Tomorrow’s Promises: The Restored Films of Edward Owens

Friday, April 7 at 8:00 PM — Gene Siskel Film Center — 164 N State Street
Tickets: $13 at the door, or purchase in advance

Tomorrow’s Promises: The Restored Films of Edward Owens
1966 – 1970
By the age of twenty-one, South Side native Edward Owens had won a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied under Gregory Markopoulos, carved out a precarious place among New York’s queer underground, met Andy Warhol, and made a quartet of distinctive films that screened around the globe. Then his filmmaking career abruptly stopped, never to resume, while the films remained in the collection of the Film-Makers’ Coop, unrented and unseen for thirty-five years. Now newly restored, Owens’s work demonstrates the outsized influence of his mentors but also points the way to a uniquely personal and interior cinema — home movie portraits composed with an almost beatific glow, the subjects simultaneously intimate and larger-than-life. As the only known gay Black filmmaker working during the New American Cinema era, Owens’s work is also an invaluable contribution to a renewed survey of the field, a voice almost completely excluded from the established canon of American avant-garde cinema. (KW)

The Films of Edward Owens were restored in a joint project undertaken by Chicago Film Society, The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This project was made possible with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Restoration: BB Optics; Laboratory Services: Colorlab.
Total program: 81 min • 16mm from CFS Collections

Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme (1966) – 24 min
Tomorrow’s Promise (1967) – 42 min
Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1967) – 6 min
Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1968–70) – 9 min

Learn more about the restoration of these films here!