Noah Davis Film Shorts: Everyday People

This short film program examines Black quotidian life as a site of intimacy, humor, grief, and quiet wonder. Inspired by the paintings of Noah Davis, the films resist spectacle in favor of the mundane. Like Davis’s canvases, these films offer a slow-moving counterbalance to the typically extraordinary depictions of Black bodies and instead offer bodies at play, at rest, and in love. Davis often painted scenes that feel both familiar and slightly displaced: figures caught mid-thought, spaces charged with memory, and narratives left intentionally open.

This program carries that sensibility into moving images. Time stretches. Gestures repeat. The camera observes without insisting on explanation. What emerges is a cinema of presence, where Black life is not defined by crisis or resolution but by texture: light sparkling on skin, the layered weight of silence, and the poetry of routine. As a group, the program invites viewers to honor the ordinary, to notice what and whom often goes unseen, and to recognize the radical tenderness of just being.

In collaboration with BlackStar Film Festival. Total run time is 85 minutes.

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