Black on Screen: Movement Leaders and Everyday People

Join us for program 3, Movement Leaders and Everyday People, as part of our October and November Black on Screen series, guest-curated by writer and film programmer, Yasmina Price. The screening includes Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète and Safi Faye's 1982 Selbé et tant d’autres (Selbè: One Among Many). The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with Price and Maliyamungu Muhande is a Congolese artist and filmmaker.

Movement Leaders and Everyday People is a record of freedom movements and daily life, carried on the shoulders of everyday people as much as singular leaders.

6:30 PM | Selbé et tant d’autres (Selbè: One Among Many) 1982, Safi Faye

Across her cinema, Safi Faye nurtured an observational ethics to chronicle the mundane tempos of agricultural communities in Senegal, negotiating and adapting cinematic form and ethnological training to her own cultural roots. Faye’s Selbé et tant d'autres exemplifies the way she not only exposed the damages of colonization but honored the central role of women’s labor in continual social and economic renewal, transmitted through the cyclical movement of song.

Running Time: 30 minutes

Language: French, English

7:10 PM | Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète 1991, Raoul Peck

Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: La Mort du Prophète is a historical retelling of the extraordinary Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist leader and first Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, combining documentary investigation with personal childhood recollections. Surveying the Cold War political landscape surrounding Lumumba’s assassination, the Haitian director offers an elegiac meditation on power and remembrance.

Running Time: 69 minutes

Language: French, 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.

Maliyamungu Gift Muhande is a Congolese artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her work moves between film, performance and site-specific installation, beginning from the body as a site of mark-making and memory. Her films have screened at Sundance and DOC NYC and her recent work has been presented in In Between at LOT-EK, Places & Spaces at Friedrichs Pontone, and You Are Shooting (Watching) What You Care at the Liu Shiming Art Gallery. She appeared as the lead in When Rain Clouds Gather, directed by Christian Nyampeta for Fondazione In Between Art Film’s 2024 Venice exhibition Nebula. Her recent outcry “Soundtrack to a Complicit Silence” in The Nation reflects on silence, spectatorship and the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her practice considers how images can hold what history tries to forget; serving as acts of witness, remembrance and reimagination within and beyond the African diaspora.

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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