'Becoming Black' film director Ines Johnson Spain to attend online screening of her movie

The Film screening of movie ‘Becoming Black’ by Ines Johnson-Spain will be going down on the 17th of November Wednesday from 8:30 PM – 10:30 PM EAT and will be an online event.

becoming black family — Ines Johnson-Spain’s film screening of her movie ‘Becoming Black’ captures a different side to being black in her autobiography.

The film is the next segment in the ongoing All Black Lives Matter event series in cooperation with the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, The University of Toronto, and Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Camden and the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA).

Becoming Black was birthed by Ines Johnson -Spain’s autobiographical documentary “Becoming Black”(2019) and is a 91 minute work of visually stimulating art.

What is the synopsis to ‘Becoming Black’ as a film?

In the 1960s, the East German Sigrid falls in love with Lucien from Togo, one of several African students studying at a trade school on the outskirts of East Berlin. She becomes pregnant, but is already married to Armin.

Sigrid and Armin raise their daughter as their own, withholding from her knowledge of her African paternal heritage. That child grows up to become the filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain.

In filmed encounters with her ageing stepfather Armin and others from her youth, Johnson-Spain tracks the strategies of denial developed by her parents and the surrounding community.

Her intimate but also critical exploration comprising both painful and confusing childhood memories and matter-of-fact accounts testifies to a culture of repression.

When blended with movingly warm encounters with her Togolese family, Becoming Black becomes a thought-provoking reflection on identity, social norms and family ties.

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Who is Ines Johnson-Spain?

Ines Johnson-Spain is an independent German/Togolese filmmaker based in Berlin. She studied Religion at the Freie Universität Berlin (FU) and Fine Arts and Painting at University of Arts Berlin.

She teaches set painting at Babelsberg Film University and has worked as a scenic painter and in other design capacities for art departments of numerous international film productions, such as Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Anders Thomas Jensen’s Men and Chicken, Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Sense 8, Andrej Swjaginzew’s The Banishment.