In 1995 the Berlin Film Festival premiered the documentary A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde by filmmakers Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson. The film is a portrait of poet and feminist activist Audre Lorde, who shaped both the women’s movement, the Black liberation movement and the LGTB movement of the 70s and 80s by making the links between them visible and fighting for the recognition of the differences between the marginalized. In her work the lesbian woman and mother of two children dealt with the intersections of discrimination and oppression in Western societies, especially by giving black women and women of color a strong and passionate voice, seeking to empower them and building new communities and secure spaces.
How this happend on a very practical level and how much Lorde’s work is still relevant and important today is made visible in the new documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 by filmmaker and activist Dagmar Schultz. The film premiered at last year’s Berlinale and assembles video- and audio recordings and footage of Lorde’s various stays in Berlin, where she worked as a guest professor at the John F. Kennedy institute for North American. It is one of the lesser known chapters of her life. The recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues reveal, on how many different levels Lorde left her footprints here – be it by empowering German black women and women of color to build their own community, or by addressing racism and structures of exclusion within the German women’s movement and the German society as a whole (especially after the racist attacks after the wall came down).
The Berlin Years is really worth watching, especially at a time where the question of intersectional discrimination and the post-colonial heritage of Western societies is more virulent than ever, both in the academic field and in political activism. The documentary is out on DVD with a distribution in German (via Edition Salzgeber) and North America. More more details check out www.audrelorde-theberlinyears.com.
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