Followed by a discussion with Natalie Bullock-Brown, teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, documentary filmmaker, and founding member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group.
Saturday, July 29, 3:00 p.m. | The poignant documentary SUZANNE, SUZANNE (1982, USA, 26 min. In English / Format: 4K Digital) profiles a young Black woman—Billops’ niece Suzanne Browning—as she confronts a legacy of physical abuse and its role in her descent into substance abuse. Family remembrances reveal the truth behind her addiction: Suzanne and her mother were victims of domestic abuse at the hands of the family patriarch. Suzanne is compelled to understand her father’s violence and her mother’s passive complicity, who suffered at her husband’s hands as well, as the keys to her own self-destruction. After years of silence, Suzanne and her mother are finally able to share their painful experiences with each other in an intensely moving moment of truth.
The startlingly personal documentary FINDING CHRISTA (1991, USA, 55 min. In English / Format: Digital) presents a moving yet unsentimental view of motherhood and adoption, exploring the feelings surrounding the reunion of a young woman with her birth mother twenty years after being given up for adoption. The reunion is between filmmaker Billops and her own daughter, Christa. Facing the re-encounter with mixed emotions, Billops interrogates her family and friends as well as her own motivations. The result is an original and daring work that challenges social biases about adoption and offers new insight into mother-daughter relationships.
Followed by a discussion with Natalie Bullock-Brown, teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, documentary filmmaker, and founding member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group.
A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch: The Film Center is proud to be the home of Chicago’s first-ever complete retrospective of the films of Camille Billops and James Hatch. Black cultural life and storytelling are centered on screen in these six autobiographical works that innovated the documentary form and artfully weave together personal histories and social issues. View full series.