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, but must be reserved on the Ackland’s webpage. Register below. 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 this spring 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.

This film series is dedicated to the memory of Allison Portnow Lathrop, former Head of Public Programs at the Ackland Art Museum. For more than a decade, Allison was an indispensable champion of film culture on campus and in Chapel Hill, most notably through her visionary stewardship of the Ackland Film Forum. She fostered a spirit of generous collaboration among faculty, students, and artists. Her belief in the power of cinema lives on in the conversations and shared experiences she helped create.

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.