WILL
(Jessie Maple, 1981, 71 min, color, DCP)

The original working title of WILL (1981), the first feature film directed by Jessie Maple, was “Higher Ground,” reflecting the aspiration of the film’s titular protagonist (Obaka Adedunyo), a former basketball star struggling to rise above addiction by becoming a youth mentor and coach. It was also the goal of the film’s director, who fought to shatter ceilings as a Black woman working as a professional cinematographer and editor in commercial and documentary filmmaking throughout the 1970s, and as a film exhibitor who created a cinema in the basement of her Harlem brownstone to elevate some of the most significant emerging Black filmmakers of the 1980s.

WILL showcases Maple’s commitments to self-determination and collective uplift through a tough but tender narrative about recovery, mentorship, and second chances. Adedunyo’s fierce performance as Will is perfectly matched by the sensitivity of Loretta Devine (making her screen debut as Will’s wife Jean), and by the laid-back cool of Robert Dean’s “Little Brother,” a bright orphan threatened by drugs and poverty who becomes Will’s unlikely protégé. Maple and her husband, cinematographer Leroy Patton, bring the same clear-eyed yet affectionate lens to their characters as they do the streets, parks, and social spaces of Harlem, offering an antidote to sensationalized depictions of Black community in mainstream cinema.

Despite being the first feature film directed by an African-American woman, WILL has been difficult to see throughout much of the last four decades. That promises to change with the recent completion of a multi-year restoration effort by Indiana University’s Black Film Center & Archive (BFCA), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and the Center for African American Media Arts. Block Cinema is thrilled to present the Chicago debut of this new 4k restoration in conjunction with its fall series revisiting the Films by Women/Chicago ’74 festival.

Films by Women/Chicago ’74 did not (and could not have) included a feature film directed by an African-American woman. With this screening of WILL, the Block recognizes the work of filmmakers and exhibitors like Maple, as well as the many archivists and scholars who have labored in the years before and since the 1974 festival to produce, distribute, preserve, and revive this and other underseen works by women filmmakers of color.

The Block Museum thanks E. Danielle Butler, the Maple family, the Black FIlm Center/Archive, and Janus Films for their support of this program.

About FILMS BY WOMEN/CHICAGO ’74:

In September 1974, at the height of the feminist movement, the Film Center hosted Films By Women/Chicago ’74, a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions, drawing 10,000 patrons to over 70 short and feature films by women filmmakers. Organized by an all-woman collective with support from the Chicago Tribune, the festival offered a global survey of cinema from across its 60-year history. From mainstream Hollywood to activist documentary, arthouse to animation, it was the most diverse and expansive American survey of women’s cinema to date. It was also a watershed moment in Chicago cinema culture: according to committee member B. Ruby Rich, “women, for years after, would come up to me in the street to credit [us]—for jumpstarting their careers, ending their marriages, shaping their friendship.”

This fall, the Gene Siskel Film Center and Northwestern University’s Block Cinema will celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of Films by Women/Chicago ’74. Screening series at both venues. will revisit some of the festival’s most original and daring films and filmmakers, while reflecting on the event’s enduring legacies.

FREE & OPEN TO ALL

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Tags: 1981), Block Museum, Evanston, Jessie Maple, Northwestern University, WILL, WILL (Jessie Maple