Short Films: Black Echoes and Imperatives

This is a program of ten films that weave together multiple styles into portraits of people and places, both real and imagined, from renowned activists and artistic visionaries to the filmmaker herself. Each can be seen as a brief chapter in a larger project: an ongoing exploration of many themes and concerns as expressed in Cauleen Smith’s own unmistakable voice. Evident throughout is Smith’s singular spontaneity and wit, a flow of haunting metaphors, and the courage to move seamlessly between different forms of film and video technology. The program includes one of Smith’s earliest and best-known films, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992); the poignant and elegiac Crow Requiem (2015); the redolent utopian testament Pilgrim (2017); and H-E-L-L-O (2014), which envisions a revived New Orleans through a series of musical street tableaux.