Filmmaker and Kade Professor Ines Johnson-Spain's Film at the HOP on April 9

The German Studies Department is delighted to welcome Ines Johnson-Spain as this spring's Kade Visiting Professor.

This quarter, Ines will be sharing her personal and professional experience, wisdom, and filmmaking know-how with students in her German-language seminar, Topics in German Creative Writing: Re-Appropriating One's Identity in Autobiographical Film. She will also meet with German Studies faculty from Dartmouth and the New England area for an overnight retreat to share and talk about her work in progress. Last but not least, on April 9 (6pm) the Hopkins Center will screen her documentary Becoming Black at Loew's Auditorium in the Black Center for the Arts.

In this deeply personal film, Ines confronts the experience of having grown up in a white East German family without being told that she is Black and chronicles her search for an identity that is her own.

In the 1960s, a white couple in East Berlin, the capital of the ostensibly anti-racist German Socialist Republic (GDR, or East Germany), tells their Black child that her skin color is accidental and of no significance. This is also what the girl prefers to believe, until by chance, she discovers the truth as a teenager.

Now in the role of filmmaker and protagonist, Ines reconstructs her family history, which is also a history of unequal relations between the socialist GDR and the decolonizing African countries, in an autobiographical essay film. In emotional and open conversations with her stepfather and half-brother, the burdens of silence, repression, deflection and denial feel visceral. Together with the moving encounters with her late-found family in Togo and Benin, Becoming Black develops into a deeply personal reflection on race, identity, social norms and concepts of family.

Discussion follows with director Ines Johnson-Spain and Leslie Center postdoctoral fellow Jeannette Oholi, moderated by Yuliya Komska. For more information, see the event listing. Free and unticketed, co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies, the Office of the Dean for International and Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Kade Foundation.

Article content and imagery provided by Becoming Black. Please visit the film's website here for more information.