Midway through Akoya Chenzira’s Alma’s Rainbow (1994), a central character, Ruby, interrupts a funeral. She poses as a friend of the deceased and cuts off the minister to hasten the ceremony. Searching for something to say, Ruby claims that the deceased “loved herself some sushi.” This is met, hilariously, with a murmur of agreement. Here, in an overtly comic moment, there are thematic strands that run through the entire film: Alma’s Rainbow is disinterested in despair. Rather, the film, which centers Black characters and consciously addresses politics of representation, undercuts histories of screen representations of racial trauma by seeking to revel in the ways that humor and in-common embodied experiences (such as loving sushi) can contribute to the joyous work of community building (signified by the murmuring crowd).

Chenzira, the film’s producer-writer-director, is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and educator. Her pioneering work began in the late 70s—directing short films such as Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1984) and Zajota & the Boogie Spirit (1989)—and spans to the present day, directing episodes of shows such as Trinkets (Netflix), A League of Their Own (Amazon/Sony), and Kindred (FX). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Chenzira has also been at the forefront of interactive cinema with projects such as HERadventure. But Chenzira is arguably best-known for Alma’s Rainbow which was shot in 21 days on a budget of $350,000 for principal photography. The film did not initially receive wide theatrical distribution, and in a behind-the-scenes featurette on the director’s Vimeo page, Chenzira notes that during early screenings “they (potential distributors) were much more comfortable with stories where there was more urban blight than there was beauty on the screen.” Last year, many of Chenzira’s works, including Alma’s Rainbow, received 4K digital restorations and were rereleased by Milestone Films and Kino Lorber, making them more accessible to audiences than ever before. The restoration rerelease of Alma’s Rainbow, screened alongside Hair Piece, debuted at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music in June 2022 with a cast reunion and has spent the last year making repertory appearances across the country.

The film is a coming-of-age story that follows Rainbow Gold as she learns from the women around her, particularly her mother, Alma, and her aunt Ruby, how the bodies of Black women have been used to position them as Other, as well as the possibility of their reclamation as a source of community building and joy. Alma Gold runs a beauty parlor, a gathering space for the Black women in the neighborhood that emphasizes bodily transformations, the sort of self-care or self-preservation that Audre Lorde saw as “an act of political warfare.” The setting has autobiographical roots for Chenzira whose mother owned a beauty parlor when she was young. Related to the subject matter of Hair Piece, an animated satire on how Black hair has long been presented as non-normative, beauty parlors and barbershops often become strongholds of community because they refuse and circumvent dominant cultural institutions that privilege straight hair. It is a space to take pride in what, in many contexts, has been used to denote Black bodies as Other. At the beginning of the film, Rainbow has a different approach to her body. To better assimilate in various environments, Rainbow wraps her chest and hides vibrant clothing under her private

school uniform, layers that allow her to transition between social settings. Rainbow makes it past the nuns at school (one of which is played by Chenzira in an amusing cameo), but while playing hooky for a hip-hop dance rehearsal, a group member repeatedly makes jokes at Rainbow’s expense. Oblivious to the fact that Rainbow intentionally wraps her chest, he rudely compares her development to two other girls who walk by the rehearsal. Rainbow’s method of assimilation becomes how she is Othered by at least one of her peers and social groups. How the body presents itself and communicates through aesthetic (non)choices is central to the film but so are representations of bodily movement and embodied emotion.

Throughout Alma’s Rainbow, dance is a significant as a form of expression and as a reason for gathering. It’s notable that there is a well-established history of early Black women filmmakers producing dance films, including Chenzira’s NYU thesis film Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum. The Flamingo Parlor’s anniversary party culminates with the arrival of aunt Ruby, bringing a twist to the film’s dialogue on embodied experience. Earlier in life, Alma and Ruby had performed together as the Flamingo Sisters, but with the birth of Rainbow, Alma quit the stage to open The Flamingo Parlor and lead a more conservative life. Ruby went on to Paris where she lived the life of a stage performer, á la Josephine Baker, and returned as melodrama personified, melodrama in motion. Her every movement seems to be the embodiment of some emotion. The soap-operatic quality of Ruby’s disposition could be read as excessive, but this excess is a resistance against hegemonic notions of reserved womanly conduct; it is a reclaiming of fully embodied emotion that might even spill beyond the bounds of the body. In this sense, in the film, both melodrama and dance are assertions of agency, the agency to express joy, build community, and divest from cultural bindings or expectations of urban blight.

Ruby’s presence in the home serves as a counterpoint to Alma’s efforts towards keeping Rainbow on the straight and narrow so that as Rainbow navigates many teenage milestones, she has diverse support from the matriarchal village around her. However, undercutting genre conventions, Rainbow’s is not the only coming-of-age arc. Representing the reparative, uplifting element of embodied emotion, Ruby helps to remind Alma of who she once was, fostering a re-coming-of-age or a coming-back-to-age that runs parallel to Rainbow’s. Furthermore, Rainbow and Alma more meaningfully communicate once they recognize the fundamental similarities between their experiences. By the end of the film, Rainbow begins to emulate Alma and Ruby’s behavior and dress, evidence of an intergenerational education. For all three women, there is extreme joy in the journey of becoming fostered by their relationships with one another.

Beginnings emerging from endings have an extratextual resonance for the film. In the pre-digital marketplace, the vast majority of films that did not receive theatrical distribution had limited afterlives, but Alma’s Rainbow, due to its wonderful restoration and rerelease, has risen in the cultural consciousness nearly twenty years after it was completed. In many cases, restoration screenings have been the first chance to see the film with an audience. I am fortunate to have attended one of these screenings as part of the 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, and I can attest that the film is not only about community building through embodied experiences, it actively engages in this practice by unifying the audience in raucous laughter. The communal element of the cinema experience is not only part of the context of these screenings, its significance is baked into the text, so as much as Alma’s Rainbow is about community, its journey back into cinemas is similarly indicative of the importance and possibilities of film communities. It took the interest and investment of countless individuals for Alma’s Rainbow to be rediscovered, and it will take the interest and investment of film audiences for rediscovery to be an ongoing and lasting project.