Tomorrow night Black Cinema House will present two overlapping film programs in the north and south sides. At 6 PM the group will present a program of work by British filmmaker and former architect Patrick Keiller at their center in Grand Crossings. (Fittingly, it’s part of their series “Image, Building, Object: Exploring Architecture and Design on Film.”) Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared Keiller to Chris Marker in his combinations of documentary observation and fictionalized narration; his “Robinson” trilogy—London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997), and Robinson in Ruins (2010)—contemplates historical and modern landscapes in England as part of a larger spiritual meditation. This program presents excerpts of the first two films in the series and the final film in its entirety.
In Andersonville at 7:30 PM, Chicago Filmmakers will play host to another Black Cinema House series, “Return of Blacklight Cinema,” a sort of greatest-hits collection of movies from Chicago’s festival of international black films, which ran from 1982 to 1996. Screening tomorrow is Wend Kuuni, a 1982 feature from Burkina Faso. The programmers describe it as “a landmark in African filmmakers’ attempts to ‘return to the sources’ of their culture . . . to solve the problems of the African present.” They continue: “Filmmaker Gaston Kaboré adapts the measured rhythms of traditional African storytelling to create an authentically African cinematic language. He retells an ancient fable about a mute, memoryless orphan, driven from his homeland, who is renamed Wend Kuuni (‘God’s Gift’) by the grateful village which adopts him.” Blacklight Cinema founder Floyd Webb will be present to introduce the movie.