Framing Finding Christa: Black Feminisms and Films

This essay considers Camille Billops and perhaps her most famous film, Finding Christa (1991), in relation to other Black women filmmakers. Like Billops, Alile Sharon Larkin, one of the first Black women associated with the filmmakers based at UCLA who became known as the LA Rebellion, and Ayoka Chenzira, a central figure in the independent film world based in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, made films in which motherhood, agency, and meanings of blackness were urgent themes; all three considered the labor of mothering and the toll that labor took. Considering Finding Christa in this cultural and political context helps us to position Billops in sites and communities in which Black feminism was taking shape and circulating. This essay illuminates the different strategies that Black women filmmakers employed not simply to reflect, but to produce a multifaceted Black feminism, and interrogates the central role that motherhood played in this process.