Pariah

OutFront Kalamazoo is bringing a special screening of the 2011 film Pariah to the historic Kalamazoo State Theatre on Saturday, June 10, 2023.

Written and directed by Dee Rees, Pariah is a story of identity. Teenage Alike (Adepero Oduye) lives in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood with her parents (Charles Parnell, Kim Wayans) and younger sister (Sahra Mellesse). A lesbian, Alike quietly embraces her identity and is looking for her first lover, but she wonders how much she can truly confide in her family, especially with her parents’ marriage already strained. When Alike’s mother presses her to befriend a colleague’s daughter (Aasha Davis), Alike finds the gal to be a pleasant companion.

In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott wrote, “Pariah is an acutely observed examination of strait-laced parents trying to deny a child’s homosexuality while all the time knowing better. He went on to describe Oduye’s performance as “incandescent,” saying the young actress “captures the jagged mood swings of late adolescence with a wonderfully spontaneous fluency. Ms. Oduye conveys not only the intelligence and will power of a young woman who is bursting out of her chrysalis like the butterfly she describes in the poetry she writes in a journal, but also the vestigial shyness of a bright, sheltered child in the throes of self-discovery.”

Pariah was a runaway hit of the Sundance film festival upon release, and the winner of its Excellence in Cinematography Award. The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2022 by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It is currently the most recently released film to be included in the registry.

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