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Back to calendarScreening: "Within Our Gates"
OFFICIAL FILM PAGE | DJ SPOOKY | EVENT POSTER
The 26th Annual Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival is proud to announce its very first screening to kick off its "Off-Track" themed run. The screening will be Within Our Gates (1920, Oscar Micheaux, USA, 79 min, silent with recorded musical accompaniment by DJ Spooky, intertitles in English).
Production began 100 years ago on what is now the oldest known surviving feature film made by an African-American filmmaker. A powerful and ambitious account of race in America, told through the experiences of Sylvia Landry, a young black woman visiting the North, it stands as an important tribute to the power of appropriating (what was then) new media to contest popular culture representations of African American life and offer instead, complexity, nuance, and stinging social critique.
Presented with recorded musical accompaniment composed and performed by DJ Spooky.
In collaboration with the UMass Fine Arts Center.
The screening will begin at 7:30PM on Wednesday, February 20th in the Isenberg Flavin Family Auditorium (SOM 137).
Guest Speakers
The film will be introduced by Ousmane Power-Greene. Power-Greene is a graduate of UMass Amherst, and now teaches as an Associate Professor of History at Clark University. He specializes in African-American social and political movements. In 2015, he authored Against Wind and Tide, a non-fiction account of African-American anticolonialists in the 1800's and their fight against the American Colonization Society. 
After the screening, composer, multimedia artist, and writer Paul D. Miller will direct a Q&A session. Miller recorded the musical accompaniment that will be featured in the screening of "Within Our Gates". Miller studied philosophy and French literature at Bowdoin College, and teaches music mediated art at the European Graduate School. He is best known under his as stage name, DJ Spooky, or The Subliminal Kid. His music is described as electronic, experimental hip-hop. In 2004, Miller released his film project "Rebirth of a Nation", which remixed the original 1915 film by D.W. Griffith.