Naked Acts Now

When Naked Acts (1996) premiered in fall 1998 at a single theater in New York City, hundreds of people showed up, thanks to word of mouth and some ’90s-style guerilla marketing. Audience response to the film was so strong that the theater owner let Naked Acts play on his single screen for an entire month.

But that triumph came three long years after I’d completed the film, which tells the story of a newly svelte aspiring Black actress cast in her first film; when she learns that the part requires a nude scene, she embarks on a journey to keep her part and reclaim her body. Naked Acts had been rejected by the ultimate gatekeeper for independent film, the Sundance Film Festival, but I still managed to take her successfully through an international and US festival circuit. After nabbing a positive Variety review (“fresh, funny and original!”), I chased and chased a distribution deal that never materialized. Distributors and studio execs said the same thing to me: “We don’t know who the audience is for this film,” which I interpreted as, This story of a Black woman’s interiority is not the story of a Black person we’re used to, or care about. Well, I’d seen that so-called unknown audience, in screenings on four continents. And so I decided I had to self-distribute, to give my film the life it deserved. After steady rejection from exhibitors, I managed to get one theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the once-iconic Thalia, now down on its luck, to screen my film. Its successful four-week run led to Naked Acts having a video and DVD release, and in the ensuing years my film continued to have anniversary screenings at select festivals. Each time, audiences remained enthusiastic, and I remained committed to giving it an ongoing life. But eventually I told myself, You’ve carried this film as far as you can take it. Time to move on. And so, in 2013—nearly 20 years after shooting Naked Acts—I placed its negative and other elements in the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University. I did so to preserve it, for sure, but also so that film scholars could potentially see it.

This is where the story becomes magical. Nine years went by. In fall 2022, I received a DM on Twitter from Maya S. Cade, founder of her own Black Film Archive, an online site that showcases Black films from the early 1900s to the ’90s. Through her lens as a young curator and Library of Congress film scholar, she told me she’d “just had the sincere pleasure” of viewing my film at the Indiana University archive; was I interested in “putting my film back out” in the world? If so, she could introduce me to a distributor. Two weeks later, I had an agreement with Milestone Films in collaboration with Kino Lorber, both iconic distributors of films considered to be “lost gems.” Fifteen months after that, my restored and remastered film was making its global premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam and its US premiere at Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia. Since then, Naked Acts has had theatrical runs in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, in addition to special screenings throughout the country as well as in France, Belgium, Spain, and England. Critics from Letterboxd to online film sites to mainstream media have given the film glowing reviews, often noting with astonishment that it languished unseen in an archive for so long. The headline for the New Yorker’s recent review by Richard Brody reads: “The Rediscovery of Naked Acts Expands Film History.” He ends his review by writing, “Davis’s film, made at a time when there were few Black women filmmakers, exalts the hard-won breakthrough of self-depiction, of controlling the means of production; it opens pathways to a future cinema more radical than itself.”

That was my key goal, to join the conversation and further the discourse for Black women filmmakers coming in my wake, so that yes, they could make even more radical films. But sadly, those gatekeepers back in the day kept Naked Acts underseen, and largely out of the cultural milieu. It could not influence up-and-coming filmmakers, as I was influenced by Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground (1982)—a film I didn’t see until 20 years after I’d shot my own (also released by Milestone Films). The difference was that I knew about Collins’s film. Even among those in the business of studying and amplifying Black women’s films, Naked Acts wasn’t part of the discourse. While filmmaker Yvonne Welbon included me in her seminal 2003 documentary Sisters in Cinema, by and large, Naked Acts wasn’t studied by scholars or taught by professors, or cited on lists and in writings about Black women filmmakers, as were the films of my contemporaries in the early ’90s like Cheryl Dunye, Ayoka Chenzira, Cauleen Smith, Zeinabu irene Davis, Kathe Sandler, and Leslie Harris, let alone Julie Dash. No better example of this exclusion exists than the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts in March 2023 in Chicago, which included a two-day symposium that gathered dozens of filmmakers and scholars to celebrate the tradition of Black feminist filmmaking. Ironically, Naked Acts was already starting its restoration process with its new distributors, but I was not invited to participate. Six months earlier, I’d personally reached out to the organizers of the symposium via a mutual colleague, introducing myself and sharing a link to my film. I never got a response. I’m sure that omission was an unintentional oversight, but it was a slight nevertheless, and it stung. Later, I was told by an attendee, “Everyone was there, Bridgett! I’m surprised you weren’t.”

