Finding Christa
Spotlight on Black Cinema
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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 Spotlight on Black Cinema
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Hammons Flute
Directed by Ari marcopoulos | 9 mins | 1991
Marcopoulos’s intimate video portrait of David Hammons finds the artist casually resplendent in a beret and mock turtleneck and playing a flute in his cluttered New York studio, surrounded by the ephemera of his practice: paintings, sculpture, and the i... -
Hyenas
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The ... -
Le Franc
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1994
Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films...
