Movies: Cauleen Smith

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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. ...

A time-lapse documentation of Lee filter film gels installed into the windows of the Dusable Museum of African American History's Roundhouse designed by Burnham and Root in 1888....

Set in Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California, artist Cauleen Smith reimagines this unique space as a radical feminist utopia. Among the scattered assemblages, a group of women whose dynamic, colourful outfits radiate wit...

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

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

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

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....

"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....

A lyrical visual poem on movement, time, and wandering....

“Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of 'reality' than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines, and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabric...

Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree. The resulting film, 'Sojourner,' contemplates centuries of black feminist mysticism and cultural production....

The word bone translates to yoruba as “bones.” In Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me, a shell-covered sea creature swims emerges form the Gulf of Mexico and wanders island jungles and shores. The shelled creature we see wandering in this film bears trai...