A Powerful Thang
Zeinabu irene Davis
- Price
- $12*
- Genre
- Film/Video
- Season
- Winter/Spring 2025
- DATE
- JAN 27
- TIME
- MON, 8 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 75 minutes
- COUNTRY
- USA
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff
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About
This program presents two milestone films, the experimental drama Cycles (1989) and the narrative film A Powerful Thang (1991). Cycles situates the Black femme body between Africa, the Caribbean, and the US. A Powerful Thang presents the story of Yasmine Allen, a writer and single mother who seeks intimacy and friendship; the film captures Black life in the Southwest Ohio of the 1990s. Davis’ grammar is one that foregrounds selfhood, curiosity, self-assuredness, and embodiment. Her films elevate diasporic music and cultural production, and create space for deep citational practice.
Please note: A Powerful Thang contains mature content.
A Powerful Thang deserves to be considered among the most vital films of the 1990s.
—
Benjamin Crabtree, Collider
about the artist
Zeinabu irene Davis is an independent filmmaker and Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is comfortable working in narrative, experimental, and documentary genres. Her work is passionately concerned with the depiction of women of African descent. A selection of her award-winning works includes a drama about a young slave girl for both children and adults, Mother of the River (1996); a love story set in Afro-Ohio, A Powerful Thang (1991); and an experimental narrative exploring the psycho-spiritual journey of a woman with Cycles (1989). Her dramatic feature film entitled Compensation (1999) features two interrelated love stories that offer a view of Black Deaf culture. The film was selected for the Dramatic Competition at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and won the Gordon Parks Award for Directing from the Independent Feature Project in 1999. Compensation was introduced by Academy Museum President Jacqueline Stewart and featured in the Black Independent Film showcase on TCM in July 2022. A restoration and release of the film by the Criterion Collection is in the works for 2024.
Her most recent documentary, Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from Los Angeles (2016), won seven awards, including the African Movie Academy Award and the Best Feature Documentary and Audience Award from BlackStar. Professor Davis has received numerous grants and fellowships from such sources as the National Black Programming Consortium, Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Davis is currently working on a hybrid documentary, Stars of the Northern Sky, which tells the stories of the legal trials of abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley, and Marie Joseph Angelique.
