Film Screening | Black Liberation: The Silent Revolution

Join us for a free community screening of an experimental art and political documentary Black Liberation: The Silent Revolution, presented by MoCADA and MUBI.

First released in 1967 to much controversy (and banned by select theaters), Black Liberation: The Silent Revolution (1967; 38 minutes; United States) is an artistic documentary directed by German filmmaker Edouard de Laurot, which offers a cinematic pamphlet that transforms New York into a city besieged by revolt, a field of maneuvers belonging to the urban guerrilla, and a training camp for the Black Panthers.

This screening will be followed by a panel discussion on creating safe spaces for us and by us, revolution, liberation, and the power of art and coalition building in this moment. Join our panelists as they build upon our generative practices of reclamation, including Shellyne Rodriguez, Artist, educator, writer, and community; Marjua Estevez, culture writer and content producer, and Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research.

WHAT: Film Screening | Black Liberation: The Silent Revolution, followed by a panel discussion
WHEN: Thursday, March 12 @ 7:00pm – 8:30pm
WHERE: MoCADA Culture Lab II, 10 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 11217

Gift bags from Mubi will be given on a first come, first serve basis while supplies last.

RSVP

This film screening and gift bags were made possible thanks to our partnership with MUBI and generous support from the NYC Coalition for Theaters of Color in partnership with NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and NYC Council.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Marjua Estevez
A first-generation Dominican-American, Marjua was born in the cultural bedrock of Washington Heights, New York, and raised between the Bronx and West Tampa. While her foundation is in poetry and the spoken word, Marjua’s college internship at The Source magazine married her love of storytelling and hip-hop, opening doors to a world of opportunity in digital journalism. She’s traveled well beyond her origins, has met some of her greatest heroes, been published in magazines and journals she holds dear to heart, and has had the privilege of making a living on the strength of her word, carrying on the very deep-rooted legacy of scribing and oral tradition of her predecessors.

Shellyne Rodriguez
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.

Cresa Pugh
Cresa Pugh is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Her research examines the social legacies of imperialism in postcolonial Africa and Southeast Asia, cultural heritage and museums, and violence.

Using archival and ethnographic data collected across three continents, her first book project, Guardians of Beautiful Things: The Politics of Postcolonial Cultural Heritage Theft, Refusal and Repair, examines the politics of cultural theft, specifically thinking through how debates about artifacts looted from the Benin Kingdom (Nigeria) by British forces now housed in Western museums help us understand and grapple with the vestiges of cultural imperialism. The project interrogates questions of ownership, appropriation and violence through the medium of 16th century brass and ivory artifacts whose displacement continues to serve as an archival record of a dispossessed cultural body. Her research fundamentally examines narratives of restitution and repair and the ways in which healing and the reclamation of memory and communal historiographies materialize in the postcolonial context. Her work sits at the intersection of transnational historical and cultural sociology; postcolonial theory; materiality; race, ethnicity and indigeneity; and museum, art history and heritage studies.

She has also conducted research on the colonial roots of the ethnoreligious persecution of the Rohingya by Buddhist extremists in Myanmar.