Movies: Cauleen Smith

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors....

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency projec...

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct....

Three women in Hollywood talk to the camera one summer (with a coda six months later). Sara is a casting director; her soliloquies are addressed to Samson (her blind infant son) and to Holly Hunter. She talks about her husband's refusal to touch thei...

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker Community...

H-E-L-L-O translates the famous musical sequence from Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around New Orleans loaded with the histories of music and procession....

Presented as a trilogy for the first time, Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto brings together three recent films—My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024)—in a densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic ...

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the "incubators." She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission....

Three monologues adapted from the groundbreaking book, Black Women in White America, edited by Gerda Lerner....

Science Fiction rumination of post-Katrina New Orleans: space, place and post traumatic stress. Executive produced by Paul Chan and Creativetime....

Short film commissioned by the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Norway...

Part of a multi-platform project highlighted by an hour long documentary about black filmmakers who worked and studied at UCLA between 1965 and the 1990s....

Choreographer Taisha Paggett activates a vacant lot in the Washington Park Neighborhood on the southside of Chicago and enjoys an encounter with young resident Maylk Singleton....

Sun Ra’s anthem Space Is the Place performed by The Rich South High School Marching Band in Chinatown Square, Chicago. Cauleen Smith organised and filmed this energetic flash-mob performance, showing the unsuspecting passers-by who gather to listen. ...

"Remote Viewing" is a story in which a man related that, as a boy, he had watched the whites in his town attempt to obliterate every trace of the black community’s history by digging a deep hole in which to bury a historical schoolhouse....

Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea began as a video designed to be background eye-candy at an outdoor performance event and evolved into a protest against the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense percolating in American culture....

The syntax of cinema collides with string theory and the unchanging sameness of movies, romance, horror, and landscape....

Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay discover a small portal that leads to another dimension where a dance marathon never ends, time collap...

A collection of 14 short films that all revolve around Sun Ra and his time in Chicago...

Images and poems responding to the photographs of Malik Sidié. A collaboration with poet, A. Van Jordan. Loops designed for install....