Screening of "If Beale Street Could Talk"

Date: 

Thursday, November 29, 2018, 6:00pm

Location: 

Harvard Art Museums, Menschel Hall, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

If Beale Street Could Talk movie poster

Co-sponsored with Harvard Art Museums

 

Join us for a preview screening of If Beale Street Could Talk, Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins’ ambitious adaption of James Baldwin’s novel about a woman fighting to free her falsely-accused husband from prison before the birth of their child.

Set in early-1970s Harlem, If Beale Street Could Talk is a timeless and moving love story of both a couple’s unbreakable bond and the African-American family’s empowering embrace, as told through the eyes of 19-year-old Tish Rivers. A daughter and wife-to-be, Tish vividly recalls the passion, respect, and trust that have connected her and her artist fiancé Alonzo Hunt, who goes by the nickname Fonny. Friends since childhood, the devoted couple dream of a future together, but their plans are derailed when Fonny is arrested for a crime he did not commit. Tish knows that Fonny is innocent, and is mindful that his good friend Daniel Carty has only recently been freed after an unjust incarceration.

While Fonny’s mother clings to piety and his father grapples with feelings of powerlessness, Tish’s earthy father Joseph and fierce older sister Ernestine are unwavering in their support. Even more anxious to clear Fonny’s name is Tish’s deeply compassionate mother Sharon, readying to put herself on the line for her daughter and future son-in-law’s happiness—and for the couple’s unborn child, whose arrival will herald new joys and challenges.

“In a filmmaking style that approaches music” (Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival), director Barry Jenkins honors James Baldwin’s prescient words and imagery, charting the emotional currents navigated in an unforgiving and racially-biased world and poetically crossing time to show how love and humanity endure. Starring KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Emmy Award winner Regina King, Tony and Emmy Award nominee Brian Tyree Henry, Aunjanue Ellis, Michael Beach, Colman Domingo, and Teyonah Parris.

This screening is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America, on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts through December 30, 2018. Guests are invited to visit the Time is Now exhibition at CCVA until the screening begins at 6pm.

Co-sponsored by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard, and the Harvard Art Museums.

The screening will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway. Doors will open at 5:30pm.

Free admission, but seating is limited. Tickets will be distributed beginning at 5:30pm at the Broadway entrance. One ticket per person.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund.

Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America is co-organized by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Harvard Art Museums, and is curated by Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums.