BARBARA LODEN + CHARLES BURNETT + BLACKHORSE LOWE
Barbara Loden THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE 1975, 25 min, 16mm-to-DCP Made for an educational film distributor, Barbara Loden's under-acknowledged short film was her first directorial effort following her masterpiece, WANDA, and was written by HESTER STREET and CROSSING DELANCEY director Joan Micklin Silver. Based on women's diaries from the period, it features Loden herself as Delilah Fowler, who struggles to survive and provide for her children during their first year as settlers in the Kansas prairie. Charles Burnett THE HORSE 1973, 14 min, 16mm. Preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. "In this haunting coming-of-age tale that its director Charles Burnett has described as a 'kind of allegory of the South,' an African American boy gently tends to a horse that is to be shot as a group of white men passively look on. Burnett artfully employs a sparse lyricism, juxtaposing the stillness of the rural setting against the disquiet imbued by the impending violence." –Mark Quigley, UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE Blackhorse Lowe SHIMASANI 2009, 15 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Navajo with English subtitles. In 1934, on the serene Navajo reservation, Mary Jane must decide whether to stay at home with her grandmother (másání) and carry on her traditional lifestyle or seek a new life "just over the mountain." Blackhorse Lowe METAL BELT 2023, 14 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Navajo and Spanish with English subtitles. A Peyote Western set in 1860s New Mexico territory, METAL BELT recounts a story about the American Indian slave trade in the southwest and one Navajo woman's fight for freedom and her spiritual journey home.