NEWS

April 5-7 film symposium at UNC to explore history, images of blacks

By L.J. TOLER
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Early black cinema and depiction of black Americans and their history in films will be among topics of films and discussions April 5-7 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Three noted black and Afro-Cuban filmmakers will screen and explain their work, and African-American scholars will discuss blacks in film in a series of events, "Real to Reel: Black Life in Cinema Symposium."

The African and Afro-American Studies Department leads 12 UNC offices in sponsoring the symposium, to be free and open to the public at various times and campus locations. Also sponsoring is the Duke-UNC Program in Latin American Studies, said coordinator Robin Vander, a UNC doctoral candidate in comparative literature and a teaching fellow in African and Afro-American Studies.

For a schedule of events, visit http://www.unc.edu/depts/afriafam/rtrinfo.html or call 966-2284. Highlights will include:

Oscar Micheaux's 1924 film "Body and Soul," 7 p.m. April 5, Hanes Art Center Auditorium. Local jazz pianist Chip Crawford has composed and will perform a new film score. A discussion will follow at 8:15 p.m.

Cameroon filmmaker and visiting UNC professor of communication studies Jean-Pierre Bekolo screening and discussing his film "Aristotle's Plot," a critique of Hollywood, 8-10 p.m. April 6 in the Carolina Union Theater.

New York documentary filmmaker Theodore "Regge" Life screening and discussing his film Struggle and Success: The African-American Experience in Japan," a brown-bag lunch from 1-3 p.m. April 7, Kresge Commons Room, James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence.

Afro-Cuban filmmaker Gloria Rolando screening and discussing two of her short films, 8-10 p.m. April 7, 111 Carroll Hall. The films are "Eyes of the Rainbow," a documentary on Black Panther Assata Shakur, who left the United States to live in Cuba more than 20 years ago; and "Ralces de Mi Corozon" (Roots of my Heart), about a 1912 massacre of Haitian members of the Independents of Color political party by members of the Cuban Army.

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