Two Golden Globe Foundation-funded 4K film restorations premiere at the Academy Museum this weekend! Preservation heroes IndieCollect have brought twelve brand new 4K restorations to Los Angeles in total, premiering many at the inaugural RESCUEFEST restoration festival last week. The 4K extravaganza continues this weekend with Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, Hairstory and A Question of Color brought back to the big screen at the Academy Museum.
Solomon Northup’s Odyssey
Friday, December 13, 2024 – 7:30PM
The Restoration World Premiere of Gordon Parks’s 1984 film Solomon Northup’s Odyssey. In 4K for the very first time!
Guest speakers: filmmaker Mario Van Peebles and director of photography Hiro Narita, in conversation with Jon-Sesrie Goff.
Gordon Parks’s 1984 film Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, based on Northup’s 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave, was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and aired on PBS as a television film. Northup was born a free Black man in New York. The talented violinist and carpenter took an offer to travel for a paid gig in Washington, DC, and was kidnapped and sold into the condition of slavery. Stripped of his freedom and family, Northup endured horrifying cruelties during his twelve years enslaved in Louisiana while holding onto his hope and strength within.
Hairstory and A Question of Color
Saturday, December 14, 2024 – 2:30PM
‘Hairstory’ by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (2000, 30’)
Set on Mother’s Day, Hairstory depicts a mother determined to impose her idea of beauty on her daughter, and woe to anyone who stands in her way. The young girl’s rebellion threatens to break their bond. This is a funny and heart-warming story about respect and forgiveness — and, yes, hair!
‘A Question of Color’ by Kathe Sandler (1993, 57’)
This was the first documentary to confront colorism in the Black community, a long-taboo subject. Sandler illuminates a caste system based on how closely skin color, hair texture and facial features conformed to a European ideal and shows how this was a legacy ofsexual subjugation of Black women by slave owners and the preferential treatment their mixed-race children received.
In person: filmmakers LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Kathe Sandler, moderated by Maya Cade, creator/curator of the Black Film Archive.
