Programmed by Janaína Oliveira
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Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora | March 30–April 1, 2023
2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Project Award
ALL SYMPOSIUM EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Taking Brazil’s new Black cinema as its point of departure, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora brings together filmmakers, artists, scholars, and critics from across the globe in order to inaugurate a practice of collective attunement.
Organized by Christopher Harris in partnership with Opacity programmer Janaína Oliveira and Cristiane Lira. Featuring films by Opacity filmmaker Grace Passô.
Seminar
The 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar inspired us to look defiantly at the opaque places of cinema. As suggested by Édouard Glissant, the works presented “clamor for the rights to opacity for everyone” in their irreducible singularities.
Janaína Oliveira
The sheer force of Janaína Oliveira’s intuition is at the bright core of Opacity. Janaína pays homage to her ancestors, her influences, her spirituality, and to the fervor of her practice. She has built a world steeped in a politics of créolité, interconnectivity, fantasy, furor, and care across time and space.
The Catalog
With this catalog, we invite you to spin and spiral—to join a collective experience of moving together, attuned to our disparate rhythms. Every piece written, spoken, sung, or whispered for this catalog was energized by the conversations that unfolded during the Seminar. We hope you find a place for yourself among the transference of these rhythms to the page—their expansions of the body, invocations of avatars, chanted cartographies, non-linear senses of time and so much more.
Criterion: Films
More than ever, the traditional geographical boundaries of cinemas have proven unsatisfactory, as cultural and historical connections are continually reworked. Moving images require both filmmakers and viewers to negotiate what is not understood: there is no such thing as a blind spot; there never was. The spots are opaque, and they compel us to shape new tools for describing what we see, feel, and think.
Launched November 1, 2022, fourteen of the 41 films presented in the 2021 Flaherty Seminar are now featured on Criterion.
Criterion: Filmmakers
Garrett Bradley, Isaac Julien, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Mark Nash, André Novais Oliveira, Grace Passô, Morgan Quaintance, Athi-Patra Ruga, Sudanese Film Group (Suliman Elnour, Eltayeb Mahdi, Ibrahim Shaddad).
