Love Jones

CTL-E-5877 · Work · film · 1997

VERIFIED evidence grade — master store (canonical CSV)

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-00174 · provenance: canonical master store (CSV), record CTL-W-0058 + build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-5877. Master record source: CTL seed 2026-10-16 — UNVERIFIED, verify before public citation.

Love Jones is a 1997 American romantic drama written and directed by Theodore Witcher in his feature directorial debut, set in Chicago's Black jazz and poetry scenes. Larenz Tate stars as Darius Lovehall, a poet and writer, opposite Nia Long as Nina Mosley, a photographer; the cast also includes Isaiah Washington, Lisa Nicole Carson, and Bill Bellamy. The Academy Museum describes the film as opening with a sequence of black-and-white photographs of Chicago, with the city itself as an immersive setting for a story of young Black professional and bohemian life, using Hyde Park and Wicker Park locations. Witcher developed the story from Chicago's underground poetry scene, and the film follows the tentative, on-again, off-again romance between Darius and Nina as they test whether early attraction can become a sustained relationship. The film won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, drew modest initial box office, and built a lasting cult following; decades later it was issued in the Criterion Collection in a new 4K restoration with new interviews, confirming its standing as a landmark of 1990s Black romance on screen.

The record

• City: Chicago
• Year: 1997
• Work type: film

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Scan Tail Wave 1 — 747 Program, Wave 8; first Scan Tail packet at the founder's 40-record size). Gate A (2026-10-16): no Love Jones entity in the live graph at 3,523 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-5877 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 4 — corpus scan tail tranche (corpus-gap-candidates-2026-10-15.json ranked clean survivor #353). The scan supplied the NAME STRING ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — a Chicago-set, Chicago-shot landmark of Black cinema, directly on the graph's Black Chicago media scope. Vital status: N/A — Work record. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): 1997 release, running time 109 minutes (Academy Museum program listing). No box-office or ratings statistic is asserted. MEDIA: photo HELD (no image verified at file-page level in this pass; named candidate is the Criterion Collection / Academy Museum program still of Larenz Tate and Nia Long in Love Jones (1997)); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-5877-love-jones.svg); video HELD (no matching-entity CTL Short in the catalog and no verified embeddable archival video staged); audio HELD (the film's soundtrack and dialogue audio carry unverified rights in this pass; no audio staged). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Work records carry no map slot under the media-layer rule; maps attach to places and institutions.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map catalog (checked by name and variants), and no official/em) | audio = HELD (The film's soundtrack and dialogue audio carry unverified rights in this pass; no audio was staged.)

Referenced by

• Larenz Tate — starred in → this record

Sources

• Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, "Love Jones" program listing (accessed 2026-10-16) — director and writer Theodore Witcher; cast Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Lisa Nicole Carson, Isaiah Washington; 1997, 109 min.; Chicago jazz and poetry setting — https://www.academymuseum.org/en/programs/detail/love-jones-017fb3f6-6989-a2c3-a02e-c36c49a001c1 (primary source · build store)
• RogerEbert.com, "Creative Expression: Theodore Witcher on the Legacy of Love Jones" (2022) — Chicago-set romance centered in Black bohemian culture; won the audience award at Sundance; modest initial box office and later cult standing; Criterion Collection edition with 4K retransfer — https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/theodore-witcher-love-jones-interview (build store)
• SFMOMA, "Love Jones" program listing (accessed 2026-10-16) — 1997, director and screenwriter Theodore Witcher; Hyde Park and Wicker Park locations; writer (Larenz Tate) and photographer (Nia Long) meet at a poetry bar — https://www.sfmoma.org/event/love-jones/ (primary source · build store)
• https://history.sundance.org/project/8908 (verification source · master store)

Evidence note (master store)

Film (work_type: film) — Sundance archive lists Film Type: Dramatic Feature Country: U.S.A. Director: Theodore Witcher Actors: Bill Bellamy, Lisa Nicole Carson, Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Isaiah Washington

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Record CTL-E-5877 · Combined Graph record U-00174 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 4 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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