Seen (Issue 003, Fall 2021)

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Cover image: Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021). Film still courtesy of Sophia Nahli Allison.

Seen (ISSN 2694-524X) is published semi-annually

by BlackStar Projects in affiliation with Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Periodicals postage paid at Philadelphia, PA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Seen Journal, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Email: seen@blackstarfest.org.

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Fall 2021 Issue 003

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Support for Seen is provided in part by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ford Foundation/JustFilms, Independence Public Media Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Perspective Fund, Samuel S. Fels Fund, Surdna Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and Wyncote Foundation. We are also supported by BlackStar Projects’ board of directors, community partners, and a host of generous individual donors and organizations. Invaluable support is provided by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Printed by The Standard Group Copyright © 2021 BlackStar Projects All rights reserved.

Fall 2021 • Issue 003

Dessane Lopez Cassell Executive Editor Darol Olu Kae Guest Editor Nehad Khader Managing Editor Caroline Washington Art Director Leo Brooks Design Associate Jasmine Weber Interviews Editor Kavita Rajanna Essays Editor Yasmine Espert Profiles & Reviews Editor Shauna Swartz Copyeditor Imran Siddiquee Communications Director Sydney Alicia Rodriguez Program Associate Maori Karmael Holmes Founding Editor

Editorial Advisory Board

Typefaces

Adam Piron COUSIN

LL Bradford designed

by Laurenz Brunner, released by Lineto

Akiba Solomon The Marshall Project Elizabeth Méndez Berry One World/Random House Gina Duncan Sundance Institute Greg Tate Jeff Chang Race Forward John L. Jackson, Jr. Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania Louis Massiah Scribe Video Center Roya Rastegar Sally Singer Tarana Burke ‘me too.’ International Zaheer Ali

Trabis designed by Axel Pelletanche-Thévenart Serial A designed by Mario Julian G, released by Dum Dum Studio

Table of Contents 10

Letter from the Editor

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Image as Offering a profile of Texas Isaiah

48 To Build a World That Is

Not Traumatizing

conversations between

Ahmed Bouanani and

Nour-Eddine Saïl, translated from Maghreb Informations

by Jessica Lynne

Untitled (Marshall), 2021. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

22 Being Seen Like Never

Before: Lina Soualem

Rewrites Her Family’s Story a profile of the filmmaker

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A Hunger to Be Heard a profile of Fox Maxy

by Cassie da Costa

Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), dir. Billy Woodberry. Film still courtesy of Milestone Films.

by Samia Labidi

Introduction and translation by Omar Berrada

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Beyond the Colonial Camera: Three Departures translated to text by Nuotama Bodomo based on a keynote delivered by Bodomo at BlackStar’s inaugural William and Louise Greaves Filmmaker Seminar in March 2021

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The Inexpressively Expressive Cinematic Image: Quiet and the Black Interior in A Screaming Man and Bless their Little Hearts

Watertight (in production), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

by Kojo Abudu

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Waikīkī and Its Discontents: Chris Kahunahana’s Hawai’i

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“The Voice I Sing Is an Echo”: the Power of Black Creativity a conversation with Sophia Nahli Allison and Merawi Gerima

by Jeff Chang

Waikiki (2020), dir. Christopher Kahunahana.

Film still courtesy of Christopher Kahunahana.

by Philana Payton

146 Shaping Time

on Isaac Julien’s Lessons

of the Hour

by Leila Weefur

154 ZONEZ:

in Full Reflection

Disintegration 93-96 (2017), dir, Miko Revereza.

Film still courtesy of Miko Revereza.

Out of Water an interview with Miko Revereza

by Jonathan Ali

124 Present Continuous

an interview with Wang Qiong

by Abby Sun

130 Repurposing, Layering, and

Close Listening a review of Bitchin’:

script by Akinola Davies Jr and Wale Davies

by Amir George

114 “As though there is no script”

an interview with Maya Cozier

162 Unseen Lizard

introduction by Akinola

Davies Jr

the Sound and Fury of Rick James

Arthur Jafa studio. Photo by Pavielle Garcia.

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by Suzi Analogue

by DJ Lynnée Denise

192 Arthur Jafa: Studio Visit

140 Land to the Tiller!

a review of Harvest: 3,000 Years

202 Conversations with

by ruth gebreyesus

Contributors

204 Contributor Bios

Letter from the Editor

Can we see ourselves?

