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Event Details

Date: Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020
Time: 4:15 p.m.
Location: Strand Theatre, 921 Main St.

The Film

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am offers an artful and intimate meditation on the life and works of the legendary storyteller and Nobel prize-winning author. From her childhood in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio to ’70s-era book tours with Muhammad Ali, from the front lines with Angela Davis to her own riverfront writing room, Toni Morrison leads an assembly of her peers, critics, and colleagues on an exploration of race, America, history, and the human condition as seen through the prism of her own literature.

Woven together with a rich collection of art, history, literature, and personality, the film includes discussions about her many critically acclaimed works, including novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, her role as an editor of iconic African-American literature, and her time teaching at Princeton University. Throughout, Morrison reflects on her lifelong deconstruction of the master narrative.

In addition to Morrison, the film features interviews with Hilton Als, Angela Davis, Fran Lebowitz, Walter Mosley, Sonia Sanchez, and Oprah Winfrey, who turned Morrison’s novel Beloved into a feature film.

Question and Answer Session

The film’s editor, Johanna Giebelhaus ’96, will be attending the screening and will be available for a question and answer session following the film. Giebelhaus has a passion for artful cinematic storytelling. She has produced and edited films for theater and television, including editing the critically acclaimed documentary feature God Grew Tired of Us, winner of Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award Sundance Film Festival and Deauville Film Festival; and producing and editing the theatrical feature film The Congressman, starring Treat Williams and Elizabeth Marvel.

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am is her second film with director Timothy Greenfield-­Sanders. In 2016, she edited HBO’s The Trans List, directed by Greenfield-­Sanders. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically distributed by Magnolia Pictures, screening at hundreds of theaters nationwide. The film went on to win the Critics Choice Award for Best Biographical Documentary. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am will premiere on PBS American Masters in 2020.

This film showing is free and open to the public. 

The event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, the Office of the President, the Office of Community Enhancement and Engagement, and the President’s Mellon Grant for Public Humanities.