
Becoming Black
with director Ines Johnson-Spain in personBecoming Black
with director Ines Johnson-Spain in personIn this deeply personal film, director Ines Johnson-Spain confronts the experience of having grown up in a white East German family without being told that she is Black and chronicles her search for an identity that is her own.
Hop Film Now
In the 1960s, a white couple in East Berlin, the capital of the ostensibly anti-racist German Socialist Republic (GDR, or East Germany), tells their Black child that her skin color is accidental and of no significance. This is also what the girl prefers to believe, until by chance, she discovers the truth as a teenager.
Now in the role of filmmaker and protagonist, Ines Johnson-Spain reconstructs her family history, which is also a history of unequal relations between the socialist GDR and the decolonizing African countries, in an autobiographical essay film. In emotional and open conversations with her stepfather and half-brother, the burdens of silence, repression, deflection and denial feel visceral. Together with the moving encounters with her late-found family in Togo and Benin, Becoming Black develops into a deeply personal reflection on race, identity, social norms and concepts of family.
D: Ines Johnson-Spain, Germany, 2019, 1h30m, German & French with English subtitles
Discussion follows with director Ines Johnson-Spain and Leslie Center postdoctoral fellow Jeannette Oholi, moderated by Associate Professor Yuliya Komska.
Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies, the Office of the Dean for International and Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Kade Foundation

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