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FRIDAY
The 12 short student films in the “Howard University School of Communications End-of-Semester Screenings” include two with hit-man plots; Refund Guaranteed even features a hit at African-American power-broker restaurant Georgia Brown’s. Still, most of these efforts don’t look like the work of filmmakers grooming themselves for commercial careers. Given their elliptical narratives, formalist style, laconic dialogue, and themes of domestic apocalypse, a significant number of these filmsincluding 1998 Paul Robeson Best-Film-Award winner Woman and Manseem most indebted to Chantal Akerman. Also of interest are Badream, a dramatization of a Tricky track, and Nappy, the program’s only documentary, in which black women (and one white woman with a black daughter) talk about what they do (and don’t do) to their hair. At 4 p.m. at the Howard University School of Communications Screening Room West, 525 Bryant St. NW. Free. (202) 806-7927. (Mark Jenkins)