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Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
Four Women
U.S., 1975
Set to Nina Simone’s stirring ballad of the same name, Julie Dash’s dance film features Linda Martina Young as strong “Aunt Sarah,” tragic mulatto “Saffronia,” sensuous “Sweet Thing” and militant “Peaches.” Kinetic camerawork and editing, richly colored lighting, and meticulous costume, makeup and hair design work together with Young’s sensitive performance to turn longstanding Black female stereotypes to oblique, critical angles.—Jacqueline Stewart
16mm, color, 7 min. Director: Julie Dash. With: Linda Martina Young.
The Juniper Tree
Iceland, 1990
While still a graduate film student at UCLA, writer-director Nietzchka Keene used a Fulbright Fellowship to shoot this stunning folk horror story adapted from a Grimm fairytale on location in Iceland. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, The Juniper Tree features a pre-Sugarcubes Björk in her film debut as one of a pair of sisters (the other played by Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir) who are cast to the rocky wilds after their mother is accused of witchcraft and burned alive. The harsh but beautiful Icelandic landscape captured in dazzling black and white by cinematographer Randolph Sellars feels, as Ross Lipman writes, “so palpable it almost functions as a character.”—Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm
35mm, b&w, 79 min. Director/Screenwriter: Nietzchka Keene. With: Björk, Bryndis Petra Bragadóttir, Valdimar Örn Flygenring.
Restored by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.
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