The Foreigner's Home

Executive Produced by Jonathan Demme

FEATURING TONI MORRISON

Who IS the foreigner? Am I the foreigner in my own home? Who decides? Such were the questions posed by renowned author Toni Morrison at her 2006 guest-curated exhibit at the Louvre, "The Foreigner's Home". There she invited several renowned artists whose work also dealt with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public discussion that Morrison herself had been pursuing through her own research and writing.

This film expands that discussion by integrating exclusive footage of the Nobel Laureate in dialogue with artists in 2006 with a sit-down conversation in her own home with fellow writer Edwidge Danticat in 2015. The film also draws on extensive archival film footage, musical performances, and animation to frame a series of candid exchanges about race, identity, and art's redemptive power. In this way, The Foreigner's Home explores the idea of "foreignness" and highlights art's crucial role in both understanding and addressing the increasingly urgent problems that surround it.

FEATURED IN THE FILM

Toni Morrison
Edwidge Danticat, Writer
Charles Burnett, Film Director
Kendrick Lamar, Musician

SPEAKER AVAILABLE

Director/Producer/Editor/Animator Rian Brown is also an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. Her overall work focuses on women's issues, social justice, and experimenting with new forms of animation and time-based art. In 2015, she and colleague Geoff Pingree weere awarded grants from both the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford foundation's Just Films initiative for the production of The Foreigner's Home.

Director/Producer/Editor/Writer Geoff Pingree serves as a Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. He also directs StoryLens, a non-profit organization that produces short independent documentary films about pression social issues in order to promote education, encourage public dialogue, and facilitate political change.

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Preview link available upon request. Contact support@videoproject for more information

FILMMAKERS' STATEMENT: "Despite Morrison's incalculable cultural and social influence, no non-fiction motion pictures exist that seriously engage her work and ideas. Our film addresses this gap.

We saw Toni Morrison as something like a prophet, bravely confronting those in power and speaking the truth about the tragic plight of millions in the world today displaced by wars, hostile governments, natural disasters, and intolerance of 'others'. We wanted to create a visual and aural world rich and bold enough to both support and engage this vision of art and its unique place in society.

Made with her blessing, The Foreigner's Home grapples with the ongoing human struggle for liberation, identity, and community to which she speaks in her larger body of writing and reaffirms her conviction -- expressed in "The Foreigner's Home," -- that art, which ignites the kind of open exchange essential to the life of any genuine community, is 'vital to what it means to be human'.

More than anything else, we hoped to convey the urgency and import of the incisive warning she issued ten years ago: 'The destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world.'"

Preview link available upon request. Contact support@videoproject for more information

A Film By Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree

56 minutes

Scene Selection • Closed Captioned

Grades 9 - Adult

Item #: TFH-1142

Explores the idea of "foreignness" and highlights art's crucial role in both understanding and addressing the increasingly urgent problems that surround it.

Starting at $89

Licensing Options

K - 12 Schools, Public Libraries, Non-Profits - $89 K-12 DVD + Digital File - $139 Colleges, Businesses, Institutions: DVD - $345 Colleges (DVD with Digital Site License) - $495 Community Screenings: Please Complete 'Host a Screening' Form found on top menu bar K-12 School District pricing available. Please inquire at [email protected]

Reviews and Festivals

"A compelling and poetic film that explores two central concepts in Toni Morrison's work; the foreigner and the home...Eloquently poses fundamental questions of our time: Who is the foreigner? How long does a foreigner remain a foreigner? Who decides what is the relationship between houselessness (lacking lodging) and homelessness (existential or politically imposed unbelonging)? Throughout the film, Toni Morrison's words and visions engage us into a conversation which is vital to understanding: 'what does it mean to be human?'"

— Professor Shahram Khosravi, Anthropology Book Forum

"An intriguing glimpse into Morrison's intellectual and artistic vision and how art can elicit powerful conversations about the human condition."

— Library Journal

"Offers plentiful food for thought about the relationship between art and politics, belonging and estrangement."

— Video Librarian

"The film is beautifully done and (surprisingly) au courant"

— Toni Morrison

"This alternately harrowing and inspiring film fuses recordings from [Toni Morrison's 2006 guest-curated Louvre exhibit] with hauntingly beautiful animation, archival materieals representing a troubled global history of inequity, and a new interview with Morrison, who is, as always, wise and incisive."

— Miami Film Festival

"The film is a provocative and timely meditation on race, identity, foreignness, and the redemptive power of art."

— Ashland Independent Film Festival

"The words are straightforward, but the haunting music, animated scenes, and the logic of poetry reach unquestionable peaks of deep emotion."

— Miguel Pendás, Filmfest DC

"An exploration of race, immigration, and othering a people, via a conversation between authors Edweidge Danticat and Toni Morrison...This is a great sister piece to Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro: both deal with the world of art, race, and the history/reality of the United States"

— The Wolves of Little Havana

"The Foreigner's Home is unique in its focus on Ms. Morrison's curated exhibition at The Louvre. [Her] analysis of what it means to be labeled "foreign" within one's own nation of birth and abroad speaks profoundly to current debates on citizenship, making clear the relevance of this issue for Black people in the US and abroad."

— Meredith Miranda Gadsby Peterson, Assoc Prof of Africana Studies, Oberlin College

"Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree's multilayered portrait of Morrison underscores the significance of the author's powerful admonition of violence and oppression perpetrated against the weak and marginalized...The directors weave together interviews, archival footage, and breathtaking hand-painted animations to create a stunning account of a world in peril and a brilliant mind who tried to warn us."

— Alberto Zambenedetti, Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto

"Ms. Morrison's compelling insights into race, class, violence, the power of language, and teh necessity of art are illustrated and illuminated by this incredibly beautiful, perfectly-paced, and deeply moving work."

— Chris Seibert, Cleveland Public Theatre

SCREENED AT

The Uffizi Gallery

The Cleveland Museum of Art

LA Hammer

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Columbia University

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Wexner Center for the Arts

WINNER

Montreal International Black Film Festival, Best Mid-Length Documentary

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Toronto Black Film Festival

Santa Fe Independent Film Festival

Citizen Jane Film Festival

Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival

The Greater Urban Cleveland Film Festival

Rotterdam International Film Festival

Miami International Film Festival

Ashland Independent Film Festival

Harlem International Film Festival

Filmfest DC

International Documentary Film Festival Millennium

BAM Cinemetek, New Voices in Black Cinema

BFI London Film Festival

Indie Memphis Nights

New Hope International Film Festival

Lo schermo dell'arte Film Festival

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The Foreigner's Home

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