Join us on Thursday, March 17 for a special screening of the short film, Afronauts, with director Frances Bodomo and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Based on true events, Afronauts tells the story of the short-lived Zambian space program and its attempts to join the space race in the late 1960s. Afronauts is Bodomo's second short film and premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2014. (Total runtime: 14 minutes)

Frances Bodomo is an award-winning Ghanaian filmmaker who grew up in Ghana, Norway, California, and Hong Kong before moving to New York City to study film at Columbia University (BA) and the Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Her first short film, Boneshaker (starring Oscar-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis), premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and played at over 20 film festivals. Bodomo was named a 2015 Sundance Institute/Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and aspires to make conceptually strong films that bring African images to the forefront. 

Jacqueline Stewart is a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005). Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, Film History, and The Moving Image. She is completing a study of African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams. She is co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Her film work in Chicago includes founding the South Side Home Movie Project and serving as Curator of Black Cinema House, a neighborhood-based film exhibition venue run by Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation. 

This event is presented in conjunction with the Graham Foundation's current exhibition Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, on view through April 16.

To view the trailer for Afronauts, click here.

Image: Diandra Forrest as Matha. Afronauts. Dir Frances Bodomo, 2014.

For more information on the exhibition, Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, click here.