25TH YEAR SPECIAL EVENT

In 2015, Kathleen Collins’s daughter finished restoring her writings, plays, and films. This was quickly followed by the international aclaim that Kathleen Collins should have received in her lifetime but sadly did not. Rivertown Film is excited to present Losing Ground in a rare screening, a few miles from Kathleen Collins’s home, as one of our 25th Year Special Events. Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker, “had it screened widely in its time, it would have marked film history.” Instead, it took decades before it received that recognition.

Losing Ground upends the stereotype of black American life in the 1980s, when it was made. The main characters are Seret Scott’s philosophy professor (loosely based on Collins’s own experiences) and her abstract painter husband played by Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess), a Rockland County neighbor who, like Collins, also received more acclaim decades after he died than when he was alive. He declares himself, with irony, “a genuine Black success” after selling a painting to a major museum, and decides the couple should leave New York City and head off to the country for the summer, picking Haverstraw because he feels drawn to the landscape, the light, and “those Puerto Rican ladies.” This sets off an existential crisis for Scott’s character. Watching it is pure pleasure for anyone who enjoys grappling with issues of representation and art, exclusion and appropriation, abstraction and narrative, intellect and emotion, feminism and race, human development and aging.

While living in Piermont and Nyack, Kathleen Collins (1942-1988) made two groundbreaking films set in Piermont, Nyack, and Haverstraw, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (50 minutes, 1978, shown on PBS) and Losing Ground (84 minutes, 1982), one of the first feature films directed by a Black woman. Both of these films were featured in the seminal Film Society of Lincoln Center series, “Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986,” presented in 2015, at which Losing Ground was the opening film. Rave reviews quickly led its first ever theatrical run and American and international exhibition and acclaim. It was included in the National Film Registry in 2021.

Stay for a discussion with Kathleen Collins’ daughter, Nina, and son, Emilio, moderated by Liani Greaves.

Nina Lorez Collins was born in New York City in 1969 and attended Barnard College. She had a long career in book publishing, first as a scout and then as an agent. She completed a Masters in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and become a certified Life Coach with IPEC. She has four children and lives in Brooklyn, where she is a trustee of The Brooklyn Public Library.

Emilio Collins is Partner and Chief Business Officer at Excel Sports Management, an industry-leading management and marketing agency that represents talent, brands and sports properties. He joined Excel in 2017 after a 15-year career at the National Basketball Association, where he served as Executive Vice President of Global Marketing Partnerships.

Our discussion moderator, Liani Greaves, has worked for over 20 years as producer, fundraiser, and special projects manager, and is now certified Health & Wellness Coach. Her grandfather, William Greaves (1926 – 2014), was a well-known filmmaker. His film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Part 1 (1968), on which Kathleen Collins worked as a production assistant, appeared in the same series at Lincoln Center that Losing Ground was rediscovered in. She is the producer of a film about the Harlem Renaissance, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, begun by William Greaves and completed by his son, David, that premiers at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2026.

REVIEW QUOTES

“Feels like news, like a bulletin from a vital and as-yet-unexplored dimension of reality… This movie is fascinating — a puzzle and a marvel, eliciting wonder and provoking questions.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“The movie is a nearly lost masterwork. It’s the only feature that Collins—who died in 1988, at the age of forty-six—made. Had it screened widely in its time, it would have marked film history.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“It is still exceedingly rare to watch a film like Losing Ground, which considers the existential, personal, and romantic dimensions of a middle-class black woman free of easy categorization or stereotype. – Angelica Jade Bastien, Vulture/New York Magazine

“It’s a tale of an artist like [Federico] Fellini’s film 8½ but for Black women instead of sexist men. By the end of the film, a hole deep in my psyche had been filled, but one I hadn’t even known existed before seeing this.” – Kristen Kim, Vice

“That Losing Ground still feels fresh, over 3 decades later, is not only a testament to its timelessness, but also is sadly indicative of how scarce complex depictions of the inner lives of women—specifically black women—are, in contemporary American cinema.”
—Tambay A. Obenson, Shadow and Act

“A story of emotional distress and creative striving among the black intelligentsia, with the wobbly marriage of a painter and a philosophy professor at its center, the film casts a highly individual spell. Driven as much by mood and setting as by plot, it follows the main couple, Sara (Seret Scott) and Victor (Bill Gunn), from the busyness of New York to the pastoral calm of the town upstate where they take a house for the summer. Victor is enchanted by the natural beauty and the local beauties, one of whom becomes his model and muse. Sara, meanwhile, agrees to appear in a student film alongside a charismatic actor (Duane Jones) whose deep voice and enigmatic utterances fascinate her.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“It’s by no means an exaggeration to say that Losing Ground is one of the most important and original American films of the second half of the 20th century. You really must watch it, for it is nothing but criminal that a work of this kind of genius is practically unknown.”
– Charles Mudede, The Stranger

“Dreamy, meaty, and deeply intellectual, Losing Ground is remarkable because of its focus on the interior lives, class and gender dynamics, emotions, and dreams of the Black characters it depicts, specifically regarding the woman at the center of the film, Sara Rogers (played perfectly by Seret Scott).” – Jasmyne Keimig, The Stranger

“That Losing Ground  still feels fresh, over three decades later, is not only a testament to its timelessness, but also is sadly indicative of how scarce complex depictions of the inner lives of women — specifically black women — are, in contemporary American cinema; especially when handled with such majesty.” – Tambay Obenson, IndieWire

“There are moments in Losing Ground — the 1982 independent film written, edited, and directed by Kathleen Collins — that are so rich in mood, texture, and longing I can’t catch my breath.” – Angelica Jade Bastién, New York Magazine

“This low-budget 1982 drama was one of the first features directed by an African-American woman, but it’s much more than a historical footnote. Formally and intellectually ambitious, it moves daringly between Bergman-esque psychodrama and probing conversations on philosophy, race, and religion.” – Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader

“Losing Ground astonishes with its assurance, subtlety, and style.” – Peter Keough, Boston Globe