IBICL presents
A Celebration
of Sinners: Podcast
The release of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners in 2025 arguably brought something to American filmmaking that had not been seen before. It is a horror film that is also a love story, a historical drama, and a work of Black cinema that tells the story of Black culture, survival, music, joy, and the costs they exact. Critics have described the film as genre-defying, and with sixteen Academy Award nominations, it is the most recognized film in Oscar history.
A Celebration of Sinners: The Podcast is a companion production to the two-day screening and cultural event hosted by the IBICL in April 2026, held in celebration of the film’s first anniversary. The podcast brings together scholars and students in conversations about the film’s significance, and the interpretation of its themes from multiple perspectives. Across ten episodes, these conversations trace the film’s connections to a hundred years of Black horror cinema; African spiritual traditions that survived the Middle Passage; Irish Gothic literature; the blues philosophy of James Baldwin; hoodoo practices of the rural American South; and questions about Black life, culture, and survival that the film raises, but refuses to resolve.
This podcast is not a work of film criticism. It is a critical conversation of the kind usually reserved for the seminar room. Some voices belong to scholars with decades of expertise; two are Dartmouth undergraduates who saw the film in theaters with friends and couldn’t stop thinking about it. All of the guests have something to say that listeners will not have encountered anywhere else.
The podcast was produced by the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College in collaboration with the Dartmouth Media Production Group. It stands on its own for anyone who has seen the film and wants to go deeper and for those who haven’t, it offers ten distinct invitations to do so.