Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this. -Martin Scorsese
Narrative and documentary films have the power to shape hearts and minds. When screened in community, this act of watching can spark conversation and action that can lead to real individual and societal change. This has been a foundational belief of the Mississippi Film Society, which works to entertain, educate, and inspire Mississippians through community screenings, lectures, workshops, and festivals.
Since 2023, the Film Society has hosted or co-hosted numerous free community screenings from inspirational, family-friendly films to challenging documentaries and everything in between. It has been vital to the Film Society that these events include post-screenings conversations where audience members are able to share their experiences of the film with one another and/or hear from subject matter experts relative to the themes and topics of the films. We are also excited to partner with a variety of civic, educational, and faith-based communities to arrange screenings for them.
Looking ahead to the next few months, we have a number of film screenings planned. We are the Jackson metro area screening partner for South Arts’ Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers. This season we will screen a variety of powerful, inspirational documentaries that cover a wide range of topics. On Thursday, February 13, at the Mississippi Museum of Art, we will screen This World is Not My Own. Beginning with her birthday July 4, 1900, artist Nellie Mae Rowe’s life spanned the 20th century. For most of her life, Nellie made art in obscurity, propelled by a force she viewed as a God-given gift. As the daughter of a sharecropper and former slave, she made art from whatever she could find. As an adult, she transformed her home into her “Playhouse,” an imaginative oasis filled with vibrant drawings, handmade sculptures and dolls, and collected objects.
Six years before her death, a wealthy gallerist, Judith Alexander, “discovered” and introduced her work to the art world. The film traces the lifespan of an artist who struggles to dedicate her life to art while exploring the personal and political events that shaped her singular body of work, mixing traditional documentary techniques with animations and scripted scenes shot in intricately detailed sets to bring her dynamic story to life.
On Wednesday, March 12, at 11:30 a.m., we will screen Where the Butterflies Go at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. In a desperate attempt to host his own children’s nature show, a fumbling filmmaker travels 3,000 miles asking North Americans how to save the endangered monarch butterfly, and ourselves, from extinction. This screening will also be a part of the Natural Science Museum’s Pollinator Day.
On Thursday, March 20, at 7 p.m. (location TBD), we will screen Lift, a film that shines a spotlight on the invisible story of homelessness in America through the eyes of a group of young homeless and home-insecure ballet dancers in New York City. After performing all over the world, ballet dancer Steven Melendez returns to the Bronx shelter where he grew up to give back to his community, offering a New York Theatre Ballet workshop to children. His traumatic reaction to the shelter from his childhood sends him on an unexpected journey with three kids to reckon with a past he had escaped from through ballet. As young dance students, Victor, Yolanssie and Sharia face the same chasm of home insecurity that long separated Steven from his audience and makes the arts inaccessible to so many kids who share his background. The children he mentors offer him insight into turning a hidden trauma into dance, and together they make an aristocratic art form into an expression all their own.
Finally, we will screen Kim’s Video on Saturday, April 12, at 7 p.m. The film is a tribute to the iconic video store in New York City that inspired a generation of cinephiles before it mysteriously closed its doors and sent its legendary film archive to a small Sicilian village for “safekeeping.” But what starts as an homage to cinema quickly becomes a rescue mission to ensure the eternal preservation of the beloved video collection. This screening is scheduled to be part of a longer weekend film screening series (mini-festival) with a handful of other short and feature-length documentaries, panel discussions, and parties.
All films listed above are part of SouthArts’ Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers (SouthArts.org). Since its inception in 1975, Southern Circuit has brought influential independent filmmakers and their films from around the country to communities throughout the South. The program is made possible through a partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. These screenings are also made possible through partnerships with the Mississippi Film Office, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and Volunteer Mississippi.
We will be scheduling more screenings along with these in the weeks and months ahead. For more information on these events or to discuss arranging private screenings for your community, please email me at ryan@msfilmsociety.org. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram at @msfilmsociety to stay up-to-date on all film screenings.
