GIDEST Presents
Kevin Jerome Everson
DON’T NEED FOR NONE
Seven Recent Films
Thursday, October 1, 7pm
Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Ave

We’re delighted to welcome filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson for DON’T NEED FOR NONE, a screening of seven recent films ahead of his GIDEST seminar the following day.

The event will be introduced by Genevieve Yue, Department of Culture and Media, Lang College.

[image from Three Quarters (2015), courtesy the artist: Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures]

Based on extensive historical research and embodying a strong sense of place, his films combine scripted and documentary moments with rigorous formalism, his filmic subjects inspired directly by gestures, tasks, and conditions of working class African American life. Avoiding traditional strategies of cinematic realism, Everson focuses on actions and statements, which are then abstracted into theatrical gestures, re-editing or restaging archival footage, incorporating non-actors enacting fictional scenarios based on their own lives, intermeshing historical observations with contemporary narratives.

Among the films screening – all made between 2012 and 2015 – is Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013), a cinematic exploration of African American intellectual, social, and political life at the University of Virginia during the 1970s.

Starring Erin Stewart as Vivian Gordon (the director of UVA’s Black Studies program between 1975 and 1980), the film tells the story of African American women and men who through their public and private gestures sought to create a beloved community that thrived on intellectual exchange, self-critique, and human warmth.

We look forward to seeing you!