Inaugurating the BGLA’s Ordinary People Film Series tomorrow night is the Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project by Tiona McClodden and Lisa C. Moore. The filmmakers will show clips from their project, as well as talk about the challenges of doing this groundbreaking work. Below, Moore illuminated a few of their struggles in making UBLEP a reality.
Lisa C. Moore:
Some of the challenges we’ve experienced are endemic to independent filmmaking: time, and money. But more challenging to me, as a writer/researcher, is the lack of lots of primary and secondary documentation. It’s not like there were magazines and news articles about black lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s. We have to rely on oral histories, and memory, and piece together an accurate documentation from there. We’re finding some rich primary documents, and so there’s a lot of work involved in documenting history from scratch, so to speak—and in a timely fashion, because many of the women we talk to have health issues, as do many older people in general. The trick is to document the stories, be respectful of elders’ time and energy, and treat it all with importance, while realizing that it’s got to be edited down in the end.
Come meet Lisa and Tiona tomorrow night at the Schomburg Center. Please RVSP by going to this link.
