Maya S Cade presents Losing ground (1982)
Wed, 19th Aug 2026 07:15 pm - 08:55 pm
Still from Losing ground 1982, photo: courtesy of Milestone Films Director Kathleen Collins, 1982, USA 86 min, 35mm-to-digital, colour, unclassified 15+ Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones Don't miss this screening of Losing ground, Kathleen Collins' landmark work of Black cinema. Guest curated and introduced by American critic Maya S Cade. One of the first features helmed by a Black American woman, Losing ground never screened outside the festival circuit during Collins' lifetime. It took three decades – and a restoration by Collins' daughter – for the film to make its way back into the public eye, where it was rightfully heralded as a nuanced, semi-autobiographical study of a Black woman's interiority and her entanglements. Seret Scott plays Sara, a philosophy professor who reluctantly joins her husband (Bill Gunn) at a languid summer retreat. Wandering eyes and beautiful strangers soon criss-cross in a web of desires, challenging both Sara's marriage and her quest for intellectual fulfilment. About the presenter Maya S Cade is the creator and curator of Black Film Archive and the inaugural CCDI scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. She has been awarded special distinctions by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics for the Archive. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Paris Review and Vulture, among other publications.
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