Kevin Jerome Everson

Kevin Jerome Everson and his collaborator Kahlil I. Pedizisai filmed the comings and goings in front of a trap house on Empire Street in Cleveland, Ohio. Loosely inspired by Andy Warhol's 1964 film "Empire," which also runs for eight hours.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s unique observational gaze collapses Hollywood histrionics and American carceral history into one frame, as a Moscow prison break scene from Andrew Marlowe’s original screenplay for Air Force One—read in affectless voiceover on the film’s soundtrack—is offset by handheld footage taken in the Ohio State Reformatory, where the scene was filmed.

Sanfield is a film about airmen training and working at Columbus Air Force Base 14th Flying Training Wing in Columbus, Mississippi. Through an observational approach, Kevin J. Everson continues his decade-long exploration of the lives of African-Americans in the fabric of white American society.

Me Broni Ba is a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi, Ghana. The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked through images of women practicing hair braiding on discarded white baby dolls from the West. The film unfolds through a series of vignettes, set against a child's story of migrating from Ghana to the United States. The film uncovers the meaning behind the Akan term of endearment, me broni ba, which means “my white baby.”

This immersive eight-hour documentary follows workers in a Virginia factory over the course of an entire day, from clock-in to clock-out. Long, unbroken sequences of assembly and fabrication focus on the bodies of African American and Vietnamese American workers, while both mobile and fixed cameras transform their acts into pure movement. Everson’s “shift-film” adjusts the frame on race, class, and labor, celebrating the everyday and imbuing working bodies with new dimensions.

In 1959 Mississippi, African-American siblings Borne and Gago must repair their vandalized school bus, facing systemic racism. With help from their community and Cassilee, the 'Queen of Catfish Alley', the teens learn history's lessons while pursuing education.

"A 16mm cinematic exploration of African American intellectual, social, and political life at the University of Virginia during the 1970s. Conceived and written by UVA History Professor and author Claudrena Harold and directed by Harold and UVA Professor of Art, filmmaker/artist Kevin Jerome Everson, the film stars Erin Stewart (the bank teller/race driver in Everson's 2006 feature film "Cinnamon") as Vivian Gordon (the director of UVA's Black Studies program between 1975 and 1980). The film tells the story of African-American women and men who through their public and private gestures sought to create a beloved community that thrived on intellectual exchange, self-critique, and human warmth." - Trilobite-Arts-DAC, Claudrena Harold, Picture Palace Pictures

Blind Huber is a film interpretation of a poem by the American writer Nick Flynn loosely based on the life of Francois Huber, the blind 18th Century beekeeper, who sat before a series of hives for fifty years unlocking an unknown world.

An enactment of the last days of Alessandro de’ Medici, who was named the first Duke of Florence in 1532. De Medici, born to an African servant in the Medici household, was assassinated by his cousin Lorenzino five years into his rule. Picking up on Everson’s 2012 short film Rhinoceros, the film broadens the scope of the artist’s look at the movement and backstories of people of African descent.

Portrait based on the first cinematic representation of Afro-American intimacy in the 1898 film Something Good-Negro Kiss.

Dooni is the eulogy, voiced by actor Timothy Johnson, of the American soul singer and disco legend Sylvester (1947-1988) as delivered by the gospel singer and preacher Walter Hawkins.

KJE captures the grand finale of Emancipation Day, the annual Detroit River Fireworks, in 2014. Founded by Walter Perry, Emancipation Day was celebrated in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, every August 1 from 1932–1967 to mark the anniversary of British Parliment’s abolishment of slavery in 1834. Also known as The Greatest Freedom Show on Earth, the festival was large enough at one time to double the city’s population. As Emancipation Day became increasingly associated with the Freedom Movement across the border, the Windsor Police Department and city council began to push against the event, eventually culminating in its cancellation in reaction to the Detroit rebellion in 1967.

How Can I Ever Be Late takes the tarmac arrival of Sly and the Family Stone as a point of departure: African American students of the University of Virginia greet the band at the airport in 1973.

Quality Control consists of a series of 16mm single take shots filmed in the summer of 2010,over a two day period, in a dry cleaners facility in Pritchard, Alabama, near Mobile, Quality Control exhibits the acts as well the conditions around labor and showcases, in Everson's words "the fine folks of Alabama producing a superior product." It is similar stylistically, in form and rhythm, to certain scenarios in Everson's award-winning and critically acclaimed previous films, including Erie (IFFR 2010) and in thematic concerns to several other short form works which follow the daily, quotidian tasks of workers in rest and in motion, and is an oblique sequel, ten years hence, to Everson's Creative Capital granted project A Week in the Hole (2001), which focused on an employee's adjustment to materials, time, space and personnel. - Written by Madeleine Molyneaux, producer

Radiating the radical simplicity of a Lumière actuality, THE MAYBERRY PRACTICE CALF shows an African-American cowboy roping a hunk of tire again and again. "Calf roping is a discipline," Kevin Jerome Everson told an interviewer. "People practice it, they know the language of it and they know how to do it." Everson's camera evinces a comparable degree of discipline, with a single long take functioning as a montage through the serial repetition of the cowboy's action. We may wonder if we're watching a loop but gradually our eyes are drawn to small variations. Practice makes perfect. - Max Goldberg

The art of the cutaway.

From Pompeii to Xenia puts in echo times of innocence struck by disaster: the lightning tornado which had beaten down on the American city of Xénia in 1974 answers, at thousands of kilometers in distance and centuries apart, the mythical eruption of Vesuvius in 79. The extended panorama, derived through the crossing of history and from an intimate story and urban sociology, is the cinematic reconstruction of a personal history: of its historical and geographical conditions to its processing.

American Motor Company (2010) is a film about mid-20th century African American migration. Has two men installing a billboard. The billboard is based on mid-20th century advertisement geared for African Americans to migrate north to work in the automobile factory during the industrial boom of the late 50s and early 60s. The title AMC refers to American Motor Company, a defunct automobile company. In collaboration with Carmen Higginbotham.

One of several Kevin Jerome Everson pieces regarding African-American rodeo riders, SECOND PLACE brings us inside the big show. The jerkily pixilated view of a bucking bull offers an aesthetic equivalent of the cowboy's wild ride while the film's silence lends an unexpected repose to the contest. Whether anticipating a bull's blasting out of the gate or watching an old hand stretch out his back, Everson's camera is ever-attentive to the action at the edge of the frame. - Max Goldberg

"Weidle's" was a delicatessen in the artist's hometown of Mansfield, Ohio that serviced the Northside community. In this 16mm silent short film, a neighborhood butcher in Charlottesville, Virginia is filmed as he prepares the goods.