now is the time to dream

Sophia Nahli Allison, Dreaming Gave Us Wings, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

Monday October 12, 2020, 8:00 pm PDT

Film at REDCAT and Los Angeles Filmforum present

now is the time to dream

Online via REDCAT

Livestream event, happening one time only.

https://www.redcat.org/event/now-time-dream

Tickets: $10 [members $8],

To get tickets, visit: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10563522

Program curated by Jheanelle Brown

Now is the time to dream. Now is the time to fortify our imaginative armament and take back what is ours. Now is the time to journey deep within ourselves and excavate that which they may seek to extinguish. Now is the time to take flight, chase the celestial message, and embody liberation.

The films presented herein are imaginative in their daring and fullness, but also grounded and assured in their terrestrial obligations. Crystal, Danielle, Rabz, and Sophia orbit the archive, but push past its limitations: rebuilding it, deconstructing it, and critically fabulating it in service of Black people.

In person via Zoom: Curator Jheanelle Brown; filmmakers TBA

“With a unique soundtrack that blends oral history, fact and fiction, Crystal Z. Campbell is both preserving and repurposing the film to pose public questions about community, development, representation and erasure: Who will preserve the artifacts, spaces, and stories of our cultures? How can art counter the erasure of communities encountering displacement?” - ArtPrize 

"Technology must be harnessed to both liberate and obscure blackness; to strip the digital image of its power. British artist and panelist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley does this in their work, building a video game-like space online that visitors must navigate to evade the threats that black trans people face every day." - Lola Olufemi, The Guardian

“Sophia Naphli Allison’s work seems to surround not just the recreation of the archive but the gaps that exist there.’”- Mia Harrison, VICE

“Exciting new artists [such as Rabz Lansiquot] … make innovative use of archival footage to question traditional, established national histories.” - Ashley Clark - The Guardian

The Artists

Sophia Nahli Allison is a black queer radical dreamer, experimental documentary filmmaker and photographer and LA native. She disrupts conventional documentary methods by reimagining the archives and excavating hidden truths. A meditation of the spirit, her work conjures ancestral memories to explore the intersection of fiction and non-fiction storytelling. She is a 2020 United States Artists Fellow in Film and has held residencies at MacDowell, The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and POV Spark's African Interactive Art Residency. Her film A Love Song For Latasha will premiere on Netflix this September. The film premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and received the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at AFI Fest, along with Best Documentary Short awards at the New Orleans Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival and more. She is currently working on her long term project Dreaming Gave Us Wings. 

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist working predominantly in animation, sound, performance and Video Games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to record the "History of Trans people both living and past,” their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future.“ Throughout history, Black queer and Trans people have been erased from the archives. Because of this it is necessary not only to archive our existence, but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to use to share our experiences.” (D B-S). 

Brathwaite-Shirley's work has been shown in Science Gallery, MU, Barbican, Tate, Les Urbains and was included in the BBZ Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. An online component can often be found at daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African-American, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell engages with public secrets and sonic, material and archival traces of the witness through film/video, live performance, installation, sound, painting and writing. In a forthcoming fellowship appointment at the Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center, Campbell will continue work on SLICK, an experimental feature film centering the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its longstanding effects on the city of Tulsa.  

Campbell exhibits and screens internationally: The Drawing Center (USA), Nest (Netherlands), ICA-Philadelphia (USA), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (USA), Project Row Houses (USA), Visual Studies Workshop (USA), and SculptureCenter (USA), amongst others. Select honors and awards include: Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, M-AAA, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, VCCA Alonzo Davis Fellowship, Black Spatial Relics, and Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowship. Campbell is a concurrent Tulsa Artist Fellow and Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021). 

Rabz Lansiquot is a filmmaker, writer, curator, and DJ. They were a leading member of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU) from 2014-2018, producing public programming in a number of institutional and independent contexts in the U.K. and Europe. As of 2019 they work alongside Imani Robinson as the curatorial and artistic collective Languid Hands, who are the Cubitt Curatorial Fellows for 2020-21. Rabz was Curator-In-Residence at LUX Moving Image in 2019, researching towards a program around Black liberatory cinema. They were program advisor for London Film Festival’s “Experimenta” in 2019, and is on the selection committee for Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020. Rabz is also training to deliver Super 8 workshops at not.nowhere and is a board member at City Projects. 

The Curator

Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles, whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with special interest in the sonic in film, political film and media, and West Indian film/video. Jheanelle Brown is a board member and associate programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum. Her programs and exhibitions have been screened and presented at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, articule gallery, Art + Practice, Residency Art Gallery, and Project Row Houses. She is currently on faculty at California Institute of the Art and Otis College of Art and Design. At this moment, she is dreaming about cosmic marronage whilst trying to remember her terrestrial obligations.

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Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the Wilhelm Family Foundation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, and the American Cinematheque. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2020 is our 45^th year.

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