Movies: Cauleen Smith

Three women in Hollywood talk to the camera one summer (with a coda six months later). Sara is a casting director; her soliloquies are addressed to Samson (her blind infant son) and to Holly Hunter. She talks about her husband's refusal to touch thei...

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors....

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the "incubators." She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission....

Short film commissioned by the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Norway...

Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay discover a small portal that leads to another dimension where a dance marathon never ends, time collap...

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct....

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency projec...

“Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of 'reality' than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines, and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabric...

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker Community...

H-E-L-L-O translates the famous musical sequence from Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around New Orleans loaded with the histories of music and procession....

Daily Rains is a measured, poetic work that confronts head-on the micro- and macro-aggressions faced by young Black women. Restored by the Academy Film Archive....

Sine at the Canyon Sine at the Sea began as a video designed to be background eye-candy at an outdoor performance event and evolved into a protest against the reverberations of the neo-fascist nonsense percolating in American culture....

Smith interweaves the figure of the crow through the histories of Syracuse and Auburn, New York, both of which were key stations on the Underground Railroad and innovators in early cinematic and 3D optical technologies. Crow Requiem connects this his...

A collection of 14 short films that all revolve around Sun Ra and his time in Chicago...

Choreographer Taisha Paggett activates a vacant lot in the Washington Park Neighborhood on the southside of Chicago and enjoys an encounter with young resident Maylk Singleton....

Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle....

Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree. The resulting film, 'Sojourner,' contemplates centuries of black feminist mysticism and cultural production....

The imagery of the film is of volcanic scenes in various life stages, from pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors unnaturally saturated – purple, blue, and orange. The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process o...

A found footage assemblage of epic proportions. Produced on residency at Chicago Film Archives, with music by The Eternals....

Set in Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California, artist Cauleen Smith reimagines this unique space as a radical feminist utopia. Among the scattered assemblages, a group of women whose dynamic, colourful outfits radiate wit...