Sankofa Cinema Club Presents: Documentary Double Feature!

The Sankofa Cinema Club Presents a Double Feature for this June! Please join us for the latest instalments in this series:

The New Black: LGBT Rights in African American Communities   1hr 15 min   2013

The New Black boldly examines the controversial and challenging issues the African American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the recent gay marriage movement and the fight over civil rights. The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black community's institutional pillar - the black church and reveals the Christian right wing's strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political agenda.

 The documentary makes a compelling case that the fight for LGBT rights in Black communities is an extension of the Black Freedom Struggle. It takes viewers into the pews and onto the streets and provides a seat at the kitchen table as it tells the story of the historic fight to win marriage equality in Maryland and charts the evolution of this divisive within the Black community

Cimarron Spirit: Afro-Dominican Maroon Culture    53 min     2015

In the Dominican Republic, as early as 1512, African slaves escaped from Spanish plantations and lived with the island's Taino Indians or on their own in mountainous jungles in the remote frontier land of Hispaniola. These people who were known as "cimarrones", meaning "maroons", created their own independent communities that have survived for centuries and until recently remained isolated from mainstream Dominican society. These resilient and resourceful "outlaws" have long developed their own celebrations, many of which mock a society that enslaved and branded them.

 Our documentary examines cimarron syncretic cultural celebrations and beliefs that are full of magic, fantasy and popular religiosity. We travel the cimarron regions of the Dominican Republic, near the cities of Elias Pina and Barahona, looking for Dominican Gaga' troops and Haitian Rara bands. Traditionally separated by national borders, these religion-based musical forms are beginning to coincide.

Cimarron Spirit explores carnival traditions such as the ritualistic fire burning of the masks and costumes of "Judas", "Cocoricamo", and "Tifuas", as figures important to the cimarron culture of Elias Pina. We also document the similar yet unique ritualistic practices around the figure of "Las Cachuas de Cabral" in the region of Barahona and the popular "Los Negros de La Joya" and "El Peje" that so much reflect cimarron communal behaviors and beliefs.

 

Please join us in the Heritage Center for these amazing films

Light refreshments will be served. 

Registration is encouraged. 

Small discussion after the documentaries will follow.