Sisters in Cinema

An interview with the filmmaker Julie Dash about her film training, vision and struggle to bring Daughters of the Dust to the American movie screen. Includes clips of Illusions and Diary of an African Nun.

An Autobiography charts the influence of the filmmaker’s six-year experience as an African American woman in Taiwan after college graduation. The highly original film recounts Welbon’s discovery, through another language and culture, of being respected for who she is, without the constant of American racism, and how it helped her achieve self-knowledge. Linking this story with that of earlier women in Welbon’s family, the richly textured memoir blends dramatic sequences with documentary footage.

The oldest known "out" African-American lesbian remembers ten colorful decades in this hour-long documentary, which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1999. Born July 23, 1899, in Springfield, IL, Ruth Ellis spent most of her life in Detroit. A pioneering independent black businesswoman, she operated her own print shop until the age of 65. In the home she shared with Cecilene "Babe" Franklin, her partner of more than 30 years, she played host to innumerable gatherings of the city's African-American gays and lesbians in an age when segregation excluded them from white homosexual society. A participant in the civil rights movement and a witness of the riots that tore Detroit apart in the 1960s, Ellis later became an icon for, and active participant in, the city's multicultural lesbian and feminist community.

Using a childhood experience of racial bigotry at school, this film looks at the ways in which racism is ingrained in American society, even in the play of children. MONIQUE is a compelling exploration of identity and memory.

A thirty-something Black lesbian reflects on falling for her best friend in junior high. Set in the 70s and 90s, this is a delightful tale of love and friendship.

An experimental dramatic documentary which explores loss and denial in an African American family through the filmmaker's story of her kidnapped twin sisters, erased from family history for 24 years.