MassArt Ciné Culture Screening Series, in partnership with the Roxbury Film Festival, will present a weekend film screening series of work by two acclaimed directors: Charles Burnett and Zeinabu Davis. Both Burnett and Davis are integral figures from the first generation of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, a group of African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA film school in the 1960s-1980s. A panel discussion and Q&A sessions with the esteemed directors will follow each film screening.

FEATURED FILMS:

• Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA by Zeinabu Davis (2016) | Followed by a Q & A with Zeinabu David and Charles Burnett. 
• Program of Short Films by Zeinabu Davis: Cycles (1989), Mother of the River (1995), Crocodile Conspiracy (1986)  | Followed by a Q & A with Zeinabu Davis
• My Brother’s Wedding by Charles Burnett (1983) | Followed by a Q & A with Charles Burnett
• Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett (1978) | Followed by a Q & A with Charles Burnett

Over her three-decade career, ERICKA BECKMAN’s playful yet formally demanding films challenge traditional aesthetic, and cultural values, that mix games with fairytales to create hybrids with new rules. Beckman uses play in every sense to shape her message. Beckman’s work has been shown at festivals, museums, and galleries around the world. Her one-woman shows include: Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, Le Magasin, Grenoble, France, the Tate Modern, London, MOCA, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, Washington,D.C., and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She has been in four Biennials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her works are in the film collection of the Whitney Museum, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, The Walker Art Center, Anthology Film Archives, plus the British Film Institute, and the Zabludowicz Collection. Amongst the numerous awards received for her work are: Two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two New York State Council on the Arts grants, one from Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and a residency from the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France.

SU FRIEDRICH is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. Su has made twenty-four films and videos which range in length from 2 to 113 minutes. The films have been featured in twenty-six retrospectives at museums and film festivals and have been widely screened, extensively written about, are in many university and museum collections, and have won numerous grants and awards.

In 2015, Sink or Swim was one of the 25 films chosen by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry. Her DVD collection is distributed by Outcast Films and her two most recent films are distributed by Icarus Films. She has taught at The New School and NYU, and since 1998, Friedrich has been Professor of Visual Art in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.