Dreaming with the Archives Film Screening + Imagination Workshop with Black Film Archive
As part of Kinfolk’s Dreaming with the Archives initiative, we are collaborating with Black Film Archive to curate a series of in-person and virtual screenings followed by Community Imagination Workshops. This film and workshop series explores how memory is (re)constructed through film, and the power of collective memory and world-building.
Join us on Tuesday, July 22, for the film series kickoff at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art. Following the film, founder of Black Film Archive Maya Cade will facilitate a Community Imagination Workshop in the spirit of the film that combines experimental techniques to tell a multilayered story of home, longing, and belonging. What is your legacy? This workshop will focus on reclaiming home, imaginations of belonging, and reclamation from cultural invisibility, and how does the archive render life’s possibility? We will work on creating a physical manifestation of home with public domain imagery and newspaper clippings of New York history.
About the Film
We will be screening the film MOTV (MY OWN TV), the story of Jamaican immigrant Ishmael (Lawrence Anderson) and his African American wife Elmina (Kaci M. Fannin), both Brooklyn residents, who go in search of the American dream and capture their journey through footage taken on Ishmael’s camcorder. Despite the unwavering and loving partnership they share, Elmina is troubled by their inability to have a child and escape the impoverished neighborhood they have been living in for the past five years. When Ishmael’s life is cut short, Elmina is faced with the task of revisiting haunting flashbacks and the stark inner-city realities that continue to surround her.
Directed by Ayoka Chenzira • 1993 • United States
Starring Lawrence Anderson, Kaci M. Fannin, Debbie Blackwell-Cook
Maya Cade and Black Film Archive
Maya S. Cade is the creator and curator of the award-winning Black Film Archive, a first of its kind digital archive, and the incoming president/owner of Milestone Films, the distribution home of Charles Burnett, Kathleen Collins, Bridgett M. Davis, Billy Woodberry, and countless others. She is based in Los Angeles.
Dreaming with the Archives
Dreaming with the Archives is a multi-city initiative presented by Kinfolk Tech Foundation, set to launch on Juneteenth 2025, to mobilize emerging technology and celebrate imagination toward cultural preservation and social justice. In the words of James Baldwin, our histories are trapped within us — we carry our histories as they breathe life into the future. This initiative asks, “What are the futures we want when we dream beyond our current narratives and systems?” and “What stories need to be preserved in order to imagine and build those futures?”
As part of Dreaming with the Archives Initiative, these histories, drawn from the archive, will not merely be retold but re-dreamed and turned into portals of possibility, through the Kinfolk platform, for healing, collective liberation, and reimagining narrative and systemic change — centering the collective thriving and futures of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Queer communities.