*Please note that there is a £1.50 fee per transaction

BFI Black Star Season

After Dark Double Bill

+ special introduction from Tom Fallows, University Of Exeter

Free filter coffee available to ticket holders – everything you need for a mega night of great film!

Late night cinema celebrating ‘Black Stars’ who have made a major contribution to film. Actor Duane Jones played landmark roles in Bill Gunn’s utterly original 70’s sci-fi Ganja and Hess as well as George A Romero’s zombie classic Night Of The Living Dead.

The films will be introduced by University of Exeter’s Tom Fallows.

Ganja and Hess (18) – 9.30pm

Dir. Bill Gunn, USA, 78 mins, 1973.

While studying an ancient African civilisation, anthropologist Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed with a cursed dagger by his demented assistant. After recovering, Dr. Green discovers that he has been given a gift of eternal life, but at a cost: he needs to drink blood.

Flirting with the conventions of Blaxploitation and Horror Cinema, Bill Gunn’s revolutionary independent film is a highly stylized and utterly original treatise on sex, religion and African American identity.

Night Of The Living Dead (18) – 11.15pm

Dir. George A Romero, USA, 96 mins, 1968.

George A. Romero’s low-rent classic follows a disparate group of individuals who take refuge in an abandoned house as corpses begin to leave the graveyard in search of fresh human bodies to devour.

The original template for the Zombie film, Romero offers us another first, with the landmark casting of black actor Duane Jones in a non-racially specific role for a horror film.

Venue: Studio 74, Exeter Phoenix