Rare Films by Maya Angelou and Black Women Directors to Screen at Stanford

Maya Angelou is regarded world over as an American literary icon, but fewer people know that she was also a director and screenwriter. Kyéra Sterling, a doctoral candidate at Stanford, scoured numerous archives for Angelou’s rarely seen films, two of which she’s bringing to the university for But Some of Us Are Brave: A Black Women’s Film Festival.

“I think that so much of Angelou’s filmmaking and work trying to get behind the camera had to do with her own conviction that the work of poetics exists way beyond the page,” says Sterling.

But Some of Us Are Brave kicks off on April 10 at 7 p.m. with a talk with acclaimed author and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib; sculptor and sonic artist Yétúndé Olágbajú; and choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith, moderated by Stanford’s Sterling and Bryn Evans, who co-lead the university’s Black Studies Collective.

After the conversation, they’ll screen The Tapestry and Circles, two short films written by Alexis DeVeaux and directed by Angelou, who became the first Black woman to join the Directors Guild of America in 1975. These coming-of-age stories about young Black women originally broadcast in 1976 on KCET, Los Angeles’ PBS affiliate. The films haven’t been screened since 2021, when they were preserved at UCLA.

The festival continues on April 11 with a conversation with Oakland filmmaker Cheryl Fabio, whose recent documentaries cover homelessness in Alameda County and West Oakland’s overlooked blues legacy. A screening of Fabio’s first film will follow. Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah W. Fabio offers an intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s mother, an influential poet, educator and Black Arts Movement writer.

That film, too, proved challenging to track down in Stanford’s archives. That many of the works featured in But Some of Us Are Brave were nearly lost to time, Sterling says, is a continuation of the same systemic issues that kept Black women out of the film world in the first place. To Sterling, it underscores the need for events like these.

“Because of the kind of infatuation that art house cinema can have with auteurs, and the way that Hollywood is really specific in what it wants as well, I think these things just fall through the cracks,” Sterling says.

Sterling became inspired to make these rare films available to the public after she watched Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage, a 1991 documentary that includes interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan and Alice Walker. After seeing the film, Sterling learned that it was made available on the Criterion Channel thanks in large part to Hanif Abdurraqib’s advocacy.

“That’s actually what gave me the tenacity to be like ‘Wait, I had just heard about these [Maya Angelou] teleplays over at UCLA. Like let me get ’em,’” Sterling says.

A Place of Rage screens at But Some of Us Are Brave on April 11, along with Spin Cycle, a 1991 short film about Black lesbian identity by Oakland’s Aarin Burch.

At Stanford’s Oshman Hall, the free event will bring together the campus community, artists and film lovers from all over the Bay Area. Sterling hopes it’ll generate some fruitful conversations about how Black women tell and preserve their own stories, and how film can be part of advocacy during challenging political times.

“We can’t keep pretending that everything is normal,” she says. “Let’s really dig into what this moment means, and also recognize that we can do that without sort of feeling like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re in this unprecedented time.’ I think we have to look back and think about the notes and the advice and the lineage that we are a part of.”

But Some of Us Are Brave takes place at Stanford University’s Oshman Hall (355 Roth Way) on April 10, 7–10 p.m. and April 11, noon–4 p.m.