Current Programs
Spring/Summer 2023
JuNE is BLACK MUSIC MONTH, JUNETEENTH,
+ PRIDE.
Join us for a special screenings and partnerships that recognize this month of creative culture and world building!
BLACK SONIC EVOLUTIONS 2023
Film screenings + reading list for Black Music Month
It's that time again for BCC's annual programming that recognizes Black Music Month and AfroDiasporic sonic contributions to the world.
As part of our annual Black Sonic Evolutions (BSE) program that recognizes Black Music Month in June, Black Cinema Collective will inaugurate a new series of music documentary screenings at Northwest Film Forum. Our film selections offer Black liberation histories and celebrate the artists who have given us enduring cultural soundtracks for powerful social and political change. This year we are screening FINDING FELA at Northwest Film Forum!
And, we are partnering with Loving Room: diaspora books + salon, whose founder Kristina Clark has created a powerful reading selection of books on BOOKSHOP.org as perfect companions for our program! This list includes music histories, critical cultural publications, and biographies of some of our iconic artists we celebrate during Black Music Month, including the father of AfroBeat, Fela Kuti.
ALL PROGRAM, TICKET, and BOOKSHOP list below!
LOVING ROOM: diaspora books + salon
for Black Music History Month 2023 | Black Sonic Evolutions
FRIDAY June 16th
⏰ 8.30pm PDT
SATURDAY June 17th
⏰ 5.30pm PDT, 8.30pm PDT
SUNDAY June 18th
⏰ 5.30pm PDT, 8.30pm PDT
💰
$14 General Admission
$10 Student/Child/Senior
$7 NWFF Member
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TRAILER
Finding Fela, 2014
US, 120min, English
Dir. Alex Gibney
Screening at Northwest Film Forum
June 16 - 18th, 2023
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Finding Fela tells the story of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s life, his music, his social and political importance. He created a new musical movement, Afrobeat, using that forum to express his revolutionary political opinions against the dictatorial Nigerian government of the 1970s and 1980s. His influence helped bring a change towards democracy in Nigeria and promoted Pan Africanist politics to the world.
The power and potency of Fela’s message is completely current today and is expressed in the political movements of oppressed people, embracing Fela’s music and message in their struggle for freedom. Directed by Academy Award winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side).
Synopsis and stills courtesy of Kino Lorber.
"Black musicians and singers throughout the African Diaspora have gifted us lyrical and sonic inspiration that have ignited independence movements, evolutionary civil and human rights, revolutionary protests and sit-ins, organizational + mutual aid, cultural belonging, ancestral memory, upliftment, and complex stories of love and sexuality.
Black Sonic Evolutions acts as celebratory learning, for us to broaden our knowledge of how African and Afrodiasporic cultures have influenced the world at large, through Reggae, Hip Hop, Country, Rhythm and Blues, Jazz, Afrobeats, the roots of Rock n’ Roll, Funk, Punk, Trip Hop, and more.
Thanks to NWFF Artistic Director Rana San + team, and Kristina Clark at LOVING ROOM for helping to organize this program."
Curated by Berette S Macaulay
Media Design by jas Moultrie
Additional Funding support by Seattle Office of Arts & Culture C.A.R.E. Grant
![OACSeattle_logo[gray]_edited.png](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a912f5_200839db4c3646edbc9219d0966b222a~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_119,h_108,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/OACSeattle_logo%5Bgray%5D_edited.png)
about
BLACK MUSIC MONTH
June is African American Music Appreciation Month! Created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, this month celebrates the African American musical influences that comprise an essential part of our nation’s treasured cultural heritage.
Formerly called National Black Music Month, this celebration of African American musical contributions is re-established annually by presidential proclamation. Though by no means exhaustive, we’ve prepared a primer that will guide you through some of the different genres that African Americans have created, inspired and fostered.
~ Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of African American History & Culture
DRYLONGSO
Dir. Cauleen Smith
screening in partnership with Black Cinema Collective, LANGSTON, and SIFF
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June 9 - *11th, 2023
@ SIFF Theater
511 Queen Anne Ave N, Seattle, WA 98101
SYNOPSIS:
A lost treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying—indeed, “becoming extinct,” as she sees it—brash Oakland art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett), experiencing love and loss, and being drawn into the search for a serial killer who is terrorizing the city. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.
SHOWTIMES:
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FRIDAY, JUNE 9, 2023
4:30 PM 7:30 PM
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SATURDAY, JUNE 10, 2023
1:30 PM. 4:30 PM. 7:30 PM
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* SUNDAY, JUNE 11, 2023
1:30 PM 4:30 PM 7:30 PM
25% of tix sales for Sunday screening will go, each,
to BCC and LANGSTON
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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2023
4:30PM
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THURSDAY, JUNE 15, 2023
4:30PM
DRYLONGSO TRAILER:
USA | 1998 | 86 mins | Director. Cauleen Smith
Opens June 9, 2023
Drylongso follows a woman in a photography class who begins taking pictures of Black men out of fear they will
soon be extinct. New 4k restoration.
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Principal Cast: Toby Smith, April Barnett, Will Power
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Producer: Salim Akil
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·Screenplay: Salim Akil, Cauleen Smith
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Cinematographers: Andrew Black
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Editors: Cauleen Smith
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Music: Curt Harpel, Pat Thomi
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Language: English
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Distribution by Janus Films.
*SUPPORT BLACK LED ORGS:
Co-sponsors Black Cinema Collective and LANGSTON will each receive 25% of the proceeds from all Sunday, June 11 screenings.
Feeling MAY!! The sun is out
and so are the award news!!!
Introducing the 2023 Black Cinema Collective Filmmaker Microgrant Awardees!
Check out the Award Page for more info on these new filmmakers to watch!
The tea for MARCH + APRIL!!!
BCC is excited to co-present and sponsor events in Seattle
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Screening at NW Film Forum
In-person only
March 29th – April 2nd
Dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman
Co-presented with Black Cinema Collective,
Meany Center for the Performing Arts
& UW Simpson Center for the Humanities
France, Rwanda, USA
105 min · Kino Lober | Dedza Films
Languages:
Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French,
and English with English subtitles
Amidst the hilltops of Burundi, a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community, a result of the romance between a miner and an intersex runaway. Set between states of being—past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience—Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.
This program pairs with the West Coast premiere of Saul Williams's The Motherboard Suite which brings to life a suite of his music and poetry, directed and produced by Bill T. Jones in partnership with New York Live Arts.
The Motherboard Suite
The Motherboard Suite
at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts
April 1st, 2023, 8:00 pm
Performed by Saul Williams
and collaborators
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The West Coast premiere of this non-linear work is performed by Saul and his musical collaborators, and features seven choreographers — Maria Bauman, Kayla Farrish, Marjani Forté-Saunders, d. Sabela grimes, Jasmine Hearn, Shamel Pitts|TRIBE and Seattle choreographer Jade Solomon Curtis. Each choreographer is invited into the world of Williams’ exploration at the intersection of technology and race, exploitation and mystical anarchy, where hackers are artists and activists.
Directed & Produced
by Bill T. Jones
and New York Live Arts
Post show discussion moderated by BCC's Berette S Macaulay
OFF THE PAGE
Thurs, March 09, 2023
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM PST
at Northwest Film Forum
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NW Film Forum and *Kamari Bright present an offsite event of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference
Off the Page will be an introductory, hands-on workshop highlighting non-traditional expressions of poetry. Participants will have a chance to experience animation poetry, embodied movement poetry, and video poetry in a lively, drop-in setting. Drink special: a poem-inspired specialty drink!
This program is sponsored by Black Cinema Collective and co-presented with Cadence Video Poetry Festival.
*Kamari Bright is an award winning poet, videopoet, and creative whose poetry and films have been published and screened widely from the United States to Germany.
Winter 2023
FEBRUARY SCREENING SURPRISE!!
Did you know the incisive and instructively brilliant Audre Lorde spent her last years in Germany?
Come celebrate her birthday weekend* with a screening of this very special documentary, which explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life.
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Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984-1992
Dir. Dagmar Schultz (2012)
Germany, 79min
In English and German
(with English subtitles)
Grand Illusion Cinema
Sunday, Feb 19th
2:00 pm matinee
7:30 pm evening
*Audre Lorde was born on Feb 18, 1934, and died Nov 17, 1992
TRAILER
Film selection by Black Cinema Collective for screening at Grand Illusion Cinema - two orgs holding it down with labors of film love.
