Trailblazing artist and polymath Camille Billops and her partner in life and work, James Hatch, left behind rich legacies as archivists of Black cultural life and as courageous independent filmmakers who chronicled the ups and downs of their own lives and family histories, and found in them the temperature of their times.
The films they made together, while grounded in documentary, use a range of techniques including reenactments, dramatization, and satire to illuminate the ways in which race, gender, and class shape everyday life, and despite their traumatic subject matter, exude compassion, humour and humanity.
Billops died in 2019 at the age of 85. In addition to filmmaking, she was an important sculptor, ceramicist, printmaker, archivist and writer. Some of her work as a photographer and sculptor is currently on display in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hatch, her husband, was a playwright, screenwriter, professor, and archivist in addition to documentary filmmaker. He died in 2020 at the age of 91.
SUZANNE, SUZANNE (1982, 25 min)
Suzanne, Suzanne presents a devastating portrait of the artist’s niece, a heroin addict haunted by the abuse she suffered as a child and the passivity of the family members who allowed it to continue.
New 4K restoration
Remains one of the most powerful documentaries of domestic life.”
– bell hooks, Reel to Real
THE KKK BOUTIQUE AIN’T JUST REDNECKS (1994, 59 min)
Evoking Dante’s Inferno during a tour of the South, Camille Billops and James Hatch trace the ways in which Americans have tried to ignore, deny, suppress, contain, tolerate, legislate, mock, and exploit racial discrimination within the United States. Like a modern-day Virgil and Dante, they drive, cajole, and lead their cast through a tour of the contemporary landscape of racism. The film features parodic game shows (the contestants made up of the filmmakers’ family and friends) which mock taboos around race and gender.
New 2k restoration
Camille Billops & James Hatch
USA
1982
English
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Also in Dispatches
Dear Jackie (Free Screening)
Henri Pardo's film is a cinematic letter to Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in Major League Baseball and a civil rights activist who broke the colour barrier when he joined the minor-league Montreal Royals in 1946. For a short time, the impossible seemed possible in a segregated North America.
James Baldwin Abroad: Istanbul - Paris - London
These three short docs, from 1968 - 1973, offer sharp, piercing glimpses of Baldwin in private and public, sometimes in repose and relaxed but more often holding forth, embroiled in the thorny discourse of racial politics, identity and self expression.
"This Time It's Personal" Films by Camille Billops & James Hatch (Programme 2)
The second programme in our short selection of independent films by Camille Bishops and James Hatch includes what is probably their masterpiece, Finding Christa, a deeply personal film about Camille's relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption as a child.
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The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings
This boisterous comedy about a breakaway barnstorming Black baseball team in the 1930s should be better known. It's an entertaining gloss on one enterprising ball player's resourceful response to segregated leagues, with Star Wars' Billy Dee Williams.
Under the Cherry Moon (35mm)
Prince is Christopher Tracy, a gigolo on the French Riviera, determined to seduce $50 million heiress Kristin Scott Thomas (!). The pop star's directorial debut is a quirky, fun throwback to old school Hollywood glamour, with knobs on.
