In 2015, Collins’s daughter resurfaced and restored 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, right in Kathleen Collins’s home town, as one of our 25th Year Special Events.

Losing Ground upends every 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 life) and her abstract painter husband played by Bill Gunn (Ganja and Hess), a Rockland County neighbor who who was also multi-talented and 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.

Piermont and Nyack resident Kathleen Collins (1942-1988) made two groundbreaking films set in the river towns, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (50 minutes, 1978) 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. It’s rave reviews quickly led its first ever theatrical run, and had it received more than just a few screenings when it was made it would have been recognized as one of the most important and original films of its time (“A cinematic masterwork” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker). It was included in the National Film Registry in 2021.

“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

“A nearly lost masterwork… plays like the record of a life revealed in real time.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“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