Trailers: Cinema Revival 2021

Losing Ground

One of the first feature films written and directed by an African American woman, Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground from 1982 features Seret Scott and Bill Gunn in a portrait of a marriage at a crossroads. The film, which was named to the Library of Congress’s prestigious National Film Registry in December, will stream starting February 25 as part of a day of programs spotlighting the work of Indiana University Bloomington's Black Film Center/Archive.

An Ecstatic Experience

Artist and filmmaker Ja'Tovia Gary uses animated scratches and markings over vintage and contemporary film—including a performance by actress/activist Ruby Dee and footage from a Black Lives Matter protest—to create, in her words, "a meditative invocation on transcendence as a means of restoration.” This 2015 short will be presented in a double feature package with Losing Ground, and Gary will join Black Film Center/Archive Director Terri Francis for a conversation about their respective work.

Chess of the Wind

Suppressed upon release, banned during the Iranian Revolution, and thought lost for three decades, Mohammad Reza Aslani's aristocratic family drama Chess of the Wind (also known as The Chess Game of the Wind) was miraculously rediscovered in 2015 and smuggled out of Iran for a full restoration by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation. A panel discussion will accompany the Cinema Revival stream, which begins February 27. Here's a terrific fan trailer.