Paducah Film Society is proud to announce that, in honor of Black History Month, it will be presenting a screening of Oscar Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates” with a live, in-house score on Feb. 21 at Maiden Alley Cinema.

Micheaux, whose father was born into slavery in Kentucky, was born in 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, just across the river from Paducah. He would later move to Chicago and then to South Dakota, where he would publish the first of his seven novels. He launched a film production company to adapt his book “The Homesteader” into his first feature film, which he directed and released in 1919. That first film was lost.

His second film was “Within Our Gates,” a movie written, produced and directed by Micheaux. It tells the story of a young biracial woman visiting Boston during the Jim Crow era. While there, she becomes a school teacher and tries to raise money for an underfunded, segregation-era institution that serves Black children.
Modern critics and film historians have hailed the film — the oldest surviving feature directed by a Black American — as an important work. It is listed in the National Film Registry, the collection of films the United States National Film Preservation Board has selected for preservation.

The film was banned in some theaters and inspired many protests through the time of its release. It depicts acts of racial violence, including a lynching. Often considered a response to Kentuckian director D.W. Griffith’s “Birth Of A Nation,” Micheaux said that he created the film independently as a response to social instabilities he perceived in the wake of World War I.
“With a brisk and sharp-edged style, Micheaux sketches a wide view of black society, depicting an engineer with an international career, a private eye with influential friends, a predatory gangster, devoted educators—and the harrowing ambient violence of Jim Crow, which he shows unsparingly and gruesomely,” Richard Brody wrote of the film for The New Yorker upon its restoration and physical rerelease in 2017.

A brief program will precede the film shortly after 7 p.m.

Rev. Orlando McReynolds of First Missionary Baptist Church will speak before the screening. The Metropolis faith leader was responsible for the southern Illinois city erecting a historical marker in Micheaux’s honor in 2023.

For this special screening, the 78-minute silent film will be scored by area musicians Clifton Davis and Keenan Perez.

The Paducah Film Society is Maiden Alley Cinema's own monthly movie club, screening classic, cult, and foreign films in western Kentucky. PFS is supported by Maiden Alley Cinema, WKMS, and local donors. This screening is sponsored by the McCracken County chapter of the NAACP. Promotional support comes from Minuteman Press in Paducah.