Stranger Inside

Directed by Cheryl Dunye

United States

EAST COAST PREMIERE

This powerful new film from award-winning director Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman) is an unflinching portrait of Treasure Lee, a young African American lesbian who's been in and out of jail for as long as she can remember. Treasure has learned that Margaret "Brownie" Lee, the mother she has never known and whom she'd long taken for dead, is actually serving a life sentence in the maximum security State Facility for Women, to which Treasure gets herself transferred.Ý From her first glimpse of Brownie bullying her way through a rough game of prison-yard basketball, Treasure's longing for her mother is breathtakingly visceral.Ý However, for Treasure, even in moments of release - hot soup smuggled into a cell, covert sex with another woman in the prison chapel - the stark cruelty of incarceration looms large.Ý Dunye effortlessly melds the gritty violence of 1970s exploitation flicks with the poetry and politics of her earlier, experimental lesbian-feminist work, and the combination is suprisingly effective.Ý From Yolanda Ross's vulnerable-but-hardened Treasure to Davenia McFadden's chillingly calculating Brownie to a drug-dealing Rain Phoenix (Joaquin and River's sister), the acting comes across as startlingly real.Ý Not to be missed, Stranger Inside, beautifully photographed and set to a soundtrack of hip-hop, a capella and the blues, touches the raw nerves of race, sex and family in unforgettable ways. ÝA 2001 Sundance Film Festival selection.Ý Director Cheryl Dunye will attend the screening and discuss her film with the audience.

7:00 PM Screening only $10

Film plus post-screening Samba Nights party at the Albion Hotel at 10:00 PM $20