Hurricane Katrina
Toni Morrison at the Louvre
The Foreigner’s Home is a feature-length documentary film that explores the vision and work of Toni Morrison through “The Foreigner’s Home,” the 2006 exhibition she guest-curated at the Louvre. Morrison invited renowned artists whose work also deals with the experience of cultural and social displacement to join her in a public conversation that she had been pursuing for years through her own research and writing and in her teaching at Princeton University. The film expands that conversation, combining exclusive and unreleased footage of the Nobel Laureate in dialogue with artists—first, in Paris in 2006 and then, in 2015, at her home in New York state—with extensive archival film footage, music, and still images to present a series of candid and incisive exchanges about race, identity, “foreignness,” and art’s redemptive power.
We are thrilled to announce that The Foreigner's Home will have its World Premiere this January at the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Netherlands. The film is part of IFFR's program Pan-African Cinema Today for January 26 & 28. See more details HERE.
Filmmakers
Rian Brown
Rian Brown is an independent filmmaker, visual artist, and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. She earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from the University of California San Diego before coming to teach at Oberlin. For the past two decades has written, produced, and directed many short films including Into the Scrum, Presence of Water, The Settler, and Death of the Moth, which have screened internationally at film festivals and museums including the L.A. Hammer Museum of Art, Cleveland Cinematheque, Harvard Film Archive, The Wexner Center for the Arts, . . . READ MORE
Jonathan Demme
Jonathan Demme began his career as a writer and producer with Roger Corman in 1971 and directed and produced more than 40 movies. His films have been nominated for 20 Academy Awards, including Beloved, Melvin and Howard, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, and Silence of the Lambs, for which he won the Oscar for Best Director in 1991 . . . READ MORE
Geoff Pingree
Geoff Pingree is an Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, a photographer, a writer, and Professor of Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. He earned both a master’s and doctorate in English and American Literature and Film Studies at the University of Chicago and, before coming to Oberlin, worked in public television in Washington, DC, where he also directed Catholic University’s Program in Media Studies and George Washington University’s Institute for Documentary Filmmaking. His film work has been broadcast on venues including PBS and Discovery . . . READ MORE
Ford Morrison
Ford Morrison was born in Washington DC on June 18 1961. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Architectural Association in London. Morrison, based in New York since 1992, is an Architect for Princeton University's Plasma Physics Laboratory . . . READ MORE
" The destiny of the twenty-first century
will be shaped by the possibility or collapse of a shareable world." – Toni Morrison
Film Subjects
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is recognized as one of the most influential writers in American literary history. In 1993, she was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her eleven major novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home, and God Help the Child—have earned extensive critical acclaim. She received the National Book Critics Award in 1978 for Song of Solomon and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved . . . READ MORE
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously, and Claire of the Sea Light. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2. . . READ MORE
TONI MORRISON AT THE LOUVRE
Music of The Foreigner's Home
As filmmakers at Oberlin College, we are lucky enough to have ongoing relationships with students and faculty at the world-renowned Oberlin Conservatory of Music. During the film’s five-year production, we worked with many of the Conservatory’s most creative and talented students—the great musicians of tomorrow. For the first three years, through numerous rough cuts, the film was held together by student-created work that set the tone and rhythm of the piece. Later, we had the privilege of working with two of the Conservatory’s best composers, Jay Ashby, a Grammy winning producer and performer who has recorded with some of the industry’s top jazz artists, and Peter V. Swendsen, an innovator whose recent work combines field recordings and acoustic instruments with electronics and who is currently chair of the Technology in Music and the Related Arts Department. Through Jay and Peter, we were able to work with prominent Conservatory alumni and friends, including Sullivan Fortner and Kim Nazarin, and to record the film’s score at Clonick Hall, a state of the art recording studio and performance space. The original score, born of an intense and careful collaboration among the directors and composers, captures the urgency and hope of Toni Morrison’s vision. View videos about our music makers.
JAY ASHBY
Jay Ashby is a four-time GRAMMY winning producer and has received multiple nominations in other categories, including Arranging and Engineering. A “consummate musician” whose talents “know few bounds” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), Ashby has performed, toured, and recorded with some of the most renowned jazz artists in the industry for over 30 years . . . READ MORE
PETER SWENDSEN
Peter V. Swendsen is interested in creating a sense of place for performers and listeners, often by using field recordings and real-world processes in music that combines acoustic instruments with electronics. Several such pieces are featured on his recent CD, Allusions to Seasons and Weather. In 2016, he premiered What Noises Remain . . . READ MORE
Who is the Foreigner?
"The relocation of peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home
and expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship
to clarifications of foreignness." – Toni Morrison
Slave Family
Rosa Parks
Slam Poet at the Louvre
Syrian Refugees
Syrian Refugees
Tunisian Refugees
Tunisian Refugees
