Short Film Program Spin Cycle

A seminal event of feminist film organizing took place in 1976 at the Women’s Interart Center in New York City: namely, the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts. The first ever Black women’s film festival was curated by a team of five feminist artists, Faith Ringgold, Michele Wallace, Monica Freeman, Patricia Spears Jones, and Margo Jefferson, and revisited in 2023 by Allyson Nadia Field, Monica Freeman, Hayley O’Malley, Michael W. Phillips Jr., and Yvonne Welbon (https://voices.uchicago.edu/sojourner/).
This short film program puts several curatorial as well as aesthetic renderings of an experimental feminist cinema in conversation and is curated in dialogue with the podium discussion Sister Projects: Revisiting Feminist Film History. Monica Freeman’s VALERIE: A WOMAN, AN ARTIST, A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE, which screened at the initial Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts in 1976 was then included in the 2023 program in Chicago alongside Aarin Burch’s DREAMS OF PASSION, as well as SPIN CYCLE. This intergenerational selection is paired with Wanjiru Kinyanjui’s A LOVER AND KILLER OF COLOR, which was part of the 1997 no(wo)mansland-program. (fe)

16mm preservation print courtesy of Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University and  Film Studies Center at University of Chicago

Program: 
VALERIE: A WOMAN, AN ARTIST, A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE Monica Freeman USA 1975 DCP OV 15 min.
A LOVER AND KILLER OF COLOR Wanjiru Kinyanjui FRG 1988 engl. OV 9 min. 
DREAMS OF PASSION Aarin Burch USA 1989 16 mm OV 4 min.
SPIN CYCLE Aarin Burch USA 1991 16 mm OV 6 min.