Ackland Film Forum: “Crooklyn” (Spike Lee, 1994)

Set in 1970s Brooklyn, Crooklyn recounts childhood from the perspective of nine-year-old Troy Carmichael (Zelda Harris), whose coming of age unfolds within the rhythms of Black family life, neighborhood culture, and social constraint. The film balances warmth and humor with moments of rupture, revealing how maturity often arrives through confrontation with authority, injustice, and grief. Lee presents growing up as both deeply personal and inseparable from place, race, and community—an education shaped as much by environment as by experience.

The film will be introduced by Daelena Tinnin-Gadson, Assistant Professor of Black Film Studies and African American Literature.

This film will be screened at 7:30 p.m. at the Varsity Theatre, 123 East Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. Tickets are free for UNC-Chapel Hill students. UNC-Chapel Hill students can receive CLE credit for attending by scanning the QR code at the event.

About the Series:

Join the Ackland Film Forum on the evenings of Monday, February 23, Monday, March 9, and Tuesday, March 24 for Growing Up, Looking Back, a series that accompanies the Ackland exhibition Bill Bamberger: Boys Will Be Men. This semester’s series highlights the filmgoing experience by using three local movie theaters as its venues

The Ackland Film Forum is co-organized by the Ackland Art Museum and UNC Film Studies, housed in the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature.