Tongues Untied by Marlon T. Riggs

Thursday, March 6, 2025 | 6:00 pm (Doors at 5:30 p.m.)
SFAC Main Gallery, 401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94102
Free and open to the public

Tongues Untied
Directed by Marlon T. Riggs 1989 USA 55 mins
Film introduced by Brian Freeman

The seminal documentary on Black gay life, Tongues Untied (1989) uses poetry, personal testimony, rap, and performance (featuring poet Essex Hemphill and others) to describe the homophobia and racism that confront Black gay men. Directed by Marlon T. Riggs’ to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.”

This program is planned alongside the exhibition on view in the SFAC Main Gallery through May 3, 2025.

About Brian Freeman

Brian Freeman is a writer, director, filmmaker and performer who is best known for his featured roles in two groundbreaking and now classic films: The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye and TONGUES UNTIED by Marlon Riggs, with whom he collaborated on many films. By training a playwright, theatre director and performer, he was a member of the SF Mime Troupe and resident director with SF’s Cultural Odyssey, before co-founding Pomo Afro Homos, the groundbreaking 1990s Black queer performance troupe. Along with his work as a freelance director and dramaturg, his subsequent plays and solo performances have been presented at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in DC, Public Theatre in NYC, Berkeley Rep, Mark Taper Forum in LA, The Marsh, AfroSolo, Magic Theatre, Oakland Ensemble Theatre in the SanFrancisco/Bay area and many others nationally and internationally. He has taught playwriting, directing and the history of contemporary theatre and performance at UCLA, CalArts, San Francisco Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago and Colorado College. Awards include the Will Glickman Playwriting Award, a New York Dance & Performance Bessie Award, a Creative Capital Award and the CalArts/Herb Alpert Award in Theatre. He is currently developing a series of short experimental videos combining performance with archival images and footage.

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