Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’ visionary hybrid of documentary and science-fiction, Dry Ground Burning (2022) envisions an alternate present, in which a daring group of outlaw women pirates, refines and distributes petrol in the working-class neighborhoods of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Between run-ins with inept security forces and tense negotiations with motorcycle-riding couriers, gang leader Chitara (Joana […]
Read more
The renowned Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul became fascinated as a young boy by the sounds and moving images his mother, a physician, could conjure with medical equipment – the beat of a human heart heard through a stethoscope, the sight of a microorganism wriggling under a microscope. “I think, more or less, at that time […]
Read more
On February 25, 2022 filmmakers Frédéric Moffet, Joelle Mercedes, and Deborah Stratman joined Block Cinema for a conversation on their short films centered on birds and birdwatching practices. With works by Kevin Jerome Everson, Margaret Tait, Frédéric Moffet, Deborah Stratman, and additional artists, the program explored human-avian relationships from a variety of formal, emotional, and conceptual perspectives. I often […]
Read more
In 1971, ten civil rights activists, including 24-year-old Rev. Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, were wrongfully convicted of arson in Wilmington, North Carolina. Through interviews with the parents of the Wilmington 10 (as well as political prisoner Assata Shakur, filmed just before her escape from the Clinton Correctional […]
Read more
“Terra Femme is Stephens’s magnum opus. It is also a meditation on the unresolved matter of women’s relationship to earthly places. What kind of home is earth, family, society? Where does the body go to live and to die? What does it mean to move through the world with this particular body, raced and gendered, […]
Read more
In November 2021, Block Cinema screened Property (1978) by filmmaker Penny Allen. In Property, Penny Allen turns her lens to the eccentric residents of a bohemian neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. The film, a critically under-seen gem of 1970s independent filmmaking, delivers an economic critique of urban renewal to warm, satirical effect. Property revels in the joy and […]
Read more
In November 2018 the Block Museum of Art welcomed documentarian PJ Raval for a conversation on his award-winning feature documentary Call Her Ganda. The film following the 2014 murder of Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipina woman killed by an American Marine, and the struggle for justice waged by her family, friends, lawyers, and investigative journalist […]
Read more
In the heart of the South Side of Chicago, an 85-acre area abutting a railyard means different things to different people. For more than 400 African American families, it is home. For Norfolk Southern railroad company, it is space to expand its train-to-truck intermodal depot. The 2018 documentary The Area tells a story that’s well known […]
Read more
In November 2019, The Block welcomed Toronto-based filmmaker Brett Story for two nights of her acclaimed documentary films and conversation on her groundbreaking practice. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) explores the criminal justice system and mass incarceration in the U.S. from a number of oblique vantage points, rather than focusing on prisons themselves. Story looks […]
Read more
At age 30, Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. A Moon For My Father (2019), an essay film made in collaboration with her partner, the British sculptor Douglas White, positions Akbari’s illness within layers of personal and national history. Rich in texture and astonishingly intimate, Akbari’s film […]
Read more