Ackland Film Forum: “Set It Off” (F. Gary Gray, 1996)

Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, and Vivica A. Fox anchor this energetic reworking of the heist film. After a series of setbacks leaves four Black women with few viable paths forward, they embark on a string of increasingly audacious bank robberies. Blending humor, suspense, and tragedy, Set It Off captures both the bonds of friendship and the pressures of race, gender, and economic inequality in 1990s urban America.

This film will be introduced by Professor Daelena Tinnin-Gadson, UNC-Chapel Hill Department of English and Comparative Literature.

It will be screened at 7:30 p.m. at The Lumina Theater (620 Market St, Chapel Hill, NC 27516). Tickets are free for all audience members, and registration is required via The Lumina’s webpage. When this link is live, click to reserve your free ticket.

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 fall for Crime Thrillers from the Americas: Snapshots of Social Anxiety, a series that accompanies the Ackland exhibition Care and Concern: Recent Acquisitions of Modern and Contemporary Art.

As vehicles of social commentary and stylistic bravura, crime thrillers often register the pressures and contradictions of their historical moment. Across nearly half a century, the films in this series stage encounters with political power, public trust, inequality, and ambition through assassination plots, botched robberies, and media-driven spectacle.

From the crises of the late 1960s to the intensified media environments of the twenty-first century, these works show how genre cinema can capture social anxiety in real time. Each film stands both as a gripping narrative and as a record of a world under strain, where institutions falter and everyday life becomes fraught with conflict.

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.