Set in 1972 Los Angeles Tamika Miller's short-film Sarang Song explores a black lesbian couples attempts at managing their love for each other, and their love for justice. Lalana Masters (Simone) and Caryn Ward (Nessa) are student leaders seeking to midwife their campus's march toward having more black faculty members, a black studies department, and less police violence against black students and community members. Along with tending to these missions, Simone and Nessa must also tend to their relationship, an act that at times appears as daunting as their other pursuits.

 

Miller deftly captures the difficulties faced by students coming of age amidst such a turbulent epoch. Her fictional adaptation of UCLA draws on the real life crusade undertaken by black students at this venerable university's in the 60s and 70s. Like many artists who've meditated on this period in time, Miller adapts Angela Davis as her muse, and seemingly limns out this narrative from a variety of visual representations of Davis that have become synonymous with black radicalism in the early 70s. Tn so doing, the Black Panther party's eponymous black leather jackets and berets take a back seat to women and men outfitted in lush earth tones. The lighting weaves back and forth from dusk and dawn, eloquently drawing on California's most profound natural resource, the sun, to relay the urgency and speed of these women's actions, not to mention the cauldron in which they are embedded.

The website does not list any screenings beyond February 2007, but this film is one well worth screening