One of the first narrative feature films directed by a Black woman, Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground never received a commercial release, and after its premiere in 1982 and a subsequent screening at MoMA in January 1983, it showed only sporadically over the years. Collins died in 1988 at the age of forty-six, having made just this miraculous film and a short. Losing Ground remains an exquisite anomaly in feature filmmaking: a window into the realities and fantasies of an intellectual Black woman and her artist husband. To this day, there are no comparable characters to these utterly unique beings on screen.
Fortunately in 2011, writer and professor Terri Francis, then teaching at Yale, reached out to Collins’ daughter, and soon, funding for a partial restoration of the film was raised. Ronald Gray, the film’s cinematographer, oversaw the color timing of the scanned and digitally cleaned negatives, which were then shot back to film. By accessing the original negatives and restoring the audio with newly discovered magnetic sound elements, the preservation resulted in vast improvements in both picture and audio quality and, for the first time, 35mm prints of the film. In 2015, Milestone Films released it commercially, to the critical acclaim and celebration this remarkable film has long deserved.