Screenings and Visiting Artists Coming to the Walker Cinema this March
Brett Story, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, 2016. Image courtesy Grasshopper Films.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes by Brett Story
Thursday, March 2, 2023, 7 pm
Free
How do you make a film about prisons without any incarcerated people? Rather than looking directly at the physical architecture or the people behind bars, Brett Story focuses her critical lens on the systems and structures of the prison industrial complex beyond the prison walls. Moving from a rural Appalachia town, where the mining industry has given way to a penitentiary, to the front lines of wildfires in California, the film looks at where the carceral landscape extends into our everyday surroundings. 2016, Canada/US, DCP, 87 min.
Post-screening conversation with filmmaker Brett Story and Nicole Fleetwood, author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and curator of the traveling exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Brett Story (b. Canada) is a filmmaker, writer, and geographer based in Toronto. Her films have screened internationally at festivals such as CPH-DOX, the Viennale, SXSW, True/False, and Oberhausen. Her 2016 feature documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. She holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020). She is also curator of the touring exhibition Marking Time, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020. She is co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name.
Free First Saturday: Kids’ Film Fair 2023
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Free
The Walker’s Kids’ Film Fair is back and better than ever! This annual collection of international, irreverent, and surprising short films for all ages will be presented both in person on Saturday, March 4, and online all weekend long.
In addition to screenings in the Walker Cinema, the in-person experience features movie-inspired art activities, free gallery admission, and a selection of additional short films screening on loop from 10 am to 3 pm in the Bentson Mediatheque.
Free admission 10 am–5 pm; activities 10 am–3 pm. Gallery admission tickets are available on-site on the event day from the Main Lobby desk; quantities are limited.
VIEW FROM HOME
If viewing from home, watch the program for free beginning at 4:30 pm on March 3 until 9 am on March 6.
Wilmington 10 – USA 10,000 by Haile Gerima
March 10–11, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Haile Gerima’s rarely seen 1979 documentary focuses on the story of 10 civil rights activists wrongfully convicted of arson in 1971. The activists, who came to be known as the Wilmington 10, spent nearly a decade in prison even as extensive evidence against the state of North Carolina’s case was brought to light by lawyers and journalists. Gerima uses interviews with the Wilmington 10’s families, and with Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur, to call out the injustices these political prisoners face, connecting their plight to others behind bars and to the legacies of systemic racism that put them there. 1979, US, 4K digital restoration courtesy the Academy Film Archive, 120 min.
The Friday, March 10, screening will be introduced by guest speakers E.G. Bailey and Craig Laurence Rice.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Haile Gerima (Ethiopia, b. 1946) is a director, writer, editor, and actor who has lived and worked in the United States since 1967. Gerima first studied theater in Chicago and then transferred to UCLA for the Master’s program in film. He is a leading member of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, also known as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers. After completing his thesis film Bush Mama (1975), Gerima received international acclaim with Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), an Ethiopian drama that won the Grand Prize at the Locarno film festival. He made two documentaries, Wilmington 10 – USA 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), before filming his formally ambitious tale of a plantation slave revolt, Sankofa, in 1993. Gerima’s Teza (2008) won the Jury and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival.
Gerima is a professor emeritus and founding faculty member of the Howard University Graduate Film Program, where he taught for decades after leaving Los Angeles. Together with his wife, Shirikiana, and sister Selome, Gerima created a distribution company for his films and those of other Black filmmakers and opened a Washington, DC, bookstore specializing in books and films about the African diaspora.
Oriana by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
March 24–25, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, and students)
A band of feminist warriors takes refuge in an abundant Puerto Rican landscape in Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s feature-length film. Following the artist’s friends and collaborators in and around San Juan in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Oriana takes inspiration from Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les Guérillères, which envisions the aftermath of a violent war of the sexes in a future where women have toppled the patriarchy. In a filmic space of everyday survival and collective invention, Oriana is less a speculative vision about what might be and more a provocation of how other futures are actualized in the present. 2022, US, DCP, in Spanish and Portuguese with English subtitles, 78 min.
A conversation with the artist follows Saturday’s screening.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (U.S., b. 1972) lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work arises out of long periods of observation and documentation, in which the camera is present as an object with social implications and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her films frequently start out through research into specific social structures, individuals, or events, which she transforms into moving image, at times supported by objects and texts. Santiago Muñoz’s recent work has been concerned with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements. Her work is included in public and private collections, such as the Whitney Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Kadist.