UI SROP will host screening of Sundance film July 7

The University of Iowa's Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) and McNair Scholars Program invite the public to a free screening of the film “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, July 7, in room 101 of the Becker Communication Studies Building on the UI campus.

The film-selected for this year's Sundance Film Festival-is produced by SROP alumni Terence Nance and James Bartlett, who will attend the screening and participate in a public discussion afterward.

“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” is written and directed by Nance, and stars Nance, Namik Minter and Chanelle Pearson. Nance's debut feature documents the relationship between Nance and a lovely young woman as it teeters on the divide between platonic and romantic. Utilizing a tapestry of live action and various styles of animation, Nance explores the fantasies, emotions, and memories that race through his mind during a singular moment in time.

Nance and Minter star as themselves in this fictionalized account of a true story.

“I wrote the whole film in one sitting, but really, the entire movie was written in my mind two to three seconds after she hung up the phone,” Nance says. “It was the moment during which I began to understand that although I loved her, there was no evidence that she loved me back.

“After writing the film, I saw it to be a whole and self-deprecating truth-one that I found exceedingly humorous, and cathartic. This work of fact, phrased as fiction in the second person, would exist on two planes of communication: one, between Namik and I, and two, between the audience and the characters portrayed.”

Nance received positive reviews of his film debut.

From The Hollywood Reporter: “Both formally experimental and emotionally accessible, Terence Nance's ‘An Oversimplification of Her Beauty' diagnoses assorted ills in a real-world love affair with the meticulousness of the heartbroken-yet-self-aware. A debut exhibiting wide-ranging talent and a fresh personality, it should attract attention at daring art houses.”

Nance and Bartlett studied at the UI in 2003. Nance worked with Horace Porter, F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and American Studies and Departmental Executive Officer of African American Studies. Bartlett studied with Richard Brent Turner, Professor of African American Religious History.

The SROP and McNair Scholars Program are award winning programs designed to provide promising underrepresented undergraduate students with in-depth research experiences. The programs are administered by the University of Iowa's Office of Graduate Ethnic Inclusion (OGEI).

OGEI, the UI Chief Diversity Office and the UI Black Graduate and Professional Students Organization are sponsoring the event.