The Rio Feminist Film Programming Group x Corrina Antrobus presents a 25th anniversary screening of LOVE AND BASKETBALL.

Rightly featured within the 100 films featured in author and critic Corrina Antrobus’s book I Love Romcoms and I’m a Feminist, come celebrate Gina Prince Bythewood’s debut as an exquisite celebration of Black love.

Corrina Antrobus will be in conversation with Selina Robertson following the screening.

When writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood said she wanted to make ‘a Black WHEN HARRY MET SALLY’ she sold herself short. Sure, she was setting out her intention of replicating the battle of the sex’s classic, but with LOVE AND BASKETBALL she erected a new plinth for the ambitious romcom heroine in Monica (Sanaa Latham’s career-defining role).

LOVE AND BASKETBALL is a tender coming of age story about the weight of a Black woman’s ambition against her desire for love. With Bythewood’s compassionate, lived-experience lens, Monica is complex, flawed and determined upending the stereotype of the typical romance heroine. As Roxanne Gay’s Criterion essay for the 4k re-release so deftly says: ‘It is exhilarating and so terribly rare to see a woman choose herself’.

Corrina Antrobus is a film critic whose life’s work has been dedicated to championing underrepresented groups in cinema. In 2014 she founded London’s popular feminist film festival The Bechdel Test Fest - an ongoing celebration of films that pass the Bechdel Test, also known as the Wallace- Bechdel Test. The festival ran for seven years and hosted screenings, talks, created zines and produced the Who Is She podcast in 2019. Corrina has been a critic for Empire magazine, Rolling Stone, BBC, Total Film, Huffington Post and was the resident host for Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. In 2020 Corrina wrote and voiced a documentary on Ava DuVernay for BBC’s Inside Cinema, was nominated for a Screen Rising Star Award in 2019 and was awarded a Women in Hollywood Trailblazer award in 2017. She now works as a writer, Q&A host, a culture lead for her hometown of Hackney, board member for the Rio Cinema and is a full-time mother.

The Rio Feminist Film Programming Group is Sarah Chorley, Selina Robertson and Helen de Witt. Inspired by the passionate feminist film programming that took place at the Rio in the 1980s by Rio Women’s Cinema and the Women’s Media Resource Project, we programme feminist film screenings and events that link the Rio’s feminist histories with contemporary feminism. Everyone is welcome!