Double Feature: Compensation (1999) and Killer of Sheep (1978)

Buy tickets on Eventbrite or with cash at the door

Compensation (1999)
⏰ doors 4:30p / starts 5p
Director: Zeinabu irene Davis
Starring: Michelle A. Banks, John Earl Jelks
Runtime: 92 min.
Language: English, American Sign Language

Killer of Sheep (1978)
⏰ doors 6:30p / starts 7p
Director: Charles Burnett
Starring: Henry G. Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy
Runtime: 80 min.
Language: English

Join us for a special collaborative DOUBLE FEATURE, featuring Compensation (2000) presented by Exposure Cinema and Killer of Sheep (1978) presented by Hard Light Cinema.

Feel free to join for one or both movies; $10 for one, $15 for both.

Compensation: doors 4:30pm, show 5pm, group discussion 6:30pm
Killer of Sheep: doors 6:30pm, show 7pm

Compensation (1999)

Taking its name from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Compensation traces two parallel love stories set in Chicago at opposite ends of the 20th century. In 1910, Malindy Brown, a deaf seamstress, falls for Arthur, a hearing laborer recently arrived from Mississippi. In the 1990s, another romance unfolds between Nico and Malaika (both couples portrayed in dual performances by Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks) echoing and diverging from one another in beautiful and tragic ways.

Deeply felt and sprawlingly intimate, Zeinabu Irene Davis’ Compensation is both a relic and a reckoning, a film that speaks the past in a language at once familiar and foreign. It acts as a profound bookend to a century marked by terror and tenderness, by heartbreak and transcendent love, and as a culmination of a cinematic movement sparked by filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, and Jamaa Fanaka, and carried forward by Davis, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, and countless others.

This film is one of my favorites of all time and is a vital piece of the American independent filmmaking canon. A work of staggering emotional depth and spiritual clarity, it wrestles with the burdens we inherit, those that keep us from joy, love, and communion, while offering something enduring, warm, and radical in return.

— Brandon Shillingford, Exposure Cinema

Killer of Sheep (1978)

Released in 1978, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep was a landmark accomplishment in the development of African American life on screen. Using grant money from the UCLA Film School, Burnett shot the film over the course of weekends in 1972 and 1973, with some additional shooting in 1975. The film follows the lives of residents in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, capturing a cinematic reality for black people that had not been seen on film before. Despite winning the critics award at the Berlin International film festival, seeing Killer of Sheep would be a massive struggle for most given a series of complications concerning the licensing of its music. It would receive an official release in 2007 with a 4K remaster being completed in 2025.

We hope you can join us at Studio Two Three on July 20th for our Double Feature beat the heat program with Exposure Cinema for a showcase of this spectacular film alongside fellow LA Rebellion Filmmaker Zeinabu Iirene Davis’s 1999 film Compensation.

— Kyle M-B, Hard Light