Alfreda’s Cinema presents Sacred Transformations

The closing program of the Alfreda’s Cinema residency brings together a collection of films that meditate on Black self-determination, ritual, and care. Each work offers a vision of transformation—quiet or radical, intimate or collective—as a sacred act. Through experimental form, poetic resistance, and gestures of protection and love, these films speak to how we tend to ourselves and one another in the face of rupture. Curated in collaboration with Diamon Fisher, founder of EXALTED Juneteenth Jazz & Gospel Festival in Baltimore, this program honors cinema as a space for healing, remembering, and reimagining what it means to be free.

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Black Economic Power: Reality or Fantasy?
Dir. Jessie Maple
57min, digital

Drawing from extensive interviews with NYC community leaders, businesspeople, scholars, and residents in the mid-70s, filmmakers Jessie Maple and Leroy Patton (Will, Twice as Nice) explore questions surrounding Black Americans’ generational wealth and economic self-determination.

Black Power-We're Goin Survive America (1968)
Dir. Leonard Henny
15min, 16mm

Leonard Henny portrays the Black liberation struggle, the African heritage of Black Americans, and the urgent call for a Black United Front against global white racism. The film centers on a 1968 speech by Stokely Carmichael at the merger of SNCC and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, held on the jailed Huey P. Newton’s birthday. It ends with the famous declaration: “Huey Newton will be set free, or else....”

Produced by Leonard M. Henny in cooperation with the Black Panther Party and American Documentary Films. Camera by Steven Lighthill and Leonard Henny. Editing by Kees Hin. Speech by Stokely Carmichael. Dancing by Uzozi Aroho Dancers and Company, Birth of Soul Dancers.