Film Categories: Black

  • 1000 Brazils of Truth

    Filmmakers Sheena Rossiter and Sandro Silva perform a spoken word song that’s dedicated to São Paulo, a megacity full of paradoxes. Through archive footage they filmed between 2011 and 2017, Sheena and Sandro show the highs and lows of a country that goes from being an emerging market, economic powerhouse, to one on the brink of collapse. By the time the filmmakers decide to leave Brazil in 2017, it is a country in the midst of a seemingly never-ending political corruption scandal and the worst economic recession in over eight decades. But, despite the shortcomings, Sheena and Sandro still miss…

  • Saving Gorillas. One Sip At A Time

    Uganda is home to the critically endangered mountain gorillas surrounded by people near their protected habitat who are also struggling to survive. Doctor Gladys Kalema – Zikusoka realized that the farmers were not being given a fair price for their coffee, which led them to use the national park to meet their basic family needs for food and fuelwood. Thinking about new opportunities for the African Community as well as saving the gorillas from diseases and poaching, she founded a social enterprise so humans and gorillas could coexist.

  • Searching for Justice

    Searching for Justice is a thought provoking short film by Tasha Brown that delves into the lack of fairness and equality, which is deemed insignificant in many societal norms. Fluid eclectic movements of dance are interwoven with the illuminating original spoken word written by poet Kells James.

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • connecting thru grasses

    Looking to prairie grass ecosystems, as well as the technologies that map and reflect the diminishing biome, connecting thru grasses considers how we might both map and define prairie boundaries anew. Considering how satellites passing overhead reflect an image of the earth (and thus of ourselves) back to us, and how these images shape or mis-shape our understanding of the land and our relationship to it, the work looks closer at TERRA, a research satellite that has circled the earth since 1999 constructing images for use in the monitoring of environmental and climate data. http://cbattle.com/connecting-thru-grasses/

  • BAD STARS

    Beginning with the root of the term disaster – from the Greek (dus-) ‘bad’ and (aster), ‘star’ this project considers disaster from an astronomical sense, imagining multiple scales of disaster as causing disruption and temporary disorientation on a planetary scale. Humans have looked to the movement of stars as a way to make sense of the terrestrial for millennia, developing elaborate systems to read celestial bodies as a way to explain and predict events on earth. Studying the stars in order to discover more about the galaxy, astronomy tells us that we are in fact born of the stars, made…

  • the air we breathe

    the air we breathe is an experimental documentary that thinks through the complexities of air pollution by weaving together themes of environmental catastrophe, environmental racism, cultural and political shifts, and conspiracy. Combining research into air pollution along with personal storytelling and speculative imaginings, this project deeply considers the complicated ways in which our air impacts us: from the way that smells travel through it and the memories they evoke; to the physical impacts of pollutants through shared inhalation; to the ways in which the air serves as a metaphor of connection in a cultural sense.