Finding Christa

Rachelle Salnave is a filmmaker and cultural leader. With over 20 years of experience, she has focused her lens on Black Global stories. The first of a handful of filmmakers to document the gentrification of Harlem, Rachelle works include capturing stories about the Haitian Guantanamo Bay experience, Macadamia Nut planting experiments in Guatemala and spotlighting Haitian identity and its society. Rachelle was part of the first class of Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive Fellows in Miami in 2015. In that year, the General Consulate of the Republic of Haiti nominated Salnave with the “Beacon of Hope and Achievement” award. Her second feature documentary, LA BELLE VIE: THE GOOD LIFE landed her an Emmy nomination in 2016. In 2017, Knight Foundation honored Rachelle as a “Knight Arts Champion” for her cinematic programming, Ayiti Images and Black Lounge Films. Her current documentary films, MADAME PIPI is airing on PBS' REEL SOUTH season 7 and her 3rd feature documentary entitled DUAL CITIZEN is in post-production. Rachelle has been newly appointed Executive Director of Artists Institute in Jacmel, Haiti.

The first-ever worldwide theatrical retrospective of the complete films of Camille Billops and James Hatch centers Black cultural life and storytelling on screen with six autobiographical works that innovate documentary form and artfully weave together personal histories and social issues.

Camille Billops (1933-2019) was a fearless filmmaker, artist, sculptor, historian, archivist, and staunch supporter of Black art and artists. Billops came into her own within the converging contexts of the 1960s civil and human rights struggles, New York's emerging Black artists movement, and her personal struggles for affirmation. Her work is autobiographical, interpretive, and challenging. Without apology, she successfully drew from her life's experiences, her education, and her observations of the world around her to carve out a space for her voice to be heard. She and her husband James made their loft in SoHo a hub for artistic collaborations, collecting thousands of books, documents, photographs, and ephemera related to Black culture. They held salons with Black artists, performers, and musicians, and recorded more than 1,200 oral histories, which were published in an annual journal called Artist and Influence.

James V. Hatch (1928-2020) was a historian of Black theater who taught English and theater at the City College of New York for three decades. He has written and co-written more than a dozen books, including The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938" (1990), which he edited with Leo Hamalian, and Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson (1993), about the titular Black poet and playwright.

Camille Billops and James Hatch made six films together, starting with Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) and ending with A String of Pearls (2002). At the time of Billops' death the two were working on their final film, Mama and Papa Lala, which is still left incomplete. All films in this retrospective have been newly digitized in 2K, with a special 4K restoration of Suzanne, Suzanne.