The screening will be introduced by film curator Matthew Barrington. Across these two films, separated by over fifty years, filmmakers Paige Taul and William Greaves, reflect on questions relating to the experiences of the Black middle class.

Greaves’ seminal film is a continuation of his long-standing commitment to documentary filmmaking and public broadcasting. Over the course of his career he continually documented questions of politics, identity, culture, sport and music relating to African American communities. This included working as a producer for Black public affairs television series Black Journal. Shortly before beginning this role, Greaves completed Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class for the American National Educational Television (NET) network. In this film he seeks to understand who makes up the African American middle class, how this community thinks of itself, and what their aspirations are for the future. To respond to these questions, Greaves interviews businessmen, community leaders, housewives, and academics, creating a freewheeling survey of a frequently ignored community at an important moment in American history.

Paige Taul incorporates several sequences from Greaves’ film in her own approach to this question, 71. As she does in much of her work, Taul draws on the participation of family members, filming the interior spaces of a suburban housing complex whilst interviewing her mother Jessica Taul and aunt Pamela Patterson, and building her own personal engagement with what the middle class means in this context. By revisiting Still A Brother from such a distance, Taul’s film is able to reflect on the politics explored within Greaves’ work, and to draw comparison between these two distinct periods, resulting in a multigenerational conversation told across five decades.