Compensation

The independent production follows two versions of a love story - one situated at the turn of the 20th century, and a parallel one in the 1990s - between a deaf woman and her boyfriend. The characters Malindy/Malaika and Arthur/Nico endure the difficulties inherent to intimacy despite different languages, and the one caused by financial survival.

Silence is prevalent through the film which, despite its atypical narration, stays transgenerationally coherent by the interpretation of the different-time characters by the same actors. Based on a 1906 poem, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, intraracial divergences are shared and overcome by the love story intended to be eternal, and evocating an underreported african-american past.

Duration: 95
Production year: 1999
Country: United States of America
Subtitles: EN, Subtitles: PT

Independent Spirit Awards 2000 - Nominated for Best Feature Film
Sundance Film Festival 2000 - Nominated for the Grand Jury Award

Zeinabu Irene Davis

The praised North-American director born in Pennsylvania, in 1961, started her academic studies at Brown University and at the university of Nairobi in Kenya - up until the moment when political repression led to the closure of her university. Inspired by the power in telling untold stories, Davis enrolled in UCLA’s Teathre, Television, and Cinema School, where she completed an M.A. in African Studies in 1985 and an M.F.A. in Film and Television Production in 1989. She then became associated with the pioneering movement of african-american filmmakers at UCLA, which would later be named L.A. Rebellion.

She has been acclaimed for her documentary and experimental filmography, which includes: Cycles (1989), awarded by the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, and the Black Programming Consortium; A Period Piece and A Powerful Thang (1991); Mother of the River (1995) and Compensation (1999), which explores dual life scenarios of an african-american woman in the early and late 20th century. Davis has recently concluded the documentary Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema (2015), an intimate chronicle of the black filmmakers connected to UCLA, and of what might constitute a “black film”.

Davis has received grants and funding from institutions, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts, and kept on teaching in schools such as the Antioch College, Northwestern University and UC San Diego.

Original title: Compensation

Zeinabu Irene Davis

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