Finding Christa
Essential Documentaries
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55m
Leaving November 1
Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch | 55 mins | 1991
An affecting yet unsentimental portrait of motherhood, Camille Billops’s collaboration with husband James Hatch captures her reunion with the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption in 1961, combining candid interviews and archival footage with musical interludes, unexpected comedy, and elements of scripted reality to interrogate both the social biases she faced as a Black woman and her own complicated emotions. At once deeply personal and formally audacious, it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize documentary at Sundance in 1992.
Up Next in Essential Documentaries
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Goodbye to Language
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden... -
History and Memory: For Akiko and Tak...
Leaving November 1
Directed by Rea Tajiri | 32 mins | 1991
A groundbreaking, highly influential work by the Chicago-born visual artist and filmmaker Rea Tajiri, this poetic tapestry of the personal and the political reckons with the internment of some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans duri... -
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Directed by Thom Andersen | 173 mins | 2003
Los Angeles, so the story goes, became the nation’s movie capital in part because of its proximity to a variety of different landscapes, easily re-cast as other, far-flung places. But how has the city represented itself on screen? Thom Anderson’s semina...
