Watching the Way You Move: An Evening with Kevin Jerome Everson

Simca Vega Cricket, ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Watching the Way You Move: An Evening with Kevin Jerome Everson

Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

West Coast premieres and one world premiere!

NOTE THE CHANGE IN DAY

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

Filmforum welcomes back Kevin Jerome Everson with a compelling array of recent work (and one from 2016), ranging from observations of bird-watchers to a powerful examination of the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, to a short tribute to Gail Fisher, the first Black woman to win an Emmy. It’s difficult to encapsulate the range of Everson’s prolific and varied films. He creates a wide array of distilled interpretations of aspects of Black life in the USA, in part producing an archive of lived experiences that have been erased in dominant culture. An artist, not a documentarian, he erases the line between staging and verité, and, through his films, insists on and deliberately enacts the presence and importance of family, labor, athletics, art-making, politics, and community. He listens to the echoes of people in empty spaces, revalorizes almost-forgotten historical figures, and arranges performances for the camera of actions that are regularly carried out without being recorded or appreciated. Every time we host Everson, we share in the beauty and energy of the ever-growing project of his film artistry. Please join us for some of his latest work. – Adam Hyman

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965 Mansfield, OH, lives and works in Charlottesville, VA) is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Studio Art, Director of Studio Arts, University of Virginia. Everson's art practice encompasses printmaking, sculpture, photography and film, including 13 features and over 300 solo & collaborative shorts. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Berlin Prize, Heinz Award, Alpert Award, and Rome Prize, & grants and commissions from Ford Foundation/Just Films, Knight Foundation, The Brick & Creative Capital among others.

A 3 DVD boxed set, Broad Daylight and Other Times, was released by Video Data Bank in 2011 and a DVD dedicated to films focusing on the rituals and gestures of labor, I Really Hear That: Quality Control and Other Works was released by VDB in 2017. His ongoing ‘Black Fire’ film collaboration with UVA colleague Claudrena N. Harold includes 13 films to date and the 2025 VDB release Can You Move Like This. The two disc blu-ray How You Live Your Story: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson was released by the UK based boutique label Second Run DVD in Fall 2020 and Park Lanes, a two-disc special edition blu-ray with essays and interviews by Michael B. Gillespie, Matthew Barrington and Elena Gorfinkel was released by Second Run in February 2025.

There will be an additional different program with Kevin Jerome Everson on Saturday May 9, 2026 at the Academy Museum. https://www.academymuseum.org/calendar

Special Thanks to Madeleine Molyneaux, Kate Lain, the Academy Museum.

Films appear courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Cactus Wren ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Cactus Wren

2024. 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 3:10. West Coast premiere!

A film about a birdwatcher looking for the state bird of Arizona as well as seven other states. (Premiered at National Gallery of Art, 2024)

Hough 66, ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Hough 66

2023, 16mm transferred to digital, b&w, silent, 7:18. West Coast premiere!

has the talented firebreather Fuego Mansa Mufasa exhibiting the visuals of the 1966 Cleveland Ohio uprising. (World Premiere, Doc Fortnight (MoMA NYC) March 2023.)

If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move, ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move

US, 2023, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 12:20. West Coast premiere!

If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move features Derek “Dripp” Whitfield Jr. and Taymond “ChoSkii” Hughes of the music group BmE composing and recording their latest composition, “Shiesty”, in the Columbus, Mississippi studio of Jermaine “Country Blakk Brown only to be interrupted by a John Cage score. (World Premiere Berlinale 2023: Cinema du Reel (intl Competition); New York Film Festival + over 15 international festival screenings)

Simca Vega Cricket, ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Simca Vega Cricket

2025, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 2:10. World premiere!

Simca Vega Cricket are the automobiles that the actor Gail Fisher, the first Black woman to win an Emmy, as the secretary Peggy Fair, drove in the United States hit television show Mannix.

Necessary Trip, ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Necessary Trip

2025, 16mm to digital, b&w, sound, 4:50. West Coast premiere!

About a heyday of vice in Mansfield Ohio when it used to be called Little Chicago. (Premiere: Prismatic Ground, May 2025)

Banging on Their Bars in Rhythm, ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Banging on Their Bars in Rhythm

2024, 16mm to digital, b&w, sound, 11:36. West Coast premiere!

Contrasty black and white footage of the old Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio which also creates the sound on the audio track. The title is from the film script for Air Force One (1997) which (like The Shawshank Redemption) was filmed on location at the reformatory. (World Premiere, First Look/Museum of Moving Image, March 2024)

“Banging on Their Bars in Rhythm is another in Everson’s recent suite of films made in the now-decommissioned State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. These films are potent works, not just because of the physical history of the prison, which of course reflects the misery of inmates from across several eras. Everson keeps finding different ways to represent the prison space, resulting in provocative variations on the theme. Banging on Their Bars is maybe the most shocking of these films; in it, Everson moves his camera at different angles to turn the prison bars into an abstract set of black lines on a white field. The soundtrack, meanwhile, mirrors this formal approach, since it is composed of the images of the bars traveling along the projector head. With its graceful, handheld spatial disorientations, Banging feels like a distant cousin to Ernie Gehr’s Side / Walk / Shuttle, while the minimalist striping resembles Tony Conrad or Lis Rhodes. There is something genuinely disturbing about Everson’s use of the Reformatory to generate such formalist images, and this frisson makes Banging one of Everson’s most impressive films.” - Michael Sicinski, In Review Online, https://inreviewonline.com/2024/03/19/illuminations-program-elsewhere-here/

Out of State Plates

2026, 16mm to digital, b&w, silent, 3:24. West Coast premiere!

A film about the dangers of driving in the south during the Freedom Summer of 1964. (World Premiere: Odds & Ends Festival, Charlottesville, 2026)

Eason

2016, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 15:00

Commissioned by the Scribe Video Center, part of the one-hundred anniversary of the great Black migration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Eason is loosely based on the life of James Walker Hood Eason (1886-1923) a long-time member of the UNIA of Philadelphia. Filmed in Philadelphia, Salisbury, North Carolina, and New Orleans.

California Quail

2024, 16mm to digital, b&w, sound, 3:14. West Coast premiere!

A film about a birdwatcher looking for the state bird of California and Arizona.