Dreams Are Colder Than Death

In Conversation

  • Hortense Spillers​, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor Emerita of English at Vanderbilt University, is the 2025–26 Una’s Lecturer.

  • Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor, Department of Film & Media, and Affiliated Faculty, History of Art, Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, African American filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals reflect on the goals and ambitions of the civil rights movement and where things stand today. Arthur Jafa arranges the thoughts of this eloquent chorus into a profoundly moving score that also elucidates the origin of the concept of Blackness and the experience of being Black in the United States in the twenty-first century. Elliptical portraits of the speakers are combined with landscapes, street scenes, and archival images in this urgent elegy featuring Charles Burnett, Kathleen Cleaver, Fred Moten, and Kara Walker, among others.

Kate MacKay
FILM DETAILS 
Cinematographer
  • Arthur Jafa
  • Malik Hassan Sayeed
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 52 mins
Source
  • Gladstone Gallery

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