Your Children Come Back to You

A film by Alile Sharon Larkin

1979 | 27 minutes | BW | 16mm | Subtitled | Order No. 99311

SYNOPSIS

YOUR CHILDREN COME BACK TO YOU is a contemporary allegory about values and assimilation. The film literalizes the meaning of a "mother country" by means of the story of a young girl, Tovi, torn between two surrogate mothers: one comfortably bourgeois, the other nationalist.

PRESS

"Director Alile Sharon Larkin’s film masterfully presents a child’s perspective on wealth and social inequality."

Samuel B. Prime

"(Larkin is) a young and original filmmaker whose pride and sensitivity is matched, happily, by an equal aesthetic sense…If there’s any other film as tender as this one, I haven’t seen it."

Ruby Rich The Chicago Reader

"One of the most ambitious, challenging works of its kind made by a Black woman."

Clyde Taylor Black Collegian

"This work provides a raw, revelatory glimpse of a single mother making ends meet, as seen through the eyes of her precocious daughter."

MoMA

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Time is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion
  • Environmental Film Festival
  • BlackPortraitures, South Africa
  • MoMA Film Series, It's All in Me: Black Heroines, 2020
  • Instituto Moreira Salles, L.A. Rebillion Film Series 201
  • BAMcinématek 2019 - Say It Loud: Cinema in the Age of Black Power 1966-1981
  • BAMcinématek 2017 - One Way or Another: Black Women's Cinema 1970-1991
  • Black Portraitures III, South Africa

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Alile Sharon Larkin

Alile Sharon Larkin is an acclaimed L.A. Rebellion filmmaker and multicultural artist-educator. Born in 1953 in Chicago, Larkin grew up in ethnically diverse neighborhoods in Altadena and Pasadena, California. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing (Humanities) from USC in 1975 where she won that year’s Moses Award in Creative Writing. Larkin earned her M.F.A. in Film and Television Production from UCLA and a teaching credential from CSULA, where she also began an M.A. in Storytelling.

Larkin is a grassroots, community-based filmmaker whose work has for decades, screened and broadcast nationally and internationally in diverse venues: community centers, libraries and universities; festivals and museum exhibitions; community cable and PBS stations.

Larkin has created award-winning narrative, documentary and dissolve-animation films including The Kitchen (1975), Miss Fluci Moses (1987), Dreadlocks and the Three Bears (1992), Warriors of the Rainbow: Children Storytellers (1996), Mz Medusa (1998) and Tie-Dye: A Children’s Music DVD (2016).

For over 25 years, Larkin made filmmaking a part of her public school elementary classroom curriculum. She was awarded ten Video in the Classroom Awards (VICs) from KLCS-TV for teacher-produced videos documenting student learning about textile arts, storytelling, yoga, jazz, women's history, Kwanzaa and African-inspired dance.

Larkin continues to create art and media that affirm and celebrate global Black life through Dreadlocks and the Three Bears Productions. Her award-winning children’s video Dreadlocks and the Three Bears which is now a picture book and the Tie-Dye music videos can be accessed from her website. (9/21)

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