Call & Response! Celebrations on Community + Black Girlhood

Call & Response! Celebrations on Community + Black Girlhood is a culmination of tender portraits, heralding the stories of Black girlhood via the traditions of our past, present, and future. Through a traveling film series and community conversation, each featured artist expands the narrative lens of Black girlhood, reaffirming our formative years as an ongoing conversation, boundless as long as we are here, feeling it out, passing it on.

This program was curated by Claudia Owusu and Ife Oluwamuyide

FILMS: Ampe: Leap into the Sky, Black Girl (18 min), Claudia Owusu and Ife Oluwamuyide. Set in the sister cities of Accra, Ghana and Columbus, Ohio, "Ampe: Leap into the Sky, Black Girl" is a rhythmic love letter to Black girlhood across the African diaspora. Through the lens of the Ghanaian traditional jumping and clapping game, Ampe, the film takes us on a journey of sisterhood, loyalty, and nostalgia in a space created for us, by us. Xagal (3 mins), Warsima Farah “XAGAL” (Angle) visualizes the transformation of an eldest daughter from childhood to adulthood in the perspectives of yellow, red and blue. A Song of Grace (12 mins), Arielle Knight A Song of Grace takes us inside the world of 12-year-old Grace Moore, a classical music composer from Brooklyn New York. In the Summer of 2020, The New York Philharmonic debuted one of Grace’s original compositions propelling her into the public eye. The film weaves a tender portrait of the magic of black motherhood and what it takes to raise a young gifted black child. Dhaanto (18 mins) Yasmin Yassin Dhaanto (Big Leap) celebrates a hidden group of culture bearers within the Somali community -- a dance troupe and their coach who hold the knowledge of traditional dances and are passing it along to waves of young first-generation Somali Americans. Through photos, text, and the debut screening of a new short film, Dhaanto explores themes of cultural transference, and its value within diaspora communities.