Can we see each other?

And can we see together?

I’ve been sitting with these questions since they were first posed to a group of Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists by Ghanaian filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo during her keynote address at the 2021 William and Louise Greaves Filmmaker Seminar. Bodomo offered this reflection in her concluding remarks as a way to encapsulate the possibilities of cinema as she sees it. I’d like to call attention to these questions because of how they subtly shift our focus away from prevailing notions of representation and visibility to indigenous forms of collectivism and intercommunal systems of seeing and making. When faced with the violent history of cinema and its logics of storytelling, Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists can’t afford to simply appropriate the prerogatives of white image makers. We have a different kind of history

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that requires us to move differently when we encounter the filmic medium. We must interrogate and, when needed, repurpose dominant storytelling tools, harnessing culturally specific knowledge and histories to create radically different ideas capable of rendering the full range of our complexity visible in cinematic terms.

Collectively, the pieces in Seen, issue 003, orbit around Bodomo’s questions, gathering up accumulative power, and extending her thoughts into new directions and terrain.

The participating artists, writers, and filmmakers offer a multitude of critical practices and approaches that help think beyond the restrictions of film and visual culture as it is presently defined. As expressed in Jessica Lynne’s exquisite piece on photographer Texas Isaiah, “To be

imaged is a deeply political process and can communicate, as an act of repair, multiple truths about the realities of those who are captured.” Lynne’s statement demonstrates the ethos of Seen, a journal of film and visual culture, and sets the stage for issue 3 by recognizing the reality that the camera is a colonial tool. But our engagement with the visual medium doesn’t stop there; it’s only our point of departure. We are interested in speaking a truer word about ourselves, to ourselves. The failures of cinema also signal its possibilities.

In addition to Bodomo’s keynote address and Lynne’s illuminating profile, issue 003 of Seen features an interview with filmmakers Sophia Nahli Alison (A Love Song for LaTasha [2019] and Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground [2021]) and Merawi Gerima (Residue [2020]) on the power of Black filmmaking collectives in Los Angeles, conducted by Dr. Philana Payton; a penetrating review of Christopher Kahunahana’s first full-length feature film, Waikīkī (2020), by cultural critic and historian Jeff Chang; two seminal interviews with Moroccan filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani from the early 1970s, translated by Omar Berrada; Jonathan Ali’s rich exploration of the possibilities of Caribbean cinema through a serious engagement with Maya Cozier’s debut fiction film, She Paradise (2020); DJ Lynnée Denise’s richly expansive review of Sacha Jenkins’s documentary Bitchin’: the Sound and Fury of Rick James; and a layered conversation between Amir George and filmmaker Miko Revereza, to name only a few.

ingenuity to bring this publication to fruition. With this in mind, I would like to sincerely thank the entire Seen team, without whom this expansive project would have been impossible. Thank you to our managing editor, Nehad Khader, whose support and tireless commitment has shaped my idea of collaboration. To our art director, Caroline Washington, and design associate, Leo Brooks, thank you for your imagination, feedback, and rigor.

Thank you to our diligent and sensitive editors, Yasmine Espert, Kavita Rajanna, Jasmine Weber, and Shauna Swartz. Imran Siddiquee, our communications director, thank you for your brilliant insights and support. And, of course, I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to BlackStar’s founder, Maori Karmael Holmes, whose vision and leadership continue to guide the way forward. I am indebted to you all!

This process has further entrenched my belief that communal spaces where we gather, commune, and share ideas are sacred.

May this issue of Seen provide readers with the necessary tools to think and study collectively, moving beyond dominant storytelling systems and modalities of struggle and survival. After all, as Nuotama Bodomo reminds us, “We are all presenting ourselves just so that we can be seen amongst each other.”

