Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

On the closing weekend of For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability, join us for a special screening of the 4K release of San Diego-based filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis’ film Compensation (1999), in advance of its theatrical run with Janus Films in February. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Zeinabu irene Davis and moderated by Dr. Caroline Collins of UCSD.

The screening will take place at MOPA@SDMA, the original location of the film’s premiere in 1999. MCASD is pleased to partner with MOPA@SDMA on Davis’ hometown premiere of the newly restored film in conjunction with the Museum’s contribution to PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative of the Getty.

Your RSVP includes free admission to the MCASD when presented to the front desk.

6:20PM: Doors Open

6:30PM: Welcome & Introduction

6:35PM: Film Starts

8:10PM: Q&A with filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, moderated by Dr. Caroline Collins, Assistant Professor, Urban Studies at UCSD

A landmark of independent cinema, Compensation is Zeinabu irene Davis’s moving, ambitious portrait of the struggles of Deaf African Americans and the complexities of loving relationships at the bookends of the twentieth century. In extraordinary dual performances, Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks play Malindy and Arthur, a couple in 1910 Chicago, as well as Malaika and Nico, a couple living in the same city almost eighty years later. Their stories are deftly interwoven through the creative use of archival photography, an original score featuring ragtime and African percussion, and an editing style both lyrical and tender. Malindy, an industrious, intelligent dressmaker, falls for Arthur, an illiterate migrant from Mississippi, along the shore of Lake Michigan. On the same beach in the present, Malaika, an inspired and resilient graphic artist, softens before a brash yet endearing children’s librarian, Nico. Each pair faces the obstacles of their time as Black Americans, including structural racism and emerging pandemics. Compensation remains a groundbreaking story of inclusion and visibility that bears witness to the social forces and prejudices that stand in the way of love.

Zeinabu irene Davis is an independent filmmaker and Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, who works in narrative, experimental, and documentary genres. Her work is passionately concerned with the depiction of women of African descent. A selection of her award-winning works includes a drama about a young enslaved girl, Mother of the River (1996); a love story set in Afro-Ohio, A Powerful Thang (1991), and an experimental psycho-spiritual journey of a woman with Cycles (1989). Her dramatic film Compensation (1999) features two interrelated love stories that offer a view of Black Deaf culture. The film was selected for the dramatic competition at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. New Yorker critic Richard Brody named it one of the best American independent films of the 20th century. The film had its world premiere restoration at the 2024 New York Film Festival and, after 25 years, will have a theatrical run with Janus Films in February 2025, followed by a Blu Ray release by Criterion in August 2025. The film was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2024. In 2016, Zeinabu completed the documentary Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from Los Angeles, which won 7 awards, including the Best Feature Documentary & Audience Award from BlackStar. She recently completed a dramatic short about an experience of COVID-19 entitled Pandemic Bread, which won the Audience Award at the 2024 San Diego Filipino Film Festival. Zeinabu is working on a hybrid documentary, Stars of the Northern Sky, which tells the stories of abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley, and Marie Joseph Angelique.

Caroline Collins is an Assistant Professor of Social and Spatial Justice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego where she is also affiliated with the Democracy Lab, the Indigenous Futures Institute, and The Scripps Center for Marine Archeology. Her work examines public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. Dr. Collins is currently working with UC Press on her first book manuscript exploring the making of race and place at Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. Her second major research project examines Black folks’ long connections to what is now the U.S. Pacific. Dr. Collins' research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bylo Chacon Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / US Latino Digital Humanities Center, California Humanities, UCSD Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program, the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California Project, the Herbert I. Schiller Communication Dissertation Fellowship, and the UC Office of the President.