Cauleen Smith Movies

Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay...

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct.

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker...

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the...

Three women in Hollywood talk to the camera one summer (with a coda six months later). Sara is a casting director; her soliloquies are addressed to...

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the "incubators." She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission.

H-E-L-L-O translates the famous musical sequence from Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind into a greeting for sites around New...

Daily Rains is a measured, poetic work that confronts head-on the micro- and macro-aggressions faced by young Black women. Restored by the Academy...

Short film commissioned by the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Norway

Choreographer Taisha Paggett activates a vacant lot in the Washington Park Neighborhood on the southside of Chicago and enjoys an encounter with...

Smith interweaves the figure of the crow through the histories of Syracuse and Auburn, New York, both of which were key stations on the Underground...

A collection of 14 short films that all revolve around Sun Ra and his time in Chicago

“Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of 'reality' than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of...

Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle.

Three monologues adapted from the groundbreaking book, Black Women in White America, edited by Gerda Lerner.

A found footage assemblage of epic proportions. Produced on residency at Chicago Film Archives, with music by The Eternals.

Second of three films relating to American conceptual Land Art of the 1970's and American histories and traumas.

Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree....

The imagery of the film is of volcanic scenes in various life stages, from pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors unnaturally saturated –...