BlaxploItalian: 100 Years of Blackness in Italian Cinema

Monday, February 19, 2018, 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Portrait of man's face from BlaxploItalian poster
BlaxploItalian, from Italian-Ghanaian filmmaker Fred Kuwornu, is a diasporic, hybrid, critical and cosmopolitan dimension documentary that uncovers the careers of a population of entertainers seldom heard from before: black actors in Italian cinema starting from 1915, when the first black actor appeared in an Italian film. BlaxploItalian cleverly discloses the personal struggles classic Afro-Italian, African-American, Afro-Caribbean and African diasporic actors faced, correlating it with the contemporary actors who work diligently to find respectable and significant roles. A Q&A with Kuwornu will follow the screening. Free.
Location: 
J. Paul Leonard Library, Frank V. de Bellis Collection (Room 460)
Directions: 
View on Google Maps
Sponsor: 
Italian Program, Modern Languages and Literatures Department, Africana Studies Department
Contact: 
Olivia Albiero
E-mail: 
albiero@sfsu.edu
Event extras: 

Fred Kuwornu is an activist-producer-director-speaker born and raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn. His mother is an Italian Jew, and his father a Ghanaian surgeon who lived in Italy since the early 1960s. Kuwornu holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and mass media from University of Bologna. After his experience working with the production crew of Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, in 2010 Fred Kuwornu produced and directed the award-winning documentary Inside Buffalo, about the African-American veterans who fought in Italy during World War II. In 2012, he released 18 IUS SOLI, which examines Afro-Italians in Italy but also looks specifically at questions of citizenship for the one million children of immigrants born and raised in Italy but not yet Italian citizens.

Organized by the SF State Italian Program with the support of the Frank V. de Bellis Collection.

Links

Video