Event Overview:
This screening accompanies "The Other America: A Cosmology of Jordan Peele’s Us" film series.

Opening Night double feature with Body and Soul beginning at 6pm (followed by a conversation with Shana L. Redmond and Michael Gillespie and a reception) and Us beginning at 9:15pm Copies of Us: The Completed Annotated Screenplay will be available for purchase (and to be signed) at this event.

In his boldest surviving film, pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux casts Paul Robeson—making his screen debut—in dual roles that expose the fault lines between America’s religious and justice systems. As an escaped convict posing as a beloved preacher, and as his gentle, upright twin, Robeson embodies a devastating split between appearance and truth, and whose uncanny doubling plays out in a community shaped by racial violence, spiritual deception, and economic precarity. Made nearly a century before Us, Body and Soul claimed the doppelgänger as a distinctly Black metaphor: not for abstract guilt or buried sin, but for the internal schism demanded by a racist society—what W. E. B. Du Bois described, in 1903, as the double consciousness of Black American identity. To this day one of the great race-melodramas, Micheaux’s silent-era masterwork still shocks with its formal audacity and searing political clarity. Featuring live piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura. 35mm print preserved by George Eastman Museum.

Body and Soul. 1925. USA. Directed by Oscar Micheaux.
35mm. Silent with English intertitles. 105 min.