Naked Spaces: Living is Round in 4K

Naked Spaces: Living is Round in 4K

North American Restoration Premiere

In person: Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha

North American Restoration Premiere

In person: Filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s widely acclaimed first feature, filmed in rural West Africa, radically challenges and redefines the perspectives, tropes, and politics of ethnographic cinema. Trinh upends the power imbalance and exoticizing colonial gaze so often embedded in this mode of documentary by decentralizing the filmmaker, whose voice and vision has historically been authoritative, observational, and detached. Through the absence of artificial narrative, explanatory voiceover, or presumptuous analysis, her film eschews simplistic, didactic objectification and instead attempts to achieve something else: an empathetic engagement driven by curiosity and a genuine, conscious humanism.

Note by Mark Toscano, senior film preservationist, Academy Film Archive.

DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1985. 135 min. USA. Color. English. 4K DCP. Restoration provided by the Academy Film Archive. Special thanks to Jon Shibata and Pacific Film Archive.

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation. 

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