This story is part of True/False Conversations, a series of in-depth interviews with the filmmakers of this year’s True/False Film Fest. Find the full series here.
Filmmakers Monica Henriquez and Louis Massiah recollect the life and lessons of longtime colleague Toni Cade Bambara in their new film, TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, screening at True/False this weekend.
All Bambara’s work in all its forms – whether writing, filmmaking, teaching, or organizing – was founded on community-rooted, people-first practices.
Decades in the making, directors Henriquez and Massiah mix archival footage of Bambara with interviews from those who shared her dedication to shaping a better world, including the voices of Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney and Haile Gerime. These intimate conversations introduce us to the Bambara who donned mini-skirts and greeted her colleagues with “Hey, sister.”
KBIA’s Scout Hudson spoke with the filmmakers about TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, and how the film’s distinctive name came in part from Bambara’s activism. Here's an excerpt from their conversation.
Monica Henriquez: I think it has to do with her, with Toni's, activism. But not only Toni's activism, although that's what it sounds — the way that I saw it was really a kind of biography of ideas. She had a lot of catch phrases or ways in which different generations of women — Black American women, but also [women] widely — they can relate. And they have to do with different areas of life, whether it’s feminism, whether it's community, whether it’s health. From what I gather, Louis wanted that kind of wide sense of what organizing can be.
I thought it just worked with the times and just worked as a kind of vehicle for embracing a dialogue with one that is no longer with us. But it’s really a dialogue with so many different generations of women that were close to her, their ideas about her. And Toni herself, her voice — the idea of organizing, for me, is a very wide and a very, kind of, non-regulated, let’s say, much more human and expansive notion, which I think she shared. So I guess that’s what I would say.
Hudson: So much of this film focuses on Toni’s role as an educator, and I was kind of curious how it felt to you two? To now be assuming some of that role as an educator trying to teach a larger public about her life, about her philosophies. How did that feel to engage with her concept, with her pedagogy of teaching?
Massiah: It was very much through Toni that I understood that teaching is cultural work. It is part of the same thrust as using film as a way of organizing communities.
Hudson: What do you think is so resonant about Toni Cade Bambara’s legacy?
Henriquez: Basic ideas. I mean basic ... notions of her[s] to do with struggle, to do with Blackness that I found — rather than limiting to race, or limiting to sex or gender or something like that – very expansive and very, you know, she was like a real opener of doors, rather than closing doors, or an inward-looking person. And that seemed extremely attractive to me, and extremely profound.
So many people want to chop the world into little segments so that we can consume it. Whereas, I think, she really had a very much more global — but from the community, you know, so grounded — but expansive [approach]. That was very profound.