Darol Olu Kae Guest Editor Los Angeles, September 2021

The current issue of Seen developed during a period of instability and loss. As a result, it required a great deal of patience, understanding, collective strength, and

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Right: Untitled (Rayly), 2021. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

ON

JESSICA

TEXAS ISAIAH

BY

LYNNE

I

A

M

A

G

E

S

O F F E R I N G

Taj, 2020. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

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To be in dialogue with Texas Isaiah, then, is something profound. That is, to be in conversation with him is an opportunity to think alongside an artist for whom the concerns of lineage, pleasure, and safety are key. As his interlocutor, you are deliberately ushered into study with him. I experienced this potent dynamic for myself after receiving an invitation to be a critical dialogue partner to the artist as part of his 20202021 artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Throughout this collaboration, we asked questions, together, about the expansive nature of selfportraiture. We exchanged notes about the scholars and thinkers who guide our work and sought the best ways to describe an ethos of care in front of and behind the camera. All of this is another way of saying that mostly we were always in dialogue about the very condition of the photographic image itself.

“First, during this moment, photography is one of the most challenging practices to engage with because it’s readily accessible and the most greatly consumed,” the artist tells me during a midsummer phone call as we discuss the storytelling possibilities of photography. “It’s also harmed a lot of communities and continues to, and I’m greatly interested in that rehabilitation.”

This intervening gesture is full of gravitas. To be imaged is a deeply political process and can communicate, as an act of repair, multiple truths about the realities of those who are captured. In Texas Isaiah’s images, sitters are not simply placeholders for a vague nod to representational politics. They also inform and contribute to the emotional and formal registers of the photograph as co-conspirators.

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In the series Blackness, the artist has imaged more than sixty participants who represent a spectrum of gender experiences, sexualities, and Black diasporic identities. These black-and-white portraits that document sitters primarily from the waist up call your focus as a viewer to the tenderness of the eyes.

In these images, the eyes are the poetry—undaunted and ethereal. In the series Every Image Is an Offering, created in partnership with the Marsha P. Johnson Institute and VSCO, Black trans and gender-expansive individuals are imaged in their homes, office settings, or in nature, an especially important setting for the photographer. The series engages a range of provocations including the poignant inquiry, “What would Marsha love to see in image making today?”

Like Blackness, these portraits embody poise and stillness. Despite a world that would dare name this embodiment as a threat, the photographs resonate at the highest frequencies.

For Black folks—particularly Black trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people—the urgency to rearticulate public visual narratives of personhood is palpable. To do so in a manner that acknowledges, and indeed revels in, the personal and subjective without flattening is the task of care. What I mean is this: intimacy lives in the creation, organization, and preservation of these (imaged) genealogies.

Such a realization strikes me intensely as Texas Isaiah describes the circumstances of grief that first compelled him to photography. “Between 2012 and 2015 I experienced significant losses, and I barely had any images of these individuals,” he says. “I believe the grief worsened because I didn’t have anything else other than my memories. It reminded me that people have experienced visual erasure because of a lack of visual evidence of their existence.”

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Texas Isaiah intentionally extends and expands upon an archive of Black life as means of recovery and, most importantly, as a way of declaring presence.

“During a time when I was being presented with my true embodiment of how I wanted to be presented in the world—and that this was also happening during an emergence of Black trans people in the media—it struck me that I would be able to contribute to this conversation at that time,” he tells me. His is a task not solely demarcated by recovery. It is also emphatically proclamation.

In her essay for Frieze Magazine, “Finding Quietness in a Loud World,” poet and critic Harmony Holiday defines Black quietness, in part, as the “antidote to dread in the realm of the senses: no more tyranny, just space to rehearse and re-hear, to pay a deep attention to the calm we have earned and pursued and become.” Holiday outlines Black quiet (aligned with the writings of Kevin Quashie) as a methodology and spiritual practice, almost, within the terrain of the sonic—Black music traditions. This thesis, I believe, is also elastic enough so that we might read the terms of Holiday’s quiet alongside the images created by Texas Isaiah and his sitters. The calm earned and pursued and that we become is a geography of Black pleasure—“rest and repose,” as Harmony calls it.

Texas Isaiah maps this landscape joyously. Even as his practice moves across the commercial and editorial or the nebulous parameters of “fine art” photography (a term the artist considers too limiting in scope)—at the time of this writing, the artist has a solo exhibition on view at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City—his work serves as a balm, an antidote, a space to look and then look again more closely.

