'Losing Ground' and Filmmaker Kathleen Collins Get a New Lease on Life

In 1988, New York writer, activist, academic and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer. At the time, her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, was living in Europe. She was just 19 years old.

“I was in Portugal when I got the call,” Collins recalled in a recent interview. “I called her collect from a payphone in the Algarve. She said, ‘Nina you have to come home.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘The cancer I had came back and you have to come home.’

“But she had never told me she had cancer.”

It was a lot for a teenager to process, particularly because in the wake of her death, Collins’s mother left in her care both a younger brother and a trunk filled with all her writings. For years, Collins was at a loss about what to do with her mother’s work.

“It’s kind of amazing. I’m 53 now, and it was a good 15 years until I opened that chest and did the work of reading her stuff,” Collins, a part-time resident of Springs, explained. “In my 20s and 30s, I was really angry and sad and a mess, acting out. I was very lost. Her death was super traumatic.”

So in her youth, Collins focused on career and family instead of her mother’s death and legacy. Married by the age of 23, Collins quickly had four children and started a business.

“I threw myself into productivity, which psychologically made me feel safe,” she said. “Then in my late 30s when I got divorced, I felt I had hit rock bottom emotionally. I had been in and out of therapy, and at 37 or 38, I started reading my mother’s work. I ended up in therapy for another 10 years, and during that period, my life changed.”

Collins was finally ready to process what her mother had left behind in terms of her body of work. In addition to the trunk full of her literary works, plays and stories, Kathleen Collins also had films, including her first, “The Cruz Brothers and Ms. Malloy,” a 1980 film that told the story of three Puerto Rican brothers facing their father’s ghost, and “Losing Ground,” a 1982 feature which was not released theatrically nor widely screened during her lifetime. While “Losing Ground” won first prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal and garnered some international acclaim, it received little notice in the United States. It resurfaced for one showing on WNET’s Independent Focus in 1987, and then largely disappeared.

But recently, “Losing Ground” has found a following among an appreciative new audience that recognizes it for what it is — one of the first fictional feature films directed by an African American woman. On Saturday, November 5, at 6 p.m. Sag Harbor Cinema will host a special screening of “Losing Ground” followed by a conversation with Nina Lorez Collins. The film celebrates both the film’s 40th anniversary, and what would have been Kathleen Collins’s 80th birthday with a brand new 4K restoration.

“Losing Ground” tells the story of Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), a Black professor of philosophy, who is embarking on an intellectual quest in Manhattan just as her painter husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), sets off on an exploration of joy. Victor decides to rent a country house upstate, but the couple’s retreat is complicated by his involvement with Celia (Maritza Rivera), a young model he meets in the small town where they are spending the summer.

“He has an affair and their marriage is coming apart. Sara is the intellectual and wants to find her ecstasy, while he’s allowed to be the libertine — live, feel and be free,” Collins explained. “It’s about her finding her bliss in a way when she gets invited to act in a student film.”

While a marriage in transition is a fairly straightforward plot line for a narrative film, the fact is, “Losing Ground” didn’t offer the kind of story line that was expected from films made by Black women at the time.

“It was shown in Atlanta and the distributor said, ‘These are not real Black people.’ This was pre-Crosby, pre-Obama, when it was all Blaxploitation films and ‘Sanford and Son,’” Collins explained. “I think people didn’t know what to make of it.”

“Losing Ground” might have remained a long lost indie film had it not been for a couple of fortuitous dovetailing events. The first came when DuArt Film & Video lab in New York contacted Collins to say that she needed to get her mother’s film out of its storage facility. The second came from Yale professor Terri Francis, who called Collins to ask for a better copy of “Losing Ground.”

“She said, ‘You can’t let it disintegrate.’ I guess it was the reason I paid $25,000. I loved my mother and thought, ‘I’m going to save this film for the family,’” said Collins. “I went to DuArt and they did the color correcting. The sound quality we did was not great, so in 2015 when it came out, I thought we’d make it to DVD and that would be it. But three years later, there was a film festival at Lincoln Center on independent films from the ’80s and they decided ‘Losing Ground’ should be the opening film.”

Now, “Losing Ground” is a regular feature at movie houses and it can be found online as part of The Criterion Collection.

“I gave the original film footage to Yale because Terri Francis got a grant to do a big restoration,” said Collins. That restoration was completed by Yale Film Archive, The Film Foundation and Milestone Films. The new 4k version that will be screened in Sag Harbor is a Milestone and Kino Lorber release.

In addition to her films, also finding a new audience are Kathleen Collins’s writings. In December 2016, a collection of the late author’s short stories was published by HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint as “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” In February 2019, Collins compiled her mother’s short stories, diary entries, scripts and screenplays into “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary.” In May 2021, the artist group Afrofemononomy performed a series of Kathleen Collins’s one act plays at locations in New York City.

Kathleen Collins’s writings, like her films, explore the lives of ordinary, but strong and intelligent Black women living life on their own terms, and they are now finding the audience that they didn’t during her lifetime. For her daughter, while the stories in her mother’s trunk were not truths she could process as a grieving teenager, today, she is proud and eager to share them with the world.

“It’s weird, I look back, I feel very lucky I’ve come this far. The personal process of really understanding her work coincided with this process of bringing her work out in public,” said Collins. “It’s super surprising because it’s been such a success. I’m now older than she was when she died, she was 46 — now, I don’t feel like her death defined me like it had. I no longer feel tortured by her death and my childhood.

“She stands alone as a very unique Black woman intellectual,” Collins added. “I do feel we’re in a moment where Black women are finally being seen and heard and I think she really contributes to that from the past.”

Kathleen Collins’s film “Losing Ground” will be screened at Sag Harbor Cinema on Saturday, November 5, at 6 p.m. followed by a conversation with Nina Lorez Collins. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor. For more information, visit sagharborcinema.org.