KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – This week’s weekend video is a bit of a double bill, featuring Nova Scotia filmmaker, artist, and poet Sylvia Hamilton.
Our first feature is a two-minute YouTube trailer for Hamilton’s documentary The Little Black School House.
The Little Black School House deals with racial segregation in Canada’s schools, a common practice until not all that long ago.
Shot on location in Ontario and Nova Scotia, the hour-long documentary interviews students and teachers about what it meant and how it felt to attend or teach at a segregated school.
Extraordinary archival film footage, rare photographs, and touching first hand accounts from past students, teachers, historians and community leaders, are interwoven in this unflinching look at the heart of racial inequality in Canada.
From a review by Cinema Politica, distributor for the film.
The 2007 documentary will be shown at the Central Library this monday April 4th, at 6:30 PM. Sylvia Hamilton will be in attendance to talk about her work and answer questions. The event is hosted by the Radical Imagination Project.
If the trailer whets your appetite, and you don’t want to wait til Monday, check out the National Film Board’s Black Mother Black Daughter, also by Hamilton. This beautiful work looks at the lives of several strong African Nova Scotian women facing racism in Nova Scotia. It’s a half-hour well spent.