“I never negotiate the intimacy I hold as a person,” Texas Isaiah tells me when I ask him about the function of such market categorizations. “It always shows up no matter what, even if it isn’t meant to show up in a conversation about image making. Because of that, something always interesting shows up in the images.” I smile to myself when I hear this because “something interesting” is too humble a statement to describe the vibrancy of a practice informed so fervently by a multiplicity of knowledge sources— from deep ancestor veneration to his parents and fellow artists such as musician Ahya Simone, actor Marquise Vilson, photographer Carrie Mae Weems, and the elder trans activist and organizer Miss Major.

The brilliance of such a constellation is further animated by a type of serendipity the artist finds in the world: “When I walk out of my apartment, whoever I encounter, I’m also taking something from them, and I’m always thankful for that.”

expect nothing less from Texas Isaiah. He knows how to tell the truth. He also knows—and this too is something that I learn from him—what it means to leave room for future pleasures, creative inquires, and surprises.

“What I look forward to is fun,” he says. “To care and be intentional in a world that doesn’t always value that. If this is it, I want to have fun and not allow others to make me worried about if the work is good enough to sell, or be in a show, or be in print, or be more popular, or be on a pedestal. I want to focus on what it’s like to be present with images.”

For an artist animated by encounters in this way, the isolation and distancing caused by a global pandemic pose an unnerving challenge. Under what circumstances can we actually gather now? And what has it meant to even re-enter a process of “art” making after such an extended period of crisis and isolation? What awaits us in this new place?

To grapple with this tension necessitates a vocabulary of love that can, of course, be applied to the realms of art making. More importantly, it can inform how we show up for ourselves and the people in our lives.

Texas Isaiah is keenly aware of this. After a year and a half of navigating the ebb and flow of creative inspiration, a recent summer trip back to his beloved home of Brooklyn renewed his charge. “It made me think about the things that I really want to be part of.

It made me re-evaluate my work commitments: what is it that I really want to do?” he asks aloud during our phone call. It is a question requiring the sincerest forms of introspection, and in a time of an expected return to a myth of normalcy, this honesty stirs me emotionally as I listen. Then again, I have come to

Page 18: Untitled (Blu), 2021. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

Page 19: Untitled (Dre), 2021. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

Page 20: Untitled (Pops), 2021. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

Page 21: Untitled (Marshall), 2021. Portrait by Texas Isaiah.

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Being Seen Like Never Before Lina Soualem Rewrites Her Family’s Story a profile of the filmmaker

by Samia Labidi

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Mabrouk, c. 1949. Image courtesy of Lina Soualem.

Where do we come from? What is family? Who are we? Key questions that echo throughout Algerian-Palestinian-French director Lina Soualem’s Their Algeria (2020), Soualem’s directorial debut. “We are not given the right to be complex. We are portrayed as one-dimensional, without room for layers and multiplicity,” Soualem once told me, referring to how stereotypically the Arab experience in France is usually portrayed. A solution permeates from her documentary: she allowed herself and her family to be seen as complex and multilayered. The stakes are not merely representational; they are very much political as well.

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Their Algeria nimbly defies categorization. With her film, Soualem sketches a poetic and intimate portrait of her working-class, immigrant Algerian grandparents, Aïcha and Mabrouk Soualem. Their story begins in 1950s Algeria. At the time, their Algeria was in the midst of a liberation struggle against brutal French settler colonialism, which started in 1830.1 Aïcha and Mabrouk had to leave their war-torn country and their village of Laaouamer to settle in Thiers, a medieval industrial town in the dormant volcanic center of France.

In 2016, upon the initial shock of learning that her grandparents were getting a divorce after sixtytwo years of marriage, Soualem realized that she didn’t know anything about their lives and what they went through. The bond of generational transmission had been severed, and she was set on repairing it by creating a space for dialogue. As a result she embarked on a journey of storytelling to understand her grandparents, whom we get to know as Mémé Aïcha and Pépé Mabrouk. She wanted to explore their memories, notably through the many home movies that her father, actor Zinedine Soualem, shot throughout the years.

A moving voiceover dialogue between the filmmaker and her father gives the film its tempo. One of their exchanges explores the stakes of building and revisiting family archives: Lina Soualem: I love these images.

Zinedine Soualem: Yes, they are beautiful. . . .

Lina Soualem: What were you looking for by filming all of this?

Zinedine Soualem: Simply to keep memories, traces.

Speaking of the wedding of Zinedine’s sister, masterfully organized by Aïcha in 1992, the filmmaker also tells her father: “I always thought that these images were in Algeria. I dreamt that we went there, that we were there. We never talked about these images. . . I don’t feel like it’s part of reality.” Through her creative act, she gives materiality to her family’s past and memories as she pieces their Algeria back together.

There are many good reasons to write about Their Algeria. Before it premiered in Visions du Réel in 2020, the film won multiple work-in-progress awards, followed by several festival competition awards. It has since been part of the 2021 BlackStar Film Festival lineup while having a fall theatrical release in France, where the filmmaker was born and raised. Recognition from peers and the industry has furthered the film’s circulation opportunities,

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which is crucial for creative documentaries to meet new audiences—even more so with a film that layers alternative ways of telling, listening, and viewing.

Their Algeria resists the erasure of immigrants by investing in this very community.

Soualem is part of a new generation of unapologetic As a descendant of decolonial storytellers.2 immigrants in France, she is undertaking the urgent yet daunting task of addressing a colorblind republic. The formation and sustainability of this republic relied on the exploitation and subjugation of its colonial empire. Soualem’s work shows new ways of living our multiple and moving identities despite being routinely erased in the name of French universalism. In doing so, she is living out the powerful words of author and activist adrienne maree brown: “Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”3 My own interest in Their Algeria stems from a professional and personal kinship with Soualem, one that developed over the years from Paris to Ramallah to Haifa and Tunis. As much as it is rewarding as a programmer and curator to follow a film to its completion, I am more interested in a reading of the film’s impact beyond the French space.

When the film ends, we discover that Their Algeria is dedicated to the memory of Soualem’s late Pépé Mabrouk, which adds power to the story. Her cinematic gesture operates as an act of reconnection. Filming him in the cityscape of his adoptive town, Soualem offered her grandfather the gift of pride by reinscribing his individual story into the bigger history. Thiers is haunted by the ghosts of the cutlery industry that exhausted his body. Mabrouk Soualem’s life there was as meaningful as it was important. He raised a family and was part of a community where he provided support to newcomers.

With images of the home village of Laaouamer under snow, Soualem gifted her grandfather a piece of Algeria. Seen through Soualem’s phone screen, this memory of Algeria mirrors the opening shots of Thiers also under a blanket of snow. Thiers and Laaouamer are not just symbolic anchors to the narrative; they are constitutive of the family’s identities. Along with her grandfather we come to the realization that the two mountainous places are inextricably linked and forever intertwined, in their lives and throughout the film. Early in the film, Soualem asks him to talk about the pictures

To discuss Their Algeria is also to discuss the

positionality of the filmmaker and understand how

Soualem constructs her own artistic and political subjectivity.

Algeria. Photo by Lina Soualem.

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Soualem is part of a new generation of unapologetic decolonial storytellers

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Portrait of Aicha. Image courtesy of filmmaker Lina Soualem.

of the family he left behind in Algeria. He is not attached to pictures as memorabilia: “In the past Arabs didn’t like keeping pictures. It reminded them of painful memories.” The images of Lina in Laaouamer are breaking this cycle. They are a source of joy and worthy of being preserved and shared. In his last appearance on-screen, Mabrouk Soualem looks straight at her behind the camera and a smile of utter happiness illuminates his face, making it a particularly memorable scene. Such moments in the film are charged with warmth and lyricism as they capture fragments of a life that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion.

While seasons pass by, we get more and more acquainted with Aïcha and Mabrouk, as Soualem captures fragments of their life. “We never spoke. We’re not gonna start now,” her Mémé Aïcha says half-jokingly and gracefully, revealing that silences will prevail at times. Both grandparents open up, however, as Soualem continues her creative act.

The grandparents are never under scrutiny. Even when the filmmaker asks uncomfortable questions, she respects their boundaries. There’s even a radical tenderness in the way the camera lingers on their faces, revealing their wrinkles and the depth of their gazes. We are privy to their lives—we are engaged in their stories, witnessing the conflicted emotions they feel—yet we don’t have access to all their inner thoughts.

