The 19th Annual African American Film Festival
Jazz Legends & Cinematic Icons
Feb 13 – 16, 2025 • Curated by Dr. Terri Francis
5-Show Series $60 • Save $25 when you purchase the entire series. All films in Rinker Playhouse • General admission
Jazz is the quintessential American art form yet it has always attracted fascination and respect in concert halls and night clubs around the world, particularly in France. Originating in the early 20th century, in New Orleans, it evolved from ragtime through big band and swing, to bebop and an array of other forms. Bandleader and composer James Reese Europe first helped to popularize jazz in France through his direction of the 369th Infantry Regiment Band, aka, “The Harlem Hellfighters” during World War I. Europe and the band traveled all over France in early 1918 performing for troops and civilians alike. Later Eugene Bullard, Cole Porter, Bricktop, Ella Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker were among the performers drawn to Paris during the Jazz Age, (1914-1940). As a dancer, Baker was a singular creative force and her breakout success in the Black Review at the Théàtre des Champs-Élysées surely fueled the atmosphere in which jazzmen like Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong would thrive.
Jazz and cinema have a longstanding collaboration. In fact, the Library of Congress contains a database, Jazz in the Movies, that lists an astounding 20,000 plus cinema, television and video productions with jazz and blues figures. Jazz Legends and Cinematic Icons presents merely five of the most exquisite duets ever between jazz and the movies.
Beginning with Josephine Baker’s film debut in 1927, the series arcs from the secular to the sacred with Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of the Lord’s Prayer in Jazz on a Summer’s Day. From the Caribbean, to Paris to New York to Rhode Island, the films explore both the wounds and the creative powers of African Americans and their place at the heart of American identity. And of course the films star gorgeous actors like Denzel Washington and Diahann Carroll, herself a musician, and they are scored with beautiful music from Duke Ellington, Jon Batiste, and more.
Join Dr. Terri Francis, professor and author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism for the 19th Annual African American Film Festival – a feast for the eyes and a listening session for the soul.
Guests attending PEAK performances in the Rinker Playhouse will receive one complimentary beverage with every ticket purchased (underage guests will be offered a non-alcoholic selection).
PEAK performances made possible by a grant from the MLDauray Arts Initiative in honor of Leonard and Sophie Davis
With support from
Curator
Dr. Terri Francis
Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts, School of Communication University of Miami
Dr. Terri Francis is an international author, film curator, and public speaker. She published Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism in 2021 and in 2023 she released her video essay, Josephine Baker Watches Herself. The British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound listed it among the best video essays of that year, calling it “A video essay that grows richer with each rewatch.” Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism examines and reflects upon Baker’s complex presence in French cinema of the early twentieth century and all it might have meant for the imagination of Black cinema in the United States. Dr. Francis has spoken on Baker’s unique and ambivalent film presence internationally, delivering a keynote “The Tender Work of Writing Black Women’s Film History,” Doing Women’s Film and Television History VI: Changing Streams and Channels, to be held at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. In 2021 she delivered the Annual Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture at the National Gallery of Art and closer to home she was honored to speak on “Making a Scene: Josephine Baker, African American Film History, and Beyond ,” at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, in 2022. The New York Times called her cocurated show Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion “deeply imaginative.” During its 2024 run at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Germany it saw constant overflow crowds and was extended to accommodate audience enthusiasm.
Dr. Francis is a past director of the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University, the world’s only academic repository entirely dedicated to the preservation of the film history of people of African descent. Her accomplishments, at the BFCA, in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture include the restoration of Jessie Maple’s groundbreaking feature, Will, which will screen at the Museum of Modern Art this winter. Further, Dr. Francis and secured the donation of the papers of Paulin Vieyra, a pioneering African filmmaker. With her leadership, the BFCA forged crucial new partnerships with the Criterion Channel and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures expanding its national reach. Meanwhile on campus she instituted a new program of visiting research fellows as well as an initiative to bring in curators to explore the BFCA’s holdings. The BFCA’s speakers’ roster during her tenure included several prominent contemporary scholars, film exhibitors, and filmmakers, including Allyson Field, Numa Perrier, Michael Gillespie, Crystal Z. Campbell, Maori Holmes, Cheryl Dunye, Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Blitz Bazawule, all of whom were brought to campus through vibrant collaborations with ARRAY, the IU Cinema, #DirectedbyWomen, and the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. The BFCA was truly a center for the exploration and celebration of Black Film.
