Selected film stills, For Paradise  (2016)

HD video and 16mm film transferred to HD video, Total Running Time 25 min.

My great-grandmother was a black woman known for her exquisite beauty, yet there are no recorded images of her. Her name was Paradise.

At the age of 18, I discovered a family history that had gone unspoken for a generation: my father’s father, whom I never met, was African-American—my father had been passing as white. He had also decided to raise our family as such, giving us no knowledge of our black ancestry. For Paradise is a hybrid documentary that traces the construction of racial identities within a family (my own) where members operate on both sides of the “color line.” Allowing the story of my great-grandmother Paradise to guide me through complicated family histories of migration and racial passing, I navigate the spaces where power can be found in absence and loss.

Selected public screening history:

2022:

• Royal Bank Cinema, Vancouver, British Columbia
• Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
• Jule Collins Smith Museum, Auburn, Alabama

2021:

• The Carr Center, Detroit, Michigan
• Prismatic Ground Film Festival, New York

2020:

• MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan
• Vigo Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, Spain

2019:

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

2018:

• Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, New York
• Gallery 175, Seoul, South Korea
• ma ma Contemporary Art Space, Toronto, Canada;

2017:

• The African American Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• New Filmmakers New York, Anthology Film Archives, New York

2016:

• Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival), Austria (World Premiere)

For screening inquiries, contact elizabethmwebb [at] gmail [dot] com