Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first Black women to enter the American literary canon (Their Eyes Were Watching God), established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial but always fiercely original.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun intersperses insights from leading scholars and rare footage of the rural South (some of it shot by Zora herself) with re-enactments of a revealing 1943 radio interview. Hurston biographer, Cheryl Wall, traces Zora’s unique artistic vision back to her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-Black incorporated town in the U.S. There Zora was surrounded by proud, self-sufficient, self-governing black people, deeply immersed in African American folk traditions. Her father, a Baptist preacher, carpenter and three times mayor, reminded Zora every Sunday morning that ordinary Black people could be powerful poets. Her mother encouraged her to “jump at de’ sun,” never to let being Black and a woman stand in the way of her dreams.

THIS FILM SCREENING IS NOT TO BE MISSED!!

The screening will be followed by a Q&A.

This event will take place on Sunday 26 January 2025 from 12:00 to 14:30.

Doors open at 11.30am.

The event will be held at The Black Cultural Centre Islington, 16–18 Hornsey Road, N7 7BT. Approx 5 mins walk from Holloway Road (Piccadilly Line) tube station.

Food and drinks will be on sale.

Book your FREE ticket at https://tinyurl.com/yxk5c742