The Foreigner’s Home (Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree, 2018) Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree in Person

In 2006, the Louvre Museum invited celebrated author Toni Morrison to curate an exhibition featuring artists who explore the experience of cultural and social displacement. Morrison’s son Ford shot substantial footage of her time in Paris, but it was never made public.

In 2012, Morrison and the late director Jonathan Demme discussed the fate of the footage, and, given Morrison’s Ohio roots, Demme recommended that Oberlin College filmmakers and professors Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree take a closer look at it. The result of their work is The Foreigner’s Home, a moving documentary that incorporates the original footage of Morrison’s trip along with archival film, new music, and animation to both examine questions of race and identity and offer nuanced interpretations of “foreignness.” (57 mins., DCP) Brown and Pingree will introduce the presentation and take questions from the audience after the screening.