Programs Film at The Africa Center Presents 'Compensation'

Film at The Africa Center Presents Compensation

Join us on Thursday, February 26th  at 7:00PM for our Film at The Africa Center screening of Compensation, presented in partnership with African Film Festival, Inc. 

The screening will be followed by a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis.

Runtime: 92 minutes

Programs hosted at The Africa Center are free and open to all. Registration does not guarantee entrance, so we recommend that you arrive early.

The Film 

Compensation (dir. Zeinabu irene Davis) is a lyrical, dual-timeline film that follows two Deaf African American women as they navigate love, labor, illness, and survival. Through sign language, intertitles, and archival-inspired imagery, the film meditates on Black Deaf history, intimacy, and resilience across generations.

About the Director

Zeinabu irene Davis is an independent filmmaker and Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is comfortable working 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 Blue Ray release by Criterion in August 2025. The film has been 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 Angélique. 

About Film at The Africa Center

The Africa Center is proud to continue its ongoing partnership with African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF) to present a selection of films from the vibrant tapestry of African cinema. Since 1990, African Film Festival Inc. has curated a remarkable catalogue of classic films, independent films,  blockbuster films,  films not widely accessible to the general public, and more. The monthly screenings jointly presented with The Africa Center unsheathe the cinematic universes of Africa and its diaspora for new and growing audiences to experience and enjoy.

About our partners

African Film Festival, Inc. (AFF) is dedicated to advancing an enhanced understanding of African culture through the moving image. It offers diverse platforms for the wide distribution of African media through its flagship annual film festival and complementary year-round programming. AFF is committed to increasing visibility and recognition for African media artists by introducing African film and culture to a broad range of audiences in the United States and abroad, bypassing economic, class and racial barriers. In 1990, AFF’s founders established goals that continue to enrich the organization mission and organizational development: To use African cinema to promote and increase knowledge and understanding of African arts, literature and culture; To develop an audience for African films; To expand the opportunities for the distribution of African films in the United States and abroad.