Set It Off

This screening will take place on Governors Island’s historic Parade Ground.

Former bank teller Frankie (Vivica A. Fox) is struggling to make ends meet, working a low-paying job as a janitor alongside close friends Cleo (Queen Latifah), Stony (Jada Pinkett Smith), and T.T. (Kimberly Elise) in mid-’90s Los Angeles. When the four women, angered and demoralized by the status quo of relentless injustice that curtails and undermines their aspirations, set about systematically robbing banks around the city, complications soon arise in the disparate forms of their tyrannical boss (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), an unsympathetic LAPD detective (John C. McGinley), and a budding romance between Stony and a charming bank manager (Blair Underwood). Director F. Gary Gray infuses the heist genre with bracing emotional clarity, sensitively yet unsentimentally dramatizing the challenges faced by working-class women of color who are forced to navigate an unacceptably inhospitable socioeconomic reality.

Pre­sent­ed by Gov­er­nors Island Arts and Film at Lin­coln Cen­ter. Curat­ed by Film at Lin­coln Cen­ter and pro­duced by Rooftop Films.