Oct 6 | 7:00pm
Mafifa
Dir. Daniela Muñoz Barroso
Cuba | 2021 | 77 min
The city of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, is renowned for its conga music, the soundtrack to the annual carnival. It’s here that the filmmaker Daniela Muñoz comes, to trace the legacy of the late Gladys Linares Acuña, also known as “Mafifa,” a legendary player of the bell, a conga percussion instrument. Forty years on from her death, the memory of this extraordinary woman, moving in a mostly man’s world, lives on through the oral testimonies of those who knew her. Daniela builds a movingly impressionistic portrait of Mafifa, filming with an intimate and immersive verité style, her camera almost an extension of her body. Intimate, too, are the glimpses we get into the world of the filmmaker, who has progressive hearing loss and for whom the search for Mafifa is like a search for her own self.
preceded by
By Way of Canarsie
Dirs. Emily Packer, Lesley Steele | US | 2020 | 14 min
A wandering portrait of an oft-neglected shoreline community, By Way of Canarsie paints a portrait of the predominantly Black New York City neighborhood of Canarsie through brief encounters, observation, and expressive use of analog film.
Oct 7 | 4:30pm
Short Film Program
Q&A with filmmakers to follow
JERK by Raine Allen Miller
Morning Sickness in the USA / Cristine Brache / United States / 2020 / 3’
The grandmother of filmmaker Cristine Brache was quarantined in 1961 after seeing a doctor for inexplicable nausea. Having immigrated to the US from Puerto Rico, doctors suspected she had an infectious disease and put her in quarantine in a mental asylum. The reason for her nausea was later revealed to be pregnancy.
In Search of…Pregame / Jason R.A. Foster / United States / 2022 / 24’
Six years after his son was born, the Jamaica-born, US filmmaker Jason Foster began having thoughts about what it means to be a father to a son. Foster’s own late father was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers around 1960, but he broke his leg after falling from a horse, ending his career before it began. Blending home movies and original footage shot in the US with archival audio recorded in Jamaica, this documentary explores the filmmaker’s relationship with his children, his family, and his love of basketball.
Jerk / Raine Allen Miller / United Kingdom / 2019 / 10’
Winston arrived in London from Jamaica back when the streets were paved with promise. A lifetime later, he’s become the smiling face around the neighborhood that everyone knows—the friendly local jerk chicken shop owner. Today, the mask is beginning to slip.
Of What Death We Die / Esery Mondesir / Canada / 2022 / 10’
October 1980, Haiti. A 26-year-old man becomes gravely ill and dies of an unknown disease. Meanwhile, in Ronald Reagan's United States, health authorities have decided that Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users are to be lumped together in a “4H club” whose members are dying of this deadly new epidemic.
Nosferasta: First Bite / Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, Oba / United States / 34’
Christopher Columbus uses his undead powers to create his “New World”, where he sucks the blood out of his colonial project for centuries. Complicit in this is Oba, a shipwrecked African who, once bitten, becomes Columbus’s subject and collaborator. When Oba discovers Rastafarianism (and ganja), his allegiance changes. In his post-vampiric, present-day existence, Oba struggles with the colonial bureaucracy he helped devise, bureaucracy that impedes his pursuit of US citizenship.