Kathleen Collins’s funny, brilliant, and personal Losing Ground should have ranked high in the canon of indie cinema, but the film was never theatrically released. One of the very first fictional features by an African-American woman, Losing Ground remains a stunning and powerful work of art. Accomplished actors Seret Scott (who appeared in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby and Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf”), Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess), and Duane Jones (Night of the Living Dead) star. Twenty-five years after Collins untimely passing at the age of 46, her daughter Nina Collins created a beautiful new digital master of her mother’s film. The restoration is a testament to Kathleen Collins’s incredible talent and a lasting treasure of African American and women’s cinema.
The film will play with An Ecstatic Experience (6 min.), a meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration from REMIX Artist-in-Residence Ja’tovia Gary. An Official Selection of several leading international film festivals, An Ecstatic Experience has also screened at MoMA PS 1 and MOCA LA. Gary will lead a discussion after the program about Collins’s work and its influence on her own.
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Learn more about Ja’Tovia Gary.