Since moving to Miami, Dr. Francis has been deeply involved in the film community. She recently co-curated The Earth is a Living Thing, a series with filmmaker Helen Peña at Bridge Red Studios in North Miami during Art Basel. And she has moderated forward-thinking energetic panels at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and Books and Books in Coral Gables. She partnered with the Coral Gables Art Cinema on rare screenings of Global Black Cinema and fostered links between UM students and the local film arts community.
Dr. Francis is a nationally recognized leader in her field as winner of an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a 2025 recipient of a Provost Research Award from the University of Miami where she is Associate Professor in the School of Communication. Dr. Francis has served as editor of multiple landmark journal issues. This winter she will publish “Camille Billops and James V. Hatch: A Certain Defiance,” a collection of essays for Feminist Media Histories on the 1990s filmmaking couple that she co-edited with Dr. Miriam Petty. This collection offers the first major new scholarship on Billops and Hatch since their heyday more than thirty years ago. With the artist and curator Betsy Stirratt, Dr. Francis edited an exhibition catalog for their cocurated film installation Rough and Unequal: A Film by Kevin Jerome Everson (2020). She then edited a timely and timeless open-access dossier for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, “Film Programming as Social Justice Work in the Wake of Covid-19,” which features essays from programmers, platform founders, and arts writers about their work during the summer of Black Lives Matter. Her areas of expertise include early African American film and performance, experimental film and the Caribbean’s story with film. In 2014, she edited “Unexpected Archives: Seeking More Locations of Caribbean Film,” an interdisciplinary selection of essays for sx salon. Francis had previously published a collection of essays exploring Afrosurrealism in film and video in Black Camera in 2013. Her writing can be found in a range of academic journals and periodicals including Film History, Black Camera, Transition, Feminist Media Histories, and Film Quarterly. Lithub, Salon and others have published her arts writing while she has provided commentary for NPR.
Dr. Francis brings 20 years of scholarship, curatorial experience, and insight to the 19th Annual African American Film Festival, hosted by the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. The values of the Festival’s educational and social justice mission resonate with her career of documenting the Black presence in cinema and sharing knowledge that knowledge with a range of audiences. First invited to introduce Poetic Justice at the 2023 festival, Dr. Francis returned in 2024 to curate “Inventing Beauty,” a cinematic journey looking at how we learn what pretty means. For the 19th AAFF, Dr. Francis has curated a program around “Jazz Legends and Cinematic Icons,” which will be a feast for the eyes and ears.
Featured Speakers
Trinidad born Etienne Charles is a performer, composer and storyteller, who is constantly searching for untold tales and sounds with which to tell them. His lush trumpet sound, varied compositional textures and pulsating percussive grooves enable him to invoke trance, soothing and exciting listeners while referencing touchy and sometimes controversial subjects in his music. Highlighting marginalized communities and engaging with them has been his mission, evident with projects such as his Guggenheim Fellowship Project, Carnival: The Sound of a People Vol. 1, San Jose Suite, Creole Soul, Folklore and his latest commission, San Juan Hill – A New York Story. His concerts engage, enlighten, educate and enrich audiences with energized multidisciplinary performance utilizing original composition, thematic improvisation, dance, short films and spoken word to create a holistic experience. A firm believer in music and performance as a tool for provoking thought and dialogue, Charles’s themes speak to the status quo while drawing parallels to history.
