The Department of African American Studies, the Student Learning Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) host a special screening of the film Compensation, followed by a Q&A with director Zeinabu irene Davis, writer Marc Arthur Chéry, and performer Christopher Smith, moderated by Language Exchange Program Coordinator at the Student Learning Center Quinta Seward.
Compensation depicts two Chicago love stories, one set at the dawn of the twentieth century and the other in contemporary times, featuring a deaf woman and a hearing man. Played by the same actors (Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks), both couples face the specter of death when confronted with tuberculosis in one story and AIDS in the next. Inspired by a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar (who died of tuberculosis in 1906, at the age of thirty-three), the film considers the ephemeral nature of love and life, while illustrating the enduring challenges of race and racism over the course of a century.