DATE: Thursday, March 19th
TIME: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
LOCATION: Emory University - Rita Anne Rollins Building Room 102
PRICE: FREE!
In partnership with the Center for Ethics in the Arts at Emory University, the Atlanta Film Society presents a free screening of SISTER SALAD DAYS, featuring a Q&A with Writer / Director Adesola Thomas and Producer Adetinpo Thomas. Plus THE GIVERNY DOCUMENT.
This event is free and open to the public; ticket reservation is required.
Film Synopsis
Sister Salad Days is a magical realist narrative short that explores Black sisterhood, gendered and religious ideas of marital obligation, and the interpersonal harm that is caused in the pursuit of piety. This is a film about promise-keeping among Black women, living vestiges of the past, and one woman’s desire to build a self-determined life in the Atlanta ethnoburbs.
Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.
ETHICS AT THE MOVIES
Ethics at the Movies is a documentary screening series presented by the Center for Ethics at Emory University, featuring in-person post-film conversations with members of creative teams. Ethics at the Movies has screened over 40 films and hosted such distinguished guest artists as Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand; photographer and filmmaker Ansley West; Regina Kelly, the inspiration behind the film American Violet; and Foreign Press Association Journalist of the Year Award and Peabody Award winner Saeed Kamali Dehghan, among others.
Parking
The most convenient parking is located in the Peavine Visitors Lot, 29 Eagle Row, Atlanta, 30322.
For more parking information, please visit the Emory University Transportation and Parking site.
About the Panelists
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Adesola Thomas is a queer Nigerian-American filmmaker and the Atlanta Film Society’s Filmmaker in Residence (Sept 2025-Mar 2027). She makes narratives about the American South and Black diasporic domestic life to create, proliferate, and archive visuals of community interdependence.
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Adetinpo Thomas is an actor & producer from Carson, California. She received her undergraduate degree in Theatre from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in Acting from the University of Connecticut. Adetinpo is best known for her acting work in HAWKEYE, BLACK LIGHTNING, THE COLOR PURPLE, and her producing work on SISTER SALAD DAYS, CLEAN SLATE, and THE EARTH WILL NOT SWALLOW US.
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Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist working across documentary, avant-garde video art, sculpture, and installation. The artist is deeply concerned with re-memory and employs a rigorous interrogation and apprehension of the archive in much of her work. She seeks to trouble notions of objectivity and neutrality in nonfiction storytelling by asserting a Black feminist subjectivity, and applies what scholar and cultural critic bell hooks terms “an oppositional gaze” as both maker and critical spectator of moving image works. Intimate, often personal, and politically charged, her works aim to unmask power and its influence on how we perceive and formulate reality. Gary’s films and installations serve as reparative gestures for the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. Black spiritual technologies, ancestral legacies, and the interiority of Black life often pull focus in Gary’s multivalent works.
Ja'Tovia is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City and WME for Film & Television.
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Director of Ethics & the Arts at Emory Center for Ethics. Full bio coming soon.
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Daniel Christian is a filmmaker, programmer, and writer in Atlanta, Georgia. His feature documentary POSSUM TOWN premiered at the 2025 New/Next Film Festival. He has programmed documentary features at the Atlanta Film Festival since 2021 and co-curated the 2025 Ethics at the Movies screening series, a partnership between the Emory Center for Ethics and the Atlanta Film Society. He is a senior writer for Emory's content and brand story team, covering campus and community engagement.
See the full 2025 - 2026 program here