The 2008-2009 Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers concludes in Mobile with a documentary about student politics that turns out to be about a good deal more than student politics.
“Bama Girl” follows Jessica Thomas, a young Black woman at the University of Alabama, in her campaign to become homecoming queen. On paper she is running against 15 other students. In practice she is running against a considerably larger and less visible opponent.
The Machine
The film’s central subject is an institution that most Alabamians have heard of and few have seen: a secret political organization known as “The Machine,” which for most of the past century has dominated student government and homecoming elections at the university through the campus Greek system.
Thomas’ campaign runs headlong into it — and into a segregated Greek structure, and into the internal politics of Black student organizations, which have their own calculations about how and whether to contest the Machine’s candidates.
The history is not simple. Black students were elected homecoming queen at Alabama as long ago as 1973, and a Black student won the Student Government Association presidency in 1976. That such victories remain notable rather than routine, three decades on, is precisely the film’s point.
The Screening
The program begins at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 23, in Bernheim Hall at the Mobile Public Library’s Ben May Main Library, 701 Government St. Admission is free.
The evening opens with a short film, “I Always Do My Collars First: A Film About Ironing,” and includes a question-and-answer session with “Bama Girl” filmmaker Rachel Goslins, followed by a coffee-and-dessert reception.
What the Southern Circuit Is
The Southern Circuit tour brings independent filmmakers to a rotating slate of Southern venues — libraries, colleges, small museums — with the director present to discuss the work. It is a modest program with an outsized effect in cities that do not otherwise host art-house exhibition, and Mobile’s stop has become a reliable fixture of the local cultural calendar.
The pairing of venue and subject has a certain resonance. Bernheim Hall sits in the Ben May Main Library on Government Street, a public building in a city whose own history of race and access is neither distant nor settled. An audience there watching a film about who is permitted to win an election at the state’s flagship university is unlikely to treat the question as abstract.
Filmgoers who miss the screening will find the subject difficult to escape. The Machine’s influence on Alabama politics extends well beyond Tuscaloosa; a considerable number of the state’s officeholders came up through the Greek system it controls.