Cauleen Smith’s seminal work Drylongso is coming to theaters in a limited run.
The film will open via Janus Films in New York March 17 at Film at Lincoln Center in a stunning 4K restoration ahead of a rollout nationwide. The restoration, performed by Janus Films, The Criterion Collection and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made its premiere at the New York Film Festival last year.
Drylongso was originally released in 1998 by Smith, an interdisciplinary artist, as her UCLA thesis. The indie film follows a young woman, also an art student, who is noticing how the Black men in her generation are dying at horrifying rate, and so she decides to document their existence.
According to the official description:
A lost treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Afrofuturist art star Cauleen Smith’s UCLA thesis film embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie-murder mystery-romance. Observing the alarming rate at which the young Black men around her are dying—indeed, “becoming extinct,” as she sees it—brash Oakland art student Pica (Toby Smith) begins preserving their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a gender nonconforming young woman (April Barnett), experiencing love and loss, and being drawn into the search for a serial killer who is terrorizing the city. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.
Check out the exclusive trailer below and the poster, by poet and visual artist Krista Franklin.
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