REPARATIONS… NOW
EPFC | October 8th, 2015
MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
Guest curator: KELLY GALLAGHER
Theme for October: NO COP ZONE
Hello everyone! Kelly here, so excited to start curating for my NO COP ZONE Marvelous Movie Mondays. My theme this month is all about resisting and fighting back against racist and white supremacist state apparatuses such as the police. NO COP ZONE is about demanding safe spaces within which folks can mobilize, strategize, and survive. I first heard the term NCZ from various east coast radical collectives who have been demanding that police be disarmed, disempowered, and disbanded. Within that spirit, we will explore films this month that demand a critical space within which to talk about the realities and terror of everyday violence against black life in our society.
Our FIRST FILM this week is called “Reparations… Now” by critically acclaimed theorist of Afro-Pessimism, Dr. Frank Wilderson . *This is the FIRST TIME ever this film has been made available to the public online.* I thank Dr. Wilderson a very great deal for sharing this film with us.
A synopsis of the film: “A documentary with an audio track consisting of Black people reflecting on issues associated with the dilemma of slavery and its ramifications in the 21st century—ranging from the sublime and banal to the vitriolic and bloody. The film’s images are selected and combined in a pastiche of emotional and intellectual montage so as to compel the viewer to contemplate the terror of everyday Black life and the impossibility of “repairing” a slave. Interviews with politicos, scholars, artists, and work-a-day and homeless Black folks are cross-cut with still photography and swaths of the director’s monologue about the psychic and political wounds of a middle class Black family that descended from the White Castle Plantation in Louisiana (now an “historic site”: combination bed-and-breakfast resort). The film deliberates, without resolution, on unnamable loss.”