Many things will be left unsaid. Away from a voyeuristic inquiry, Soualem’s camera gives way for the narrative to invest the liminal space of Algerian exile, where silences hide the unresolved trauma. The grief of loss, erasure, and dispossession also persist, even more so when living in a country in denial of its colonial past and present.4 Soualem takes over her father’s videos and unanswered questions, interlacing her cinematic gaze and subjectivity with her father’s by reinterpreting his home videos. The film ends with the final voiceover exchange between the father-daughter duo, where Zinedine asks what she was thinking about when she reached their village of Laaouamer. “I thought about us,” she says, to which he replies playfully, “The password is Soualem.” Although centered on her grandparents first and foremost, this first-person movie is about the broader Soualem family unit. Still, their story manages to have a universal reach.

To discuss Their Algeria is also to discuss the positionality of the filmmaker and understand how Soualem constructs her own artistic and political subjectivity. She performs and embodies a new mode of representation that defies any notion of fixed identity while creating a new mode of intersubjectivity and viewership. There’s a very smart play throughout the film of blurring the traditional boundaries of a first-person account: she creates the possibility of an alternative viewing experience, challenging the viewer, alternatively adopting the point of view of one generation or the other, making more tangible an experience that is usually an elusive one. She plays with the narrative boundaries of distance and proximity. With this film, the three generations of Soualems are foreclosing new ways to understand the past, inform the present, and construct the future. Through deeply personal accounts of sorrow, they extend the possibility of universality, as the viewer is not engaged in a passive experience: the author’s self-reflection acts as a mirror, inviting us to engage in self-reflexivity.

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The filmmaker’s intent was never to provide all the answers to the existential questions about identity and belonging, her own as well as the viewers’. Rather, the film acts as one piece of a much larger puzzle, mirroring Soualem’s journey through cinema, which is at once familial, creative, and political. Her process is steeped in a belief that collaborative work has the potential to be disruptive and can be read as an urge to contribute to tilting the power imbalance in terms of access to resources, as well as which narratives get to be reflected on-screen.

Looking back, it seems apt that I first met Lina a few weeks after seeing her on-screen in At My Age I Still Hide to Smoke (2016), an ensemble film by Algerian playwright Rayhana. Lina’s mother, the Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, plays the main character in this choral feminist huis-clos movie set in Algeria’s Black Decade. Back then, she had been filming her grandparents for a few months, and we were both volunteers in a Palestinian Film Festival in Paris. She was also working on two festivals that she cofounded, Palest’In&Out (Paris) and Haifa Independent Film Festival. In Their Algeria, her father, Zinedine, uses the term , or felha (resourceful), which perfectly describes her. In turn, I would describe Soualem as a talented storyteller and cultural organizer who keeps questioning the systems and structures in place while building communities and expending the resources, shedding the light on exceptional people and their stories.

I have had the pleasure to witness her grow as an artist while getting a clear sense of the breadth of her hybrid storytelling practice in the making. She is developing a promising polyphonic body of work deeply rooted in the exploration of the self (in all its multiplicities). It comes as a no-brainer that she doesn’t need validation to go back and forth between her Algerian and Palestinian heritage, as well as her French upbringing, from one project to another. She is free to explore all parts of what constitutes her entire experience. In her essay “A Map of Parallel Worlds between Algeria and Palestine,”5 she writes about a rare skin condition, erythrokeratodermia variabilis, linked to unique migration patterns between her two countries of origin.

She insists, “My story is only one story among the multiple intimate stories that compose our collective history.” She tells me that “some identities need to be lived through struggle,” and “storytelling is directly linked to our survival; we are no longer waiting for others to recognize our humanity in all its pain and beauty.” She adds that not having to prove our humanity becomes the prerequisite to how we center and frame our narratives. Having to code-switch while navigating social spaces where her backgrounds would not be perceived as positive, Soualem feels that growing up in France somehow robbed her of a sense of wholeness. It wasn’t until she moved to Argentina (to work for a Human Rights Film Festival) that her multicultural background was really valued for the first time.

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More than ever, Soualem is invested in the process of producing her stories in a collaborative environment and in a way that disrupts representational expectations. Her second feature documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias, is the perfect illustration. It will explore her Palestinian mother’s emancipatory and trailblazing journey as an artist. Foregrounding Abbas’s artistic path in photography, theater, and cinema, this second feature will be carried by the mother-daughter

Portrait of Mabrouk. Image courtesy of filmmaker Lina Soualem.

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duo this time around to tell this story, collaboratively.

Soualem is in the process of cowriting with Nadine Naous,6 a Palestinian-Lebanese filmmaker, and the France-based Lebanese editor Gladys Joujou has been on board since the inception of the project. Joujou, the editor of Their Algeria, is also credited as an artistic partner. Soualem feels privileged to work closely with her, telling me: “Gladys has a gift, which is to always look for humanity, in all the stories she works on. No matter how painful or bleak they are, she is always able to sublime them.” She was instrumental in Soualem’s path to finding and refining her narrative and creative sensibility. This was crucial in helping her interlace the intimate and the collective, both narratively and aesthetically. Time and again, Joujou’s work as an editor manages to achieve a seamless balance between the form and the content, allowing the movie to be soulful. In this case, it was a way to push the boundaries of representation of immigrant life.

Over the years, Soualem and I have had regular conversations evoking the transformational power of cinema. We believe that programming and curating cinema can bring about positive change, as it moves the lines of representation, pushes back against our presumed homogeneity, and defies expectations from the industry and the audience. A shared concern throughout all of our collaborations on Palestinian cinema was to create new platforms for showcasing the diversity of Palestinian artists and plurality of their artistic voices. We want to open up new venues for connections, essentially shifting the narratives around Palestinian arts. While her connection to Palestine and its creative scene is organic and longstanding, it’s her filmmaking journey through her Algerian heritage that reconnected her to the broader Arab region.

With a French production company attached to her project, she gradually gained support and built a strongly knit community around her film through industry platforms in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt. The making of her film is a journey in itself, pushing the boundaries for financing and programming, going back and forth between both banks of the Mediterranean. Ultimately, this supports the filmmaker’s multipositionality and investment in creating links beyond imposed border divides.

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Soualem is also one of the nine cofounding members of Rawiyat ( , storytellers in Arabic), a “collective of women filmmakers from the Middle East, North Africa, and the diaspora joining forces to imagine a new landscape in the region and beyond.”7 Selfreflexivity is at the center of the collective, and the members are aware of their relative position of privilege. Rawiyat also works toward a more sustainable industry by supporting and nurturing voices that are emerging and established. In fact, it is through one of the collective’s members that she was introduced to Frida Marzouk,8 the Brooklyn-based French-Tunisian cinematographer with whom she is collaborating for the shooting of Bye Bye Tiberias.

Soualem stands on the shoulders of generations of storytellers, both in France and in Arab countries.

The novelty, however, is how she not only honors this legacy but is part of a new artistic and political movement. This contemporary movement challenges narrative norms and provides a new outlook on marginality while creating new diasporic dynamics and connections. In the French context, her work resonates with the current generations of artists, thinkers, and cultural organizers pigeonholed in a country that still considers them as aliens, in need of assimilation. Her film also belongs to a larger body of work from Arab filmmakers, past and present, who chose the nonfiction realm and the first-person narrative to revisit traumatic memories and navigate exile.

There’s a clear momentum that allows us to think of these filmmaking experiences as a new cinematographic epistemology and praxis. They create a new visual language and aesthetic culture from the standpoint of those who are deemed “the minority.” Rather than have stories catered to the hegemonic white and male gaze, they question authorship and disrupt the power dynamics at play in production as well as distribution. This momentum also creates a new intersubjective viewership, allowing for universality to stem from untold stories from the margins. Soualem’s generation is out to correct all forms of underrepresentation, misrepresentation, stereotyping, and exclusion. From auteur cinema to pop culture, they are affirming their right to break from the mold.

Opposite Page, clockwise: Mabrouk, Zinedine, and AÏcha, photo by and courtesy of filmmaker Lina Soualem; AÏcha and Mabrouk, image courtesy of Lina Soualem; Mabrouk with a friend in Thiers, France, image courtesy of filmmaker Lina Soualem.

While her connection to Palestine and its creative scene is organic and longstanding, it's her filmmaking journey through her Algerian heritage that reconnected her to the broader Arab region.

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Their Algeria (2020), dir. Lina Soualem. Photo by Thomas Brémond. Image courtesy of Lina Soualem.

1. The Algerian War of Independence spanned from 1954 to 1962. The French colonial rule over Algeria relied on systemic atrocities, massacres that amount to ethnic cleansing and incremental genocide, killing millions of Algerians and displacing millions of others. We are currently witnessing in France a political pