Dreaming with the Archives Film Screening + Imagination Workshop with Black Film Archive

​As part of Kinfolk’s Dreaming with the Archives initiative, we are collaborating with Black Film Archive to curate a series of in-person and virtual screenings followed by Community Imagination Workshops. This film and workshop series explores how memory is (re)constructed through film, and the power of collective memory and world-building.

​Join us on Saturday, October 18, for the film series finale at the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice in New Orleans, LA for the screening of two films from director Charles Burnett, When It Rains, and Quiet As Kept.  Following the films, founder of Black Film Archive Maya Cade will facilitate a Community Imagination Workshop focused on collective remembering and collective dreaming.

Collective Remembering
Following the 20th anniversary of Katrina, Maya will guide participants in thinking about the question of, how do we collectively remember destruction and resilience? Taking images, newspaper clippings, and digital archival tools to be a surrogate of recollection, evidence building, and transformation with care.

Collective Dreaming
Defining ourselves for ourselves and repairing what the archive has yet to contain. Willing memory’s creation into tangibility. Dreaming of a new world after the 20th anniversary of Katrina.

About The Films

When It Rains
Charles Burnett paints a jazz- and poetry-inflected portrait of African American community and resilience via the story of a mother who enlists a musician’s help when she is evicted on New Year’s Day.

Quiet As Kept
A squabble reveals the anxieties and generational differences within a New Orleans family displaced by Hurricane Katrina in this alternately comedic and casually profound video work.

​Maya Cade and Black Film Archive
Maya S. Cade is the creator and curator of the award-winning Black Film Archive, a first of its kind digital archive,  and the incoming president/owner of Milestone Films, the distribution home of Charles Burnett, Kathleen Collins, Bridgett M. Davis, Billy Woodberry, and countless others. She is based in Los Angeles.

​Dreaming with the Archives​Dreaming with the Archives is a multi-city initiative presented by Kinfolk Tech Foundation, set to launch on Juneteenth 2025, to mobilize emerging technology and celebrate imagination toward cultural preservation and social justice. In the words of James Baldwin, our histories are trapped within us — we carry our histories as they breathe life into the future. This initiative asks, “What are the futures we want when we dream beyond our current narratives and systems?” and “What stories need to be preserved in order to imagine and build those futures?”

​As part of Dreaming with the Archives Initiative, these histories, drawn from the archive, will not merely be retold but re-dreamed and turned into portals of possibility, through the Kinfolk platform, for healing, collective liberation, and reimagining narrative and systemic change — centering the collective thriving and futures of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and Queer communities.