As an Afro-descendant, his work is actively connecting the diaspora and drawing lines to the regions at the roots of migrations, evident in his latest release, Creole Orchestra which spent 7 weeks at #1 on the Jazzweek chart this summer.
As a sideman he has performed with and/or arranged for Roberta Flack, Chucho Valdes, Marcus Roberts, Marcus Miller, Count Basie Orchestra, Frank Foster’s Loud Minority Big Band, Monty Alexander, Gregory Porter, Terri Lyne Carrington, René Marie, Paulette McWilliams and many others. He has been commissioned as a composer and arranger by Lincoln Center for the New York Philharmonic (2021), Savannah Music Festival (2017), Chamber Music America (2015 & 2021), the Charleston Jazz Orchestra (2012) and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble (2011).
He currently serves as Professor of Studio Music and Jazz at University of Miami Frost School of Music.
Guest performing at this film
SIREN OF THE TROPICS
Danyelle M. Greene is a scholar-practitioner whose areas of interest include the study and production of African American cinema, documentary, and aesthetics. Her work focuses especially on the politics of representation and re-presentation of blackness, gender, and religion in film. Dr. Greene uses filmmaking and written scholarship as complementary modes of critical inquiry and exploration. Her research has been published in journals such as Black Camera and Journal of Popular Culture. She also co-directed an art exhibition titled In My Hands in which she presented her co-produced video installation, “Twice As Hard,” and triptych, “Always Already.” Dr. Greene’s interdisciplinary approach bridges theory and practice, contributing to the field of film and media studies through both traditional scholarship and creative productions.
Guest speaking at these films
MO’ BETTER BLUES
JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY
Pranoo Kumar (she/they/we) is a proud immigrant, educator, TedX speaker and mother dedicated to identity driven experiences for all. With her shift from medicine to education, she taught, led and founded inclusive PreK-4th educational programs with notable projects in Harlem, the South Bronx and co-founding WA state’s first elementary charter school in a primarily refugee community. She then established divHERse education consulting in 2019 to address the lack of representation and retention of women of the Global Majority in education leadership. Committed to authentic community building, she opened Rohi’s Readery (named after her grandmother and education activist Rohini Rao) and Rohi’s Liberation Station 501c3, a social justice-driven children’s bookstore and learning center committed to honoring historically marginalized communities through outreach and free programming. Her focus and passion for decolonizing education, quality social emotional learning and ancestral remembrance stems from her family’s own experiences of discrimination and witnessing the intentional structures of systemic oppression influencing self worth and belonging. Pranoo continues to champion equity in education in creative ways through Rohi’s, fostering over 175 partnerships and 400+ free events. Pranoo has garnered numerous accolades, including 2-time NY Teacher of the Year, Gates Foundation K-12 Programs Contributor, and Champion for Equity in Education Palm Beach County School District Award. A current professor at Watson Institute x Lynn University, she holds a BS in Biology, MS in Medical Sciences and an MS in Education/Special Education from UF and Touro College. Through her work, Pranoo is committed to right the wrongs of the past for those who have come before her and the Little Revolutionaries to follow.
Guest speaking at this film
SOUL
Dr. Alisha R. Winn is an applied cultural anthropologist and the founder and owner of Consider the Culture, an educational and community engagement firm specializing in community outreach and cultural education. Dr. Winn has led community, preservation, and education projects in various cities across the US. Currently, she is a consultant for the City of West Palm Beach’s Community Redevelopment Agency, focusing on the preservation and planning efforts of the Historic Sunset Jazz Lounge, the Historic Northwest District, and Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Community Transformation Center, where she is an adjunct professor in the School of Ministry’s Intercultural Studies. She has also served as project director of the Osborne School Oral History Project and the PBC African American Virtual Oral History Project and led initiatives related to anthropology and African American history and culture in the Palm Beach County System.
Guest speaking at this film
PARIS BLUES
