift as well as works by Chantal Akerman, Clive Barker, Robert Bresson, Lino Brocka, Marguerite Duras and Paul Seban, Marva Nabili, Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, and Frederick Wiseman.

Check out the the lineup below.

Bona

Lino Brocka, 1980, Philippines, 85m

Filipino and Tagalog with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere of 4K Restoration

A fierce work of quasi-neorealist melodrama that melds pop cinema instincts and political indignation, Lino Brocka’s 1980 feature endures as a lively, searing parable...

One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. The mirror reflects a curious and alarming scene: in the foreground, Mozelle, a young woman, and Eve, a little girl, gaze wide-eyed at the men standing behind them. One of the men holds a gun to the chest of the other. The shot embodies the seamless ambition of Kasi Lemmons’s directorial debut Eve’s Bayou (1997), the tale of the Batistes, a haunted Creole family plagued by the careless philandering of their patriarch. Eve (Jurnee Smollett) has already caught her father making love to his mistress—a poorly kept secret in any case—but by now rage has eclipsed heartbreak as she helplessly watches her family unravel. Her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) seeks to impart upon the child an unconventional lesson in grace by revealing her own past infidelity: she had planned,...

One of the great restorations of recent years, premiering in the 59th New York Film Festival’s Revivals section, is Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Chameleon Street. Originally debuting at the 1990 edition of the Park City festival, the film is both an enormously entertaining con man film and illuminating study of race. Following a con man from Detroit as he alters identities in an attempt to penetrate different pockets of American life that can be out of reach in a classist system.

Largely unavailable aside from an out-of-print VHS edition and a DVD released in 2007 (now also out-of-print), it has now been newly restored in 4K from the original camera negative under the supervision of the director. Following its NYFF screenings, the film will now roll out in theaters––specifically beginning at Bam Cinemas beginning on October 22––and we’re pleased to debut the first trailer.

The Haile Gerima story is one of personal and professional resistance. A warrior whose chosen weapon is cinema, Gerima has been at the forefront of the Black independent film movement for almost 50 years, leading a charge to counter the West’s history of gross misrepresentations of the Black experience with complete and complex stories about what it means to be Black, viewed through a global lens.

Most exemplary of this ethos is his epic 1993 slavery-era revolt drama, “Sankofa,” which has now been given new life in a partnership between Gerima’s Mypheduh Films and Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing. A brand-new 4K restoration of the film is available today on Netflix in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Gerima will also be honored by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures with its inaugural Vantage Award as part of its opening gala on September 25.

For Gerima, the chance...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Above: Hour Glass (1971)Film scholar Clyde Taylor coined the name "L.A. Rebellion” for a retrospective of the Black cinema made at UCLA between the 1960s and 80s that was held at the Whitney Museum in 1986. The name conflates the filmmakers’ radical aesthetics with the Watts Rebellion and Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. It does not account for the Asian, Latinx, Native American and white film students who also sought styles outside the Hollywood formula, and remains a point of contention for some of those Black filmmakers it gathers under one denomination. “Rebellion” suggests a collective response to the status quo, rather than a series of independent expressions with diverse influences and motivations. But the slogan stuck, and, for better or worse, remains the most common calling card for a...

Editor's note: It made its TV broadcast premiere on Bet last night, and my Twitter feed was all abuzz about it, by those who apparently hadn't already seen it. Thus, I thought it would be a good idea to repost this comprehensive interview we did with the director of the film, Shola Lynch, handled by Zeinabu irene Davis, which is an absolute must read, if you missed it when it was originally published last April. Like I said it's quite thorough, so set aside time to read it, because it's a long, informative and entertaining read. On March 27th, I had the great opportunity to interview Shola Lynch about the groundbreaking premiere of her documentary feature, Free Angela and All...

I posted this back in June; and if you missed it before, here’s your chance to see it. And if you’ve seen it before, it’s definitely worth another look. And when you think about it, long extensive interviews with filmmakers on TV are a rare thing indeed.Back in May Free Angela and Free All Political Prisoners filmmaker Shola Lynch, who also directed the terrific 2004 Shirley Chisholm documentary, Chisholm '72 Unbought & Unbossed, did an hour-long interview on the C-span interview program, Q & A, hosted by C-span’s founder and former CEO Brian Lamb, about her films, her career and her life in general.Though filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis did a fantastic interview with...

Though I’m just finding out about it now, the C-span interview program, Q & A, hosted by C-span’s founder and former CEO Brian Lamb, featured an interview with filmmaker Shola Lynch, in early May, about her films, her career and her life in general.Though we already have a really excellent interview with Ms. Lynch that filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis did exclusively for us (Here) with Ms. Lynch (director of Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed and Free Angela and All Political Prisoners), this C-span interview is just as good.In the hour long interview, you’ll get a real sense of Ms. Lynch’s charisma (having met her before, a couple of years ago, I can...

As I said, when I hosted one of screening before of the L.A. Rebellion black film series a few weeks ago, when it came to black filmmakers, these were the black filmmakers I knew and who inspired me before other more famous black filmmakers attracted the public’s attention. Long before Spike lee, Reginald Hudlin John Singleton, Antoine Fuqua, just to name a few, black cinema was defined by the works of Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Zeinabu irene Davis Charles Burnett , Ben Caldwell, Barbara McCullough (pictured above) Billy Woodberry and Larry Clark just to name a few as well. They were all, at one time during the early 70’s to the mid-1980’s, film students at UCLA...

The 8th in the ongoing series of the Chicago screenings of the L.A. Rebellion touring film series, will continue on Thursday May 23 with a screening of filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis’ touching and powerful 1999 feature film, Compensation. Ms. Davis, who is also a professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego, was inspired by a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and tells the stories of two relationships during two different periods of time between one couple at the turn of the 20th Century and another contemporary couple in Chicago, who are deaf. Zeinabu’s use of silence in her film is strikingly original, and can be seen as a metaphor...

News on the march…! Held over the weekend, in Yenegoa, Bayelsa State (Nigeria) on Saturday, March 26, 2011, the celebration announcing the winners of the 2011 African Movie Academy Awards (Amaa) – in just its 7th year.

This year’s nominations list boasted an even longer list of awards, compared to previous years, as the award ceremony continues to grow.

Viva Riva, a film I’ve touted on this website in recent days, after seeing it for the first time last week, rightfully dominated, winning 6 trophies, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design.

The rest of the story follows in the table below, lifted from the Amaa’s website Here:

Category

Nominated Films

Winners

Best Short Film Bougfen – Petra Baninla Sunjo (Cameroun)

Weakness – Wanjiru Kairu (Kenya)

No Jersey No Match – Daniel Ademinokan (Nigeria)

Duty – Mak Kusare (Nigeria)

Bomlambo – Zwelesizwe Ntuli (South Africa)

Zebu And...

Over the weekend, as most of us were reveling in Academy Awards thrills and chills, the nominations for another major movie award ceremony were announced, many miles, across the Atlantic Ocean; I’m referring to the 7-year old (this year) Africa Movie Academy Awards (Amaa), which will be held in Yenegoa, Bayelsa State (Nigeria) on Saturday, March 26, 2011.

This year’s nominations list boasts an even longer list of awards, compared to previous years, as the award ceremony continues to grow.

I’ll have to thoroughly scrub this list to highlight as many titles as I can – especially in the feature film categories, and I’ll do that with individual posts over the next week, or so. In the meantime, however, I’ll quickly point out those few titles that we’ve previously given ink to on this website, that are nominated for Amaa awards, including the following: in the Best Diaspora Feature,...