Finding Christa
Getting Personal
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55m
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 Getting Personal
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Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun?
Directed by Travis Wilkerson | 90 mins | 2017
A particularly lacerating take on the “home movie,” Wilkerson’s film excavates the buried story of his own great-grandfather’s murder of a Black man in c. 1946 Dothan, Alabama, an inquest that puts him in conflict with contemporary residents of the to... -
Jaddoland
Directed by Nadia Shihab | 88 mins | 2018
“I don’t make art to make pretty things,” Lahib Jaddo tells her daughter, filmmaker Nadia Shihab. “I make it because it helps me understand my life.” In "Jaddoland," Shihab searches for deeper understanding of the diasporic experience of home through the ... -
The Image You Missed
Directed by Dónal Foreman | 74 mins | 2018
An otherwise impossible conversation between two men of different generations, both filmmakers, is instigated via cinema itself in this probing and achingly personal essay film. Dónal Foreman grew up in Dublin, estranged from his father, the documentaria...