Dr. Kathe Sandler is an educator and scholar of Black feminist cultural studies and a Guggenheim award-winning filmmaker.
Sandler's PBS film, A Question of Color, was the first nationally aired documentary to explore attitudes about skin color, hair texture and facial features in African-American communities. She has received filmmaking grants from the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Independent Television Service. Sandler is a founding member of the Black Documentary Collective and served on the Artists Advisory Board for the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Kathe Sandler
Mexico City, Mexico
Films
The Friends
Not currently available to stream
(1996)
A coming-of-age story about the friendship between two young Black girls growing up in 1957 Harlem, Phyllisia Cathy from a newly arrived, upwardly mobile Caribbean family, and Edith Jackson, Harlem-born and raised. Their friendship is a microcosm of the intercultural conflicts and accommodation between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the US, as well as a tale of two girls' struggle to build a friendship. An adaptation of Rosa Guy's novel"'The Friends"
A Question of Color
Watch TrailerAvailable to rent on Vimeo
(1993)
A Question of Color is the first documentary to confront a painful and long-taboo subject: the disturbing feelings many African Americans harbor about themselves and their appearance. African American filmmaker Kathe Sandler digs into the often subconscious world of "color consciousness," a caste system based on how closely skin color, hair texture and facial features conform to a European ideal.
Remembering Thelma
Not currently available to stream
(1981)
Kathe Sandler’s 1981 portrait of dancer Thelma Hill, a founding member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
