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Sunday, June 22, 2014, UCLA Film & Television Archive will present a special screening of Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, 25 years after its debut.
Produced in part with funding from PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the film’s screening on PBS’s POV series ignited a cultural firestorm over public arts funding, galvanizing a debate around what audiences considered such funding was intended for—and for whom it was allowed to speak.
In a piece for PBS, filmmaker Yance Ford, a POV series producer, reflects on the continuing influence of Riggs’ film, and why it remains as powerful today as when it first debuted.
A key influence on Rodney Evans’ arthouse hit Brother to Brother (2004), also screening June 22, Tongues’ outcry continues to echo through queer film history, and speaks eloquently to the renewed debate over gay Americans’ right to a place in mainstream culture.
The special double feature of Tongues Untied (1989) and Brother to Brother (2004) unspools June 22 at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village as part of the Archive’s Outfest UCLA Legacy Project screening series.
—John Kostka, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies.
