Black on Screen: Debt, Dependency, and City Stories

Join us for program 4, Debt, Dependency, and City Stories, as part of our October and November Black on Screen series, guest-curated by writer and film programmer, Yasmina Price. The screening includes Le Franc (1994), directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty and Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera (One Way or Another) 1974/1977. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Price and Dr. Nzingha Kendall, Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University.

Enslavement and colonization established persisting structures of economic dispossession, instituting dependency and debt as both historical and contemporary obstacles to the autonomous flourishing of the African continent and diaspora.

5:30 PM | Le Franc 1994, dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty

Djibril Diop Mambéty unleashed his exuberant and poignant cinema against the craven conditions of neocolonialism and financial deprivation on the African continent. Le Franc (1994) is one part of an unfinished trilogy dedicated to the minoritized experiences he always championed as meaningful and revelatory. The protagonist is a penniless musician, Marigo—played with lanky, languid charm by Dieye Ma Dieye—whose anarchic trek through Dakar with a lottery ticket in hand unfolds as both a deeply moving journey and an indictment of the colonially imposed CFA franc monetary system.

Running Time: 69 minutes

Language: French, English

6:35 PM | De cierta manera (One Way or Another) 1974/1977, dir. Sara Gómez

Working in revolutionary Cuba, the fearless Sara Gómez upheld but also expanded the state’s vision of liberation to fully address ongoing issues of racialized economic disparity and marginalization in her hybrid documentary De cierta manera (1974/1977). Blending stark documentary footage and a knotted fictional love story, her monumental film is a lucid examination of education, labor, poverty, racism, sexism, and popular religion from the perspective of an Afro-Cubana.

Running Time: 74 minutes

Language: Spanish, English

This series, Black on Screen: A Century of Radical Visual Culture, captures 100 years of local and transnational Black movement work and artistic evolution on film. Sourced from The Schomburg’s collection and others, it takes a kaleidoscopic look at Black life and expression across diasporas, rendering a range of storytelling traditions that incite and inspire Black world-building. The Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division (MIRS, pronounced “meers”) at the Schomburg Center collects and preserves audio and moving image (AMI) materials related to the experiences of people of African descent. The division has amassed nearly 400 collections, approximately 5,000 square feet, in a variety of formats, which captures the gestures and sounds of major historical, artistic and cultural moments and influencers. While the strength is the Black American holdings there is considerable Caribbean and African representation in the collection.

Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].

Yasmina Price (Guest Curator) a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anti-colonial cinema and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, D.C. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, with essays in The Nation, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Criterion’s Current, Film Quarterly and World Records Journal.

Nzingha Kendall is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on black women filmmakers from across the diaspora. Her project, “Imperfect Independence: Black Women Filmmakers and Experimental Filmmaking” investigates the liberatory potential of black women’s experimental film practices. She has a PhD in American Studies from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she programmed films for the Black Film Center and Archive and the Indiana University Cinema. Nzingha was also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is currently an assistant professor of film and screen studies at Pace University in New York City.

This year, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding! Join us all year long for a wide array of special events, exhibitions, and more as we celebrate this milestone and continue the legacy of Arturo Schomburg.

Schomburg100 | Exhibition | Special-Edition Library Card | Become a Member

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FIRST COME, FIRST SEATED Events are free and open to all, but due to space constraints registration is requested. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. After the event starts all registered seats are released regardless of registration, so we recommend that you arrive early. We generally overbook to ensure a full house.

GUESTS Please note that holding seats in the Langston Hughes Auditorium is strictly prohibited and there is no food or drinks allowed anywhere in the Schomburg Center.

ACCESSIBLILITY Accessibility requests can be made by e-mail [email protected].

E-TRANSPORTATION NYPL policy prohibits electric transportation devices (e.g., motorbikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards) from being brought into or stored at library sites for any length of time, as this is the best way to keep our spaces & people safe.

AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING Programs are photographed and recorded by the Schomburg Center. Attending this event indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any all purposes of the New York Public Library.

PRESS Please send all press inquiries (photo, video, interviews, audio-recording, etc) at least 24-hours before the day of the program to Leah Drayton at [email protected].

Please note that personal and professional video recordings are prohibited without expressed consent.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, United States

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