This book offers an absorbing portrait of a groundbreaking Black woman filmmaker. Kathleen Collins (1942-88) was a visionary and influential Black filmmaker. Beginning with her short film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and her feature film Losing Ground, Collins explored new dimensions of what narrative film could and should do. However, her achievements in filmmaking were part of a greater life project. In this critically imaginative study of Collins, the author narrates how Collins, as a Black woman writer and filmmaker, sought to change the definition of life and living, and explores the global significance and futurist implications of Collins. In addition to her two films, the author examines the broad and expansive and varying forms of writing produced by Collins during her short lifetime. The book showcases how Collins used filmmaking, writing, and teaching to assert herself as a poly-creative dedicated to asking and answering difficult philosophical questions about human being and living. Interrogating the ideological foundation of life-writing and cinematic life-writing as they intersect with race and gender, the author intervenes on the delimited concepts of life and Black being that impeded wider access, distribution, and production of Collins's personal, cinematic, literary, and theatrical works. The work definitively emphasizes the evolution of film and film studies that Collins makes possible for current and future generations of filmmakers.