Film scholar and programmer Nzingha Kendall and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich propose to explore alternative narrative-making grounded in radical black intellectual production, responding to what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “silence in the archive.” They ask how can black storytellers work in the realm of reality when traditional records of reality historically rendered black subjecthood invisible? How might the transparency imposed on minoritized subjects be resisted by employing gaps and fragments to achieve strategic opacity? By interrogating film form and genre, they seek to extend possibilities for moving images to resuscitate embodied, spiritual, and coded understandings of black experiences.

We’re thrilled to present our public Dialogue with Madeleine and Nzingha as part of the program of the pair’s UNDO FELLOWSHIP research topic, Archive Repairs.

This program is a part of BREAK ꩜UT: A SYMPOSIUM OF SORTS, which celebrates the research, writing and filmmaking initiated during The UNDO Fellowship. We are excited to share the ideas and work resulting from the inaugural year of this endeavor and are eager to hear your questions, thoughts and feedback.

You’re invited to a series of screenings, study groups, and discussions spread over the first two weekends in March . Choose a single thread of inquiry, or weave the connections between them all. Tune into the stream to watch and listen in or fill out a simple application up for an UNDO STUDY GROUP to get the reader and join a rigorous and creative discussion.

Register for a reminder to catch our public Film Program with Madeleine’s work on March 11th for a full program experience. If you want to engage a draft of Nzingha’s writing and take an even deeper dive, our Archive Repairs Study Group is open by application. Learn more and APPLY!

Film scholar and programmer Nzingha Kendall and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will engage in conversation to discuss their work and their shared research question.

Nzingha Kendall is a film scholar and programmer. Her work focuses on moving images by black women from across the diaspora. She has a PhD in American Studies and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich makes work about the private lives and worlds of black women. Her practice is rooted in archival research and field research, which then gets translated through a writing process, and then finally a filmmaking process that includes narrative, documentary and experimental film techniques. This means working closely with archives that until recently did not preserve or respect black voices and thinking about how to represent histories that have been neglected.