Filmmaker Amandine Gay Screened Work for Students
Students crowded the Humanities Lecture Hall on Thursday, February 10 to see director, producer, academic, and activist Amandine Gay present her new documentary A Story of One’s Own (“Une Histoire à Soi,” 2021) with the film’s DP, editor, and producer Enrico Bartolucci.
The screening was followed by a Q+A with Associate Professor of Literature Mariel Rodney, and Paula Halperin, associate professor of cinema studies and history and director, School of Film and Media Studies.
Amandine Gay is a filmmaker, afrofeminist activist, and scholar who divides her time between research and creation. According to her, reclaiming the narrative is an act of emancipation.
Following Speak Up—her first feature-length documentary on European Black francophone women released in French, Belgian, and Swiss theaters in 2017 and Canadian theaters in 2018—she releases a second documentary, A Story of One’s Own in 2021.
This second feature is an archival film on transnational adoption from the perspective of 5 adult adoptees. Amandine Gay regularly appears as a speaker on Afrofeminism, intersectionality, or adoption. In 2015, she authored the preface of the first French translation of bell hooks’ seminal, Ain’t I A Woman.
She is also a writer in several collective works: Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space; Éloge des mauvaises herbes: ce que nous devons à la ZAD; Décolonisons les Arts!; and “Reach Everyone on the Planet…”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality.
In 2018, she started National Adoptee Awareness Month, a series of events centering adoptees’ voices and experiences, and happening every November between France, Switzerland, and Quebec.
In 2020, she’s awarded the Ted Little Prize, an annual award of $500 presented to a Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling community affiliate. The award acknowledges significant oral history-based research, activism, research-creation, arts-based storytelling, and/or creative, place-based work. In 2021, she authors her first book, A Chocolate Doll, an autobiographical essay on adoption with La Découverte editions. Find more information about Amandine Gay’s work.
The event was sponsored by the School of Humanities, the School of Film and Media Studies, and the Roy and Shirley Durst Distinguished Chair in Literature Endowment.
