Images for Us, Chanting in Poesis

S. Pearl Sharp

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Price: $12*
Genre: Film/Video
Season: Fall 2025
DATE: OCT 6
IN-PERSON: MON, 8 PM
STREAM: MON, 8 PM (PT) (72 hours)
COUNTRY: USA
PROGRAM: Not yet available

* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff

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About

S. Pearl Sharp has been a foundational presence in the Los Angeles film and video community over the past 45 years. This program of five films celebrates Sharp’s creative lives as both a filmmaker and a poet.

Sharp’s film The Healing Passage: Voices from the Water (2004) poses the question: “How can we receive our own healing while we begrudge someone else theirs?” This arc of healing and the deep messy well of humanness characterize Sharp’s nonfiction portraits of Black art, history, and life. Sharp exists both inside and out of the frame of these films, as friend, peer, and fellow traveler, in search of beauty, care, and community alongside her film’s subjects. Other films reflect her role as poet and truth teller in Blood Bank (2022); as storyteller in Life Is a Saxophone (1985), as cultural historian in Voices from the Water (2004), and as witness in Back Inside Herself (1984/2009).

This program features a conversation with film programmer Jheanelle Brown and S. Pearl Sharp.

Presented in English and French with subtitles.

Sharp communicates with a power and economy that seem remarkable, considering that [Back Inside Herself] is her first film.

—

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

The Jack H. Skirball Series is organized by Jheanelle Brown.

about the artist

S. Pearl Sharp has focused on cultural arts, Black Diaspora history and wellness, working in radio, theater, music, literature, and in film on both sides of the camera. Her semi-animated short Picking Tribes (1988) is archived in the Women Make Movies collection of the Motion Picture Academy (AMPAS). Documentaries include The Healing Passage: Voices from fhe Water (2004) which aired on The Documentary Channel, Life Is a Saxophone (1985) on poet-griot Kamau Daáood, the controversial women’s health video It’s O.K. To Peek, produced with Arabella Chavers-Julien, and a dozen cultural arts docs for the City of Los Angeles’ Channel 35. She has put poetry on film in the shorts Back Inside Herself (1984), Channeled (2009), and Blood Bank (2022). Print publications include Black Women For Beginners and The Evening News, her collected commentaries and essays broadcast on NPR and Pacifica Radio Network. S. Pearl is a founding member of the Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers (BADWest) and one of her joys is mentoring new documentary filmmakers.