Our health and safety policies may have recently changed. Click HERE to learn more.

Presented as part of the Out of the Archive: Black Women Behind the Lens series.

Followed by a post-screening Q&A with Blaine Greteman (UIowa English) and Deborah Whaley (UIowa English/African American Studies).

Liz White’s Othello was the first film version of Shakespeare’s tragedy that starred a Black man and remains the only Shakespearean film directed by a Black woman. The film adapts Shakespeare’s tragedy using an all-Black cast and crew (including music by Hugh Masekela) to reimagine the play in a way that addresses colorism in the Black community, Afrocentrism, and the Black Power Movement. Filmed between 1962 and 1966 at White’s Shearer Summer Theatre at Oak Bluffs, a historic Black community on Martha’s Vineyard, but unseen until 1980 and seldom thereafter, White’s radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s text is essential viewing.

Digitized 16mm print provided by the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University.