Mixed Race Studies

Parallel Adele

Third World Newsreel
2008
Color
16 minutes
USA
English

Adele Pham, Director/Producer

Two half Vietnamese documentary filmmakers, both named Adele, weave a shared narrative of mixed Asian (hapa) experiences through interviews with 7 other mixed race subjects. History, memory, and anecdotes on multiracial ethnicity are represented through archival images, super 8 film, verité, and interview.

Screenings

• Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2009
• San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, 2009
• Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2008
• Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival, 2008
• Slant: Bold Asian American Images, 2008

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992

Third World Newsreel
2012
84 minutes
Germany
English/German with English Subtitles

Dagmar Schultz

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing, the acclaimed Black lesbian feminist poet and activist. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Lorde’s incisive writings and speeches defined and inspired the women of color, feminist and LGBT social justice movements in the United States.

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992  explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life, a period in which she helped ignite the Afro-German Movement and made lasting contributions to the German political and cultural scene before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification.

Lorde mentored and encouraged Black German women to write and publish as a way of asserting their identities, rights and culture in a society that isolated and silenced them, while challenging white German women to acknowledge their white  privilege. As Lorde wrote in her book Our Dead Behind Us: Poems, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 contains previously unreleased audiovisual material from director Dagmar Schultz’s personal archive, showing Lorde on and off stage. With testimony from Lorde’s colleagues, students and friends, this film documents Lorde’s lasting legacy in Germany.

See the Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 Study Guide here.

Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story

Third World Newsreel
1997
28 minutes
Germany
German with English Subtitles

Maria Binder

A moving documentary about the life and untimely death of Ghanaian-German poet, academic and political personality May Ayim. Ayim was one of the founders of the Black German Movement, and her research on the history of Afro-Germans, but also her political poetry, made her known in Germany and other countries.

Ayim wrote in the tradition of oral poetry and felt a strong connection to other black poets of the diaspora. Poetry gave her an opportunity to confront the white German society with its own prejudices.

Interviews and poems reveal the search for identity, how and why the term Afro-German was introduced. An insightful look at how a young black woman experiences the German reunification.

In the foreword to Ayim’s Blues in Schwarz Weiß (Blues in Black and White), Maryse Conde wrote “… With the unmistakable sound of her voice her poems spoke to me of her, told of others that are like her and yet so unlike her in Germany, in Africa, in America. These poems held passion and irony … In May’s voice I found the echo of other voices from the diaspora.”

Passing

Third World Newsreel
1995
Black & White
9 minutes
United States

Kym Ragusa

The videomaker’s grandmother recounts the tale of a trip she and her lover took through the segregated South of the 1950s. As her story unfolds—revealing as much in silences and gaps as it does in its actual narrative—a blues and gospel soundtrack provides other tales of miscegenation and resistance. The story is full of tensions around race, class and color and the anxieties produced by the racial climate and violent history of the South.

Screenings

• Charlotte Film/Video Festival 1997
• Reel New York, WNET-TV

Awards

• Women in the Director’s Chair, Juror’s Prize

For more information, click here.

Fuori/Outside

Third World Newsreel
1997
Color
12 minutes
United States

Kym Ragusa

In Fuori/Outside the videomaker, a woman of African American and Italian American descent, examines her relationship with her Italian American grandmother. The lives of the two women are inextricably linked to local geographies; family stories embedded in the walls of tenement buildings and suburban landscapes. Personal memories overflow into public spaces, contradictions around race within the family are contextualized within larger conflicts between Italian Americans and African Americans. The foundation of Fuori/Outside is the powerful bond between the two women, marginalized by color and age, that survives the instability of family, class and ethnic identity.

Awards
Best Video, South Bronx Film and Video Festival, 1997

For more information, click here.