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Poster for PARIAH Presented By Britt Sankofa & Sisi Reid
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PARIAH Presented By Britt Sankofa & Sisi Reid

Director: Dee Rees Run Time: 86 min. Release Year: 2011

Starring: Aasha Davis, Adepero Oduye, Charles Parnell, Kim Wayans, Pernell Walker

PARIAH: The path to living as one’s authentic self is paved with trials and tribulations in this revelatory, assured feature debut by Dee Rees—the all-too-rare coming-of-age tale to honestly represent the experiences of queer Black women. Grounded in the fine-grained specificity and deft characterizations of Rees’s script and built around a beautifully layered performance from Adepero Oduye, Pariah follows Brooklyn teenager Alike, who is navigating the emotional minefields of first love and heartache and the disapproval of her family as she expresses her gender and sexual identities within a system that does not make space for them. Achieving an aching intimacy with its subject through the expressive cinematography of Bradford Young, this deeply felt portrait finds strength in vulnerability and liberation in letting go.

SISI REID: Sisi Reid (she/her) is an internationally accomplished multidisciplinary theater artist from Norfolk, Virginia and Wheaton, Maryland who practices theater as tools for collective liberation, healing, and youth empowerment. Sisi’s art is grounded in the values of justice, community building, and education instilled by her family and upbringing. She is an actor, writer, playwright, dancer, director, spoken word poet, Emcee, facilitator, teaching artist, educator, and applied theater practitioner. She has taught and performed in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan area, Maryland, New Jersey, Michigan, London, and Brazil. She was a commissioned playwright with Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Imagination Stage as well as a Maryland States Arts Council Independent Artist Awardee. In her storytelling, she often centers Black femmes, girls, & women; nurturing spaces that are queer, Black, and abundantly joyFULL.

BRITT SANKOFA: BRITT SANKOFA is a filmmaker, writer, and artist from Washington DC. Her works have been featured in the SAAM ‘Women Filmmakers Festival” (2019), Virginia Film Festival (2018), Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival (2019), and the Afrikana Independent Film Festival (2017, 2019). Britt has a huge passion for black history and cinema and works towards building relationships between the two.

 

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