Screening Dates
  • February 15, 2019 8:30
  • February 16, 2019 6:30
  • February 17, 2019 8:30
  • February 18, 2019 6:30
New Restoration

“The most original and intellectually ambitious of all blaxploitation films of the ​’70s.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Resurrected from the dead in a dynamic new restoration, writer-director Bill Gunn’s long-neglected Ganja & Hess, a radical, inventive mix of vampire horror and blaxploitation, has been called ​“the most ambitious ​‘black movie’ of its day” (Tony Rayns, Time Out) and ​“nothing short of a masterpiece of ​’70s American cinema” (Metrograph, NY). When wealthy African-American anthropologist Hess Green (Night of the Living Dead​’s Duane Jones) is stabbed by a ceremonial dagger from an ancient Black civilization, he’s transformed into an immortal with an insatiable hunger for blood. Marlene Clark plays love-interest Ganja; Gunn is Hess’s unhinged assistant. Gunn’s stylish film, fêted at Cannes, never stints on gore and nudity but was too full of formal experimentation and heady ideas—on race, religion, colonialism, cultural assimilation, and desire—to hit with the grindhouse crowd to which it was marketed. This restoration revives Gunn’s original, full-length version. Spike Lee’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus was a remake.

“Ingenious … Four decades on, Ganja & Hess still packs a primal punch.”

Scott Foundas, Variety
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