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Programmer Rógan Graham Talks Championing Black Women Filmmakers & Handing UK Debuts To Indie Classics Like Jessie Maple’s ‘Will’ With Buzzy BFI Season ‘Black Debutantes’
Black Debutantes: A Collection of Early Works by Black Women Directors takes place at BFI Southbank from 1 – 31 May.
The season will also include rare UK screenings of titles like Cauleen Smith’s seminal, indie favorite Drylongso(1998), Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground(1982), and Naked Acts by Bridgett M. Davis (1996). Below, Graham speaks further about how her ambitious programme ended up at the BFI, how she landed some of her rare titles like Jessie Maple’s Will, and why the U.S. can often be a much more fertile ground for more expansive practices in film preservation. There are lots of reasons why they didn’t make more work, and the industry ills are a big one, but as I researched more, it felt diminishing to say, ‘Look at these poor women who only got to do this.’ The focus quickly turned to look at the incredible impact these filmmakers had by only doing this one thing in the film space.
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