“It took 14 years and $1.2 million dollars to make a documentary on the life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry,” said Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell. “’Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart’ by filmmaker/producer Tracy Heather Strain is worth every minute and every penny.”
The documentary looks at the life and work of Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), the playwright and activist who wrote the acclaimed drama “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), the first play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. The film, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, explores Hansberry’s early years in segregated Chicago, her work as a groundbreaking journalist, and her pursuits as an activist, as she fought against racism, gender discrimination and homophobia.
Washington University’s Department of African and African American Studies, Washington University Libraries and Cinema St. Louis will present a screening of the documentary “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25, in Whitaker Hall Auditorium on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Tracy Heather Strain and producer Randall MacLowry, who used the Libraries’ Henry Hampton Collection while researching the film.
The 35,000-plus items in the Henry Hampton Collection include unique filmed interviews with key figures in the civil rights movement. The digital projects, Eyes on the Prize: The Complete Interviews and The Great Depression Interviews, make the content of these interviews available to scholars, researchers and historians.
Narrated by acclaimed actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson (“The Fighting Temptations,” “A Raisin in the Sun”) and featuring the voice of Tony Award-winning actress Anika Noni Rose (“A Raisin in the Sun,” “Dreamgirls”) as Hansberry, the documentary portrays the writer’s lifetime commitment to fighting injustice and how she found her way to theater as her medium for activism at a crucial time for black civil rights. The film title comes from Hansberry’s view that “one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”
“This documentary is long overdue,” Mitchell said. “I salute Strain for the tenacity she has shown in making it.”
The event is part of the Henry Hampton Film Series, which premiered in 2014 and seeks to share documentary films made by minority filmmakers or that depict the stories of often underrepresented groups with a focus on the African-American experience.
The screening for “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, January 25, in Whitaker Hall Auditorium on the Danforth Campus of Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive. The screening is free and open to the public. For additional information, call (314) 935-5631 or e-mail: afas@wustl.edu.
