7:00 p.m.	A Different Image and Short Films Allie Sharon Larkin (U.S., 1982)

Leigh Raiford is associate professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, where her teaching and research interests focus on photography, film, and art of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle.

An African American woman living away from her family in Los Angeles yearns to be recognized for more than her physical attributes. In cultivating the friendship of a male office mate, she aspires to a relationship where romance is not a factor, seeking someone who can "see her as she is," rather than see only what he wants to see.

—Samuel B. Prime

• Written by Larkin. Photographed by Charles Burnett. With Adisa Anderson. (51 mins, Color, 16mm)

Preceded by:
Cycles
(Zeinabu irene Davis, U.S., 1989)

As a woman anxiously awaits her overdue period, she performs African-based rituals of purification. She cleans house and body, and calls on the spirits (Orishas in the Yoruba tradition), receiving much needed inspiration and assurance in a dream. The film combines beautifully intimate still and moving images of the woman’s body and home with playful stop-motion sequences. Jacqueline Stewart (17 mins, B&W, DigiBeta transfer from 16mm)

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification
(Barbara McCullough, U.S., 1979) New Restoration Print!

Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual #1 examines black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, the film was made in an area in Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. Structured as a ritual for Barbara McCullough’s “participant-viewers,” Water Ritual #1 honors black/Third World women’s beauty and self-possession, and has been recognized as a pioneering work in black feminist and experimental filmmaking. Jacqueline Stewart (6 mins, B&W, 35mm, Preservation funded with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program funded by The Film Foundation.)

Grey Area
(Monona Wali, U.S., 1981) New Print!

From Black Panthers to Young Urban Professionals, several members of a blighted neighborhood debate the causes and experience the stresses of cyclical poverty, as a monolothic bank commissions a film about its own supposedly good work in the community. Shannon Kelley (38 mins, B&W, 16mm)

Total running time: 112 mins