Anthropology Film Series

Tuesday, April 3, 6:45pm
Brockway Room (6402)

In Search of Our Fathers
(U.S. 70min. 1992)

This autobiographical film combines cinema verité footage, interviews and stills to document the filmmaker's seven-year odyssey to meet his father whose name he did not know until he was 24. Opening with a strained phone conversation between Williams and his purported father, James Berry, the film follows the director's quest not only to see him but also to probe the dynamics that define his and other African American families. Traveling to Harlem and Boston, Williams seeks to learn about his father and to discern what the Black community feels about single parent families. In Philadelphia, he interviews numerous aunts and cousins to trace the history of his own clan: four generations of women who have raised or are raising children without husbands. Williams also quizzes male relatives who are perpetuating the phenomenon of absentee fatherhood.

Followed by...

Coffee Colored Children
(Great Britain. 15min. 1988)

This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage. Suffering the aggression of racial harassment, a young girl and her brother attempt to scrub their skin white with scouring powder. Recalling the racist indignities she endured at school, the girl confesses: "I lost my childhood in a blur of self-hate." Now older, the siblings exorcise the pain and in a cathartic act, consign the abrasive powder and a white princess costume to the flames.