Luminal Film Club

Luminal Film Club

The Luminal Theater is a nomadic arthouse cinema experience that brings Black film straight to the people. Our film club is all about us making space to watch Black films each month as a group of committed Black film enthusiasts who also want to make community together. Each month we’ll select a different film to watch (many will be available on OVID) and come together one Sunday monthly to discuss.

Our 2023 Programming theme is VIBRANT THING! The vibrance of molting, the vibrance of our dark spaces, the vibrance that follows shadow work. We’ll encounter the rhythmic, the comedic, and the absurd, saturated in earthy, dusky colors, submerged bonds, and warmth. We say: Come as you are, stay whole, BE SEEN.

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Luminal Film Club
  • Integration Report 1

    Directed by Madeline Anderson • Documentary • 1960 • 20 minutes

    INTEGRATION REPORT 1 examines the struggle for black equality in Alabama, Brooklyn and Washington, D.C., incorporating footage by documentary legends Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock, protest songs by Maya Angelou, and a speech by M...

  • Conversations with Roy DeCarava

    Directed by Carroll Parrot Blue • Documentary • 1984 • 28 minutes

    'It starts before you snap the shutter... It starts with your sense of what's important.' These are the words of Roy DeCarava, one of the foremost photographic artists of the twentieth century, contributor to the Family of Man exh...

  • Color Adjustment

    Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1991 • 88 minutes

    An essential companion to Ethnic Notions, Color Adjustment explores black representation in the age of primetime television. Deconstructing cultural touchstones from Amos ’n’ Andy to The Jeffersons to The Cosby Show, this cogent and prov...

  • Tongues Untied

    Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1989 • 55 minutes

    The seminal documentary on Black gay life, Emmy Award-winning director Marlon T. Riggs’ 1989 Tongues Untied uses poetry, personal testimony, rap and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others), to describe the homophobia and r...

  • The Nine Muses

    Directed by John Akomfrah • Documentary • 2010 • 94 minutes

    Structured as an allegorical fable set between 1949 and 1970, THE NINE MUSES is comprised of nine overlapping musical chapters that mix archival material with original scenes. Together, they form a stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of t...

  • My Brother's Wedding

    Directed by Charles Burnett • Drama • With Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Ronnie Bell • 1983 • 86 minutes

    In 1983, after many long months of shooting, Charles Burnett sent his rough-cut of My Brother’s Wedding to his producers. Ignoring his request to finish the editing of t...

  • Cane River

    Directed by Horace B. Jenkins • Drama • With Tommye Myrick, Richard Romain, Carol Sutton • 1982 • 104 minutes

    Written, produced, and directed by Emmy Award-winning documentarian, Horace B. Jenkins, and crafted by an entirely African American cast and crew, CANE RIVER is a racially-charged love s...

  • Queer Coolie-tudes

    Directed by Michelle Mohabeer • Documentary • 2019 • 87 minutes

    Queer Coolie-tudes is a queer ethnography which utilizes decolonial aesthetics mirroring philosopher Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity to reclaim the racial slur of ‘Coolie’. 

    Visualizing the intergenerational lives, histories,...

  • Nostalgia for the Light

    Directed by Patricio Guzmán • Documentary • 2010 • 90 minutes

    Master director Patricio Guzmán travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, where atop the mountains astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. The sky is so translucent ...

  • Portrait of Jason

    Directed by Shirley Clarke • Documentary • 1967 • 108 minutes

    On the night of December 2, 1966, Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. There, for twelve straight hours they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang, donned costum...

  • Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker

    Directed by Joanne Grant • Documentary • 1981 • 63 minutes

    FUNDI: THE STORY OF ELLA BAKER reveals the instrumental role that Ella Baker, a friend and advisor to Martin Luther King, played in shaping the American civil rights movement. The dynamic activist was affectionately known as the Fundi, a...

  • Ethnic Notions

    Directed by Marlon Riggs • Documentary • 1986 • 58 minutes

    Unflinching, unsettling, and essential, this Emmy-winning documentary examines the devastating legacy of black stereotypes throughout American history, from the slavery era to the present. Drawing on a wide variety of media—from minstrel...