Losing Ground @ 40
Introduction remarks by Nina Collins. Post-screening conversation with Julie Dash - Filmmaker, Dr. Jacqueline Stewart - Director and President of the Academy Museum, and Dr. Ariel Stevenson - Assistant Professor at USC.
One of the first feature-length motion pictures directed by a Black American woman and a National Film Registry inductee, Losing Ground tells the story of a Black female philosophy professor and her abstract painter husband drifting apart as they experience separate creative evolutions. The film won first prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal in 1982 but did not receive an official release until it was restored in 2015, long after director Kathleen Collins passed away from breast cancer in 1988. Losing Ground paved the way for Julie Dash to become the first African American woman to have a wide theatrical release of a feature film with Daughters of the Dust (1991).
Dash will join Dr. Jacqueline Stewart, Director and President of the Academy Museum, and Dr. Ariel Stevenson, Assistant Professor at USC, in a conversation following the screening.
Losing Ground @ 40 is a two-day, multi-site program that brings together luminary Black women filmmakers and scholars to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the path breaking film. To learn more about the event weekend, go to https://tinyurl.com/losinggroundat40
ASL interpretation by Amelia Boik for the introduction and Andréa D. Lust for the post-screening conversation.
DIRECTED BY: Kathleen Collins. WRITTEN BY: Kathleen Collins. WITH: Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Billie Allen. 1982. 86 min. USA. Color. English. 4K DCP. Presented by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, University of Southern California’s Visions and Voices, and the California African American Museum. Restoration by Yale Film Archive, The Film Foundation, and Milestone Films with supervision by Ronald K. Gray. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Lab: Colorlab. Audio Restoration: Audio Mechanics. Thank you to Nina Collins, Michael Minard, Brian Meacham, AJ Rohner and Michael Lloyd at Colorlab, and Terri Francis.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
A limited number of standby tickets may become available on the day of the screening. Guests can join the standby line for a chance to purchase these additional tickets. Standby tickets are sold on a first-come, first-served basis, depending on available seats. Please note: there is no guarantee of admission for guests in our standby lines.