Justin Simien’s Adventures in Moviegoing

Justin Simien’s Adventures in Moviegoing

7 Episodes

What would the world look like if Charles Burnett and Kathleen Collins were spoken of in the same terms as Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick? That’s the question at the heart of this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, in which Justin Simien, the creator of DEAR WHITE PEOPLE and BAD HAIR, sits down with fellow filmmaker Janicza Bravo to discuss the decades-long erasure of Black artists from the cinematic canon, the expectations and constraints faced by contemporary Black directors, and why, in Simien’s opinion, every Black film is an experimental film. Their incisive conversation is presented alongside a selection of some of Simien’s favorite touchstones of Black cinema, including Gordon Parks’s gorgeous coming-of-age odyssey THE LEARNING TREE—the first major studio film made by an African American director—and Collins’s luminous character study LOSING GROUND.

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Justin Simien’s Adventures in Moviegoing
  • Justin Simien in Conversation

    Episode 1

    Justin Simien, the creator of DEAR WHITE PEOPLE and BAD HAIR, sits down with fellow filmmaker Janicza Bravo in this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing.

  • Justin Simien on SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM

    Episode 2

  • Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One

    Episode 3

    Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
    Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows

    In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM TAKE ONE, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them t...

  • Justin Simien on LOSING GROUND

    Episode 4

  • Losing Ground

    Episode 5

    Directed by Kathleen Collins • 1982 • United States
    Starring Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones

    One of the first feature films directed by an African American woman, Kathleen Collins’s LOSING GROUND tells the story of a marriage between two remarkable people, both at a crossroads in their lives...

  • Justin Simien on DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST

    Episode 6

  • Daughters of the Dust

    Episode 7

    Directed by Julie Dash • 1991 • United States
    Starring Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbara O. Jones

    Julie Dash’s rapturous vision of black womanhood and vanishing ways of life in the turn-of-the-century South was the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a wide release. In 1...