AUDRE LORDE - THE BERLIN YEARS - 1984-1992

It has been a long time since I shared news about our journeys with Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years. February was Audre’s  birth month and The Feminist Wire devoted the whole month to a wonderful array of articles on Audre and to two long video interviews with her partner Dr. Gloria I. Joseph and her daughter Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins. I contributed many photos and an article on the making of the film. Check out The Feminist Wire and enjoy the many memories, views and thoughts of friends, colleagues and followers of Audre!

UC Berkeley Professor Paola Bacchetta, Gender and Women's Studies, co-sponsored both our screenings at CCA and UC Berkeley [February]. Thank you Paola! Karen Fiss, CCA, Dagmar Schultz, Jewelle Gomez, Pratibha Pamar, JB and Marion Gerlind were on the panel.

In February I had the great opportunity to screen the film at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. After the screening, which was organized by Professor Karen Fiss,  we had a panel with Pratibha Parmar, director of the film on Alice Walker Beauty in Truth, Jewelle Gomez, playwright, author and friend of Audre’s, JB of DRAGA design who distributes the home video and is our web mistress, and Marion Gerlind of the Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies. The lively exchange with about 100 students and community persons, was recorded on video and eventually we will have clips of it on our YouTube channel. Marion Gerlind organized a second screening at German Studies at the Berkeley campus  in cooperation with Paola Bacchetta, professor in the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies—again attended by a very diverse group.

On my way back to Berlin I stopped in New York where Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook, Audre’s old friend, had organized a screening at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York which was attended by students, faculty, and old acquaintances of Audre. In New York I spent a lovely evening with Audre’s daughter Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, her partner Judy Boals, and Audre’s oldest friends Blanche Wiesen Cook and Clare Coss.

Ekene Oboki, Dagmar Schultz, Carolyn Butts

In Manhattan I met Ekene Oboki, with whom I had been in email contact, and Carolyn Butts, who is working with The Reel Sister of the Diaspora and The African Voices, shortly before taking the super shuttle to the airport. Both had not known each other and were glad to meet and to plan joint projects.

Back in Berlin I traveled to the European Conference of the Women in Black, the international peace group, which took place in Leuven, Belgium May 1 to May 3. I have been associated with WIB since 1995. The conference was attended by women from 23 countries and many of them watched the film one night and felt truly inspired by it. A translation of Serbian subtitles is being planned.

Astride Charles at Massimadi

During the conference I went to Brussels to attend the Massimadi Bruxelles - Festival des films LGBT d'Afrique et de ses diasporas where the film was shown and a discussion on questions of identity was introduced afterwards by Astride Charles from “I will always be me” and by Nawo Crawford.

Lina Render, Sunny Graff, Ika Hügel-Marshall, Dagmar Schultz

A screening in Hannover, Germany followed, organized by Asma-Esmeralda AbdAllah-Portales and Sandra AbdAllah-Álvarez Ramírez…Ika Hügel-Marshall and I attended for the discussion. We went to Frankfurt/M. in May for a screening organized by Sunny Graff, Ika’s Taekwondo teacher, and the Center Frauen in Bewegung. More screenings will follow in June: at the Gay Museum in Berlin, in Jena and in Halle in Germany. On June 19, the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for Northamerican Studies at the Free University of Berlin, where Audre taught as a guest professor in 1984, will have an event in her honor: Dr. Marion Kraft and I will give talks on Audre's times in Germany, there will be a photo exhibit of some of my photos and a display of a signed broadside of Audre's poem 'Sisters in Arms' as well as in introduction to the 'Audre Lorde Archive' by Birgit Rehse, the library's archivist."

Keep up to date via FaceBook. By now the film has been screened in 62 festivals and five awards (!) as well as over 125 other screenings around the world!

Good news! In February 2014 the film had its Asian premiere in Bangalore, India, followed in May by a screening at the Kashish Queer Film Festival in Mumbai.

Please show the film to friends, colleagues, groups and organizations; get institutions to order the DVD; encourage teachers to use it in their classes (a Study Guide is on the web site (also in German).

Click HERE to purchase your North American DVD (NTSC) today.
Click HERE for the film’s Press Kit

The European DVD (PAL) is available from www.jcp.de. The DVD is in English with subtitles in German, French and Spanish.