Join us for our weekly Monday Movie where we will be screening "Black is... Black Ain't" a documentary made by legendary Marlon Riggs, known for his journalism and voice for the intersection of the gay black community. "Black is... Black Ain't" will be screened at the Civic Media Center on Monday, February 26th at 7pm.
The final film of Riggs’s career, "Black is… Black Ain’t", provided a unifying theme for his body of work. In "Black Is", Riggs strikes out to find a definition of black identity that includes all the varieties of black experience. He challenges the viewer to replace an imagined homogeneous, unified culture with a vision of vastly different people who come together as a single community. The film admits the difficulty of this task, highlighting the many divisions within the black community: male v. female, urban v. rural, dark v. light, assimilationist v. separatist, straight v. gay. But Riggs, who narrates much of the film from his hospital bed as he lies dying, remains hopeful that even those on the margins of the black community can be recognized as legitimate parts of the African American world.
Riggs did not live to see the completion of his final film, "Black Is… Black Ain’t". He died on April 5, 1994 of an AIDS related illness before filming was finished.
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/riggs-marlon-1957-1994
