Lakeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya appear in "Judas and the Black Messiah," which will screen as part of the Sundance Film Festival in Columbia.
It didn’t take long for The Luminal Theater to make a big impact in Columbia.
Curtis Caesar John, the executive director of the nomadic film organization that trumpets work produced by members of the world’s Black/African diaspora, moved to Columbia from Brooklyn last year, relocating with his wife who was from here originally.
Luminal quickly stepped into the void left with theaters stymied by the COVID-19 pandemic, hosting drive-in movies including “The Last Dragon” and “The Preacher’s Wife” outside the Spotlight Cinemas Capital 8. Not only did these screenings arrive at a time when many were starving for communal film-watching experiences, they brought them to the Dentsville area of Northeast Columbia, a majority-Black part of town that frequently gets left out when it comes to local arts events.
And it ended up helping the Luminal prove it was ready for a much bigger event — hosting one of 25 satellite locations for this year’s coronavirus-adjusted edition of Utah’s Sundance Film Festival, one of most visible and prestigious film events in the U.S. and the world at large. The screenings, held indoors at the Capital 8 from Jan. 28 to Feb. 3 with COVID-19 protocols in place, will be the only ones in either Carolina.
John said the connections Luminal has built across nearly six years were vital in landing this opportunity.
“We do and are connected to a lot of different film networks, here in the United States especially,” he explained. “It just came that way, just from us making sure that we maintain certain relationships in the community, with a lot of different partners. It’s not public, but we do advocacy work for different filmmakers in different sectors of the filmmaking world, and it was just due to us maintaining relationships and being a steady part of what’s going on in the film community that this opportunity came across our bow.”
The other part of the equation was finding local partners to help with the endeavor. The groundwork laid at the Captial 8 helped in that regard, as well as in showing Sundance that the Luminal could handle the headaches that would come with hosting screenings during a pandemic.
“That helped tremendously,” John said. “Because it showed that despite what’s happening we’re active on the ground trying to create opportunities for filmmakers here and in Northeast Columbia, and Columbia period, and providing those services for South Carolina. Because a decent part of us doing the drive-ins was also letting people know about Spotlight Cinemas that we set up right outside of, to let the community know that this is a space to come view films, independent films and Hollywood studio films.”
Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star in "Passing," another one of the Sundance films showing in Columbia.
In the coming days, people will indeed get a chance to see some intriguing films at the Capital 8. Columbia’s Sundance slate — presented for free thanks to an anonymous donor — is crowned by “Judas and the Black Messiah,” a narrative look at the FBI’s infiltration of the Illinois Black Panther party that stars Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield and is one of the biggest titles on the overall festival lineup.
The rest of the schedule puts a similar emphasis on diversity, with the Tessa Thompson-starring “Passing” (about a pair of African-American women who can “pass” as white in the 1920s) and “Homeroom” (a documentary that follows “the class of 2020 at Oakland High School in a year marked by seismic change”) also among the five Columbia films.
John is excited to bring such an event to town, and particularly to bring it to Northeast Columbia.
“You have to bring the art to where the people are,” John posited. “And yes, of course, people are downtown, too. But there’s a lot of people who through family reasons or historical reasons just don’t go downtown to access much of anything. And unfortunately it means they miss out on artistic opportunities. But the fact that there’s no significant amount of places out Northeast for people to really interact with the arts is a really negative thing.”
Omme-Salma Rahemtullah, a former employee at the Nickelodeon Theatre who helped the Luminal with its fall screenings, is similarly pleased to see this kind of programming happen outside the city center. The Nick, which is located on an increasingly gentrified block of Columbia’s Main Street, is the city’s lone arthouse cinema.
“What we’re seeing there in the independent arthouse is a white population in a city that’s 50/50,” she said, referring to the fact that about half of Columbia residents are minorities, with Blacks making up roughly 40 percent of the city’s population. “That is not reflected in any of the arts, not just independent films, any of the arts in this city.”
As to what Sundance’s presence in Columbia might do for those in the local filmmaking community, that remains to be seen.
Christopher Bickel, a locally based director specializing in horror, grabbed some national attention with his 2017 film “The Theta Girl,” and is hard at work on a similarly self-funded follow-up called “Bad Girls.” He said he doesn’t think Sundance coming here will impact him directly. But any bump to the city’s profile on the national film scene is welcome.
“I think anything that helps anybody working in the trenches here will sort of be a rising tide that lifts all the boats, I guess,” he offered. “I don’t know that it does anything for me personally, but I think for the Columbia film scene in general, it has to be a coup.”
For its part, Luminal is trying to involve local filmmakers as much as possible. Its online Beyond Film events surrounding the screenings include a (Re)Defining Carolina Film talk, with a panel of filmmakers, critics, arts administrators and other creatives, including Columbia filmmaker Roni Nicole Henderson, striving to “explore and redefine the identity of filmmaking and media making coming out of the region.” And Henderson and North Carolina’s Atinuke Akintola Diver will offer a special look at their Carolina Works-In-Progress.
“There’s a lot of people already working in the arts and in film here in the Columbia area. And in the state, period,” John said. “For me, it just brings more attention to the work that these folks will be doing.”
Sundance Film Festival
Jan. 28-Feb. 3. Spotlight Cinemas Captial 8 (and online). 201 Columbia Mall Blvd. Ste 211. Free (donations encouraged). luminaltheater.org/sundance.
