Accompanying Stan Douglas: Allegories of the Present at Griffin Art Projects, ReMIX History is a public program series including film screenings, conversations with curators and panels with artists and musicians.
The Road Taken (dir. Selwyn Jacobs), 1996, National Film Board of Canada
ReMIX History Film Series: Screening I
The ReMIX History film series consists of six powerful and fascinating shorts that illuminate the unrecorded histories and experiences of Black and diasporic communities. They reimagine these events and places through the lens of the embodied archive, showing the resilient ways that artists, individuals, and collectives have resisted discrimination and structural erasure.
The series starts off with two documentaries from the 1990s. Cornelia Wyngaarden and Andrea Fatona’s Hogan’s Alley (1994) tells the unrecorded history of Vancouver’s Black community, specifically Hogan’s Alley, between 1930 and the late 1960s, through the memories of three Black women. The second film, The Road Taken (1996) is directed by Selwyn Jacob and presents the experiences of Black sleeping-car porters who worked on Canada’s railways from the early 1900s through the 1960s. The harsh working conditions and racism they experienced led these men to successfully fight for the right to work in other areas of the railway, under the Canada Fair Employment Act.
Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden - Hogan’s Alley (1994), 32 minutes, Video Out
Selwyn Jacob - The Road Taken (1996), 52 minutes, NFB
The Road Taken (dir. Selwyn Jacobs), 1996, National Film Board of Canada