I cannot fully convey what this overlooking of Naked Acts by my filmmaking contemporaries and those who study Black women filmmakers, let alone the film industry, did to me personally. I felt such cognitive dissonance, continuously witnessing audience affection for my film (even winning an audience award at the African Diaspora International Film Festival at its 10th anniversary screening) and yet being left out of the larger cultural conversation. When I discovered Maya Cade’s online Black Film Archive, I wistfully hoped she might eventually learn about my film, but I didn’t expect that to happen, because experience had taught me otherwise. Hence my genuine surprise when she did reach out to me. I loved my heartfelt, risk-taking film, but I questioned its cultural worth. Would it ever be acknowledged as part of the canon?

Now that Naked Acts is getting its overdue attention, complete with extended runs, nationwide bookings, and sold-out screenings, it’s gratifying and most of all validating. But how do I reconcile the same film having such a drastically different reception from critics, exhibitors, and distributors nearly 30 years ago today? Some have tried to explain this dissonance by saying Naked Acts was ahead of its time, given its portrayal of a Black woman’s struggles with her sexuality in light of her childhood sexual abuse, alongside images of non-sexualized nudity. Some even cite my having a dark-skinned lead actress as proof that the film was ahead of the curve. But those explanations ring hollow for me. To be sure, today we have #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and a body positivity movement. But back in the day, many, many women would approach me after screenings in tears as they thanked me, having had a visceral reaction to the film even if they weren’t able to articulate why. These days, women and men approach me—yes, some in tears still, but able to tell me specifically how the film resonated with them. The culture has evolved, finally giving us the space and the language to discuss body-centered issues. But in the early ’90s, those same issues were deeply resonant for me and my friends, enough so that I devoted years to exploring them, first on the page and then behind the camera. Naked Acts wasn’t ahead of its time. It was undervalued by those in power during its time.

And so, this moment is bittersweet for me.

The hardest loss I experienced as a result of the industry’s overlooking of my work was the inability to make a second film—the most radical act for a Black woman filmmaker, because so few of us ever get to do it. Making a second film meant industry support and the chance to build a body of work. I certainly tried to make a second film, pitching indie producers and studio execs with a new script, only to be met with across-the-board rejection. I clearly am not alone in this regard. The most stunning example is Julie Dash, whose Daughters of the Dust came out in 1991; In 2019, Indiewire reported Dash was “finally making her second film,” a biopic of Angela Davis, but that has yet to happen. Every time I read current reviews praising both my screenwriting and filmmaking, a long-buried ache bubbles up to the surface—one I’ve tamped down across the decades because my heart couldn’t take it. As a young creative, I loved screenwriting and filmmaking and I had a lot to say through the medium. I longed to make a second film, but without funding (I’d put every resource I had into Naked Acts), it was out of my grasp. I’ve only recently come to see that my main character Cece, fighting for a chance at a creative life, for acceptance, was a stand-in for me.

What this current moment of embrace reveals to me is that I was also good at the craft, even as a first-time filmmaker. I look back with enormous respect for the young woman I was, who birthed into the world with such urgency this story of legacy and pain, yet also tenderness and triumph. I love how resonant and relevant the film remains, how contemporary it feels, how so many Millennial and Gen Z viewers tell me it looks like a period film shot today. The praise feels great. But when I think of the film stories that I carried within me these past three decades, stories that never got a chance to be told . . . well.

As one Letterboxd reviewer wrote, echoing so many others, “It’s a shame Bridgett M. Davis didn’t get another chance to make a movie.” Perhaps that sentiment is why, as Naked Acts gets its second chance to be out in the world, I am awash in pride, but also poignancy.