About this Event
The Free Black Women's Library is a grassroots funded literary hub, social site, Black Feminist archive, and community care space that features over five thousand books by Black women and Black non-binary folks, as well as a wide range of free public programs, special events, and creative workshops, as well as a free store, period pantry, backyard garden, virtual reading club, and weekly book swap.
We center Community, Creativity & Care.
Support the growth and sustainability of this project by making a donation at Join the Creator/Director on Patreon for library updates, book recommendations and monthly study sessions
The Free Black Women's Library
presents
African Women Filmmakers with Afi Venessa
All are welcome to join us for this 3 part film lecture series that explores the work of African women filmmakers, led by our favorite in house film scholar Afi Venessa.
Friday, April 24
7PM - 9.30PM
(Space is limited, please do not register if you know you are not coming and block someone else's blessing ☺️)
Session I - Archive, Memory & Erasure: Who is Visible in African Cinema’s History?
Our first session questions the construction of Black African cinema’s history by centering pioneering women whose contributions have been persistently fragmented or completely omitted. We engage with the lives, work, and legacies of Thérèse Sita-Bella(Cameroon), Safi Faye (Sénégal), Sarah Maldoror (Guadeloupe/Angola/Algeria), Lola Fani-Kayode (Nigeria), and Efua Sutherland (Ghana).
Moving beyond dominant historical narratives that simply would position them as “firsts”, we situate these filmmakers within broader networks of intellectual, artistic, and political labor. We aim to uncover how the normalized absence of women in cultural histories is produced, and how it might be challenged.
How do we write histories when the visual record is incomplete or absent? What forms of knowledge emerge through visual fragments and dispersed traces? And how might Afrofeminist and decolonial approaches to historiography allow us to reframe visibility not as a given, but as something actively contested and reclaimed? What does it mean to remember when you can’t always see?
The lecture will be infused with screened fragments and excerpts from key works, including: Battle of Algiers (1966), Araba, the Village Girl (1967), Monangambée (1968), Sambizanga (1972), Kaddu Beykat (1975), Mirror in the Sun (1976–78), Fad’jal (1979), Dessert for Constance (1981), and Mossane (1996). With segments from the filmmakers themselves from Sisters of the Screen (Beti Ellerson, 2002)
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Free Black Women's Library Reading Room, 226 Marcus Garvey Blvd, Brooklyn, United States
USD 0.00
