RECLAIMING
NARRATIVES
Filmmakers Garrett Bradley + Sophia Nahli Allison screen their provocative work and discuss the power of reclaiming narratives through non-fiction film.
SATURDAY
10.19
12:00PM
ALONE
Director: Garrett Bradley
Year: 2017
Country: USA
Language: English
Run Time: 12min
With her fiancé in jail, single mother, Alone Watts, must now decide whether to go through with their planned wedding. This documentary short film investigates the layers of mass incarceration and its shaping of the modern black American family, as seen through the eyes of a single mother in New Orleans, Louisiana. Shown with A Love Song for Latasha directed by Sophia Nahli Allison.
About the Filmmaker:
Garrett Bradley received her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and BA from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her short films and feature-length projects have exhibited internationally at museums and festivals including the Sundance Film Festival, the TriBeCa Film Festival, the Film at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films, and more. Bradley's 2017 short film Alone was honored with the Sundance Film Festivals Grand Jury Prize and was released by the New York Times OpDocs. That same year, Alone was included in the Academy Shortlist for short non-fiction filmmaking. Bradley is one of 75 artists included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and will have her first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston which opens December 14th, 2019. Bradley is also a 2019 receipt of the Prix de Rome. She co-founded Creative Council, an artist lead after-school program aimed at developing strong college portfolios and applications for students attending public high schools in New Orleans. Creative Council is supported by The New Orleans Video Access Center (NOVAC).
A LOVE SONG FOR LATASHA
Director: Sophia Nahli Allison
Year: 2019
Country: USA
Language: English
Run Time: 19min
An experimental short documentary of a dreamlike archive in conversation with the past and the present to reimagine a more nuanced narrative of Latasha Harlins by excavating intimate and poetic memories shared by her cousin and best friend. Los Angeles Premiere. Shown with Alone directed by Garrett Bradley.
About the Filmmaker:
Sophia Nahli Allison is an experimental documentary filmmaker and photographer from South Central Los Angeles currently living in the South. She disrupts conventional documentary methods by reimagining the archives and excavating hidden truths. She conjures ancestral memories to explore the intersection of fiction and non-fiction storytelling. She is a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellow and an artist-in-residence with POV Spark’s African Interactive Art Residency in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. She works as an educator facilitating community-based workshop and was a co-coordinator for the track Magic As Resistance at the 2018 Allied Media Conference. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, with Pop Up Magazine, at Art + Practice, and at the Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA. She holds a M.A. in Visual Communication from The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and received her B.A. in photojournalism from Columbia College Chicago.