Losing Ground; Bless Their Little Hearts

One of the first feature films written and directed by a woman of color, Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground is a portrait of a marriage at a crossroads, between a philosophy professor (Seret Scott) and a painter (Bill Gunn, whose film Ganja & Hess screens on February 18). Released four years before She’s Gotta Have It but without a theatrical run, it took an ecstatically received 2015 national release to secure the film a place in the 1980s canon. Look for paintings by Jack Whitten, whose canvases memorably filled the Wexner Center’s galleries in the summer of 2015. (86 mins., DCP)

Starting in the late 1960s, a group of African and African American students studying at UCLA’s film school created a movement now known as “LA Rebellion,” typified by Charles Burnett’s 1977 film Killer of Sheep. Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts—rarely screened and unavailable on home video for over 30 years—almost functions as a follow-up. Written and photographed by Burnett, set in the same neighborhood as Sheep, and using many of the same actors, the film chronicles the devastating effects of underemployment on a family. This is true independent filmmaking at its best, in the last moments before it became more professionalized with the mid-80s indie boom. (84 mins., 35mm)