Celebrated as a key film in the canon of independent cinema by African-Americans in the 1990s, Bridgett M. Davis’s Naked Acts was included in the seminal anthology The 50 Most Influential Black Films by S. Torriano Berry. On July 16, join us for a special evening to watch Losing Ground and Naked Acts plus a conversation between director Bridgett Davis and Black Film Archive founder and Library of Congress scholar Maya Cade after Naked Acts about the film, its restoration, and the influence of Losing Ground.  After sold out shows at Film Forum and Brooklyn Academy of Music, don’t miss out on one of the most exciting rediscoveries this year.

Kathleen Collins’ landmark work Losing Ground was one of the first independent features made by a Black woman. As Milestone Films explain on their site: “Funny, brilliant, and personal, ‘Losing Ground’ should have ranked high in the canon of indie cinema. But the early 1980s was not an easy time for women or independent filmmakers, and the film was never theatrically released. It was shown once on PBS’s American Playhouse, and then it effectively disappeared…” until the negatives were rescued 25 years after Collins’ death.  In the 1990s, Bridgett Davis’ Naked Acts wrestled with similar topics of authorship, sexuality, and self-acceptance in the story of a young actress trying to step out of her mother’s shadow and conquer her insecurity over her body. Yet again, the film never found a distributor despite its director’s best efforts to screen the film on her own, and Naked Acts sat in an archive for years…until now.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker said of Naked Acts, “Davis’s film, made at a time when there were few Black women filmmakers, exalts the hard-won breakthrough of self-depiction, of controlling the means of production; it opens pathways to a future cinema more radical than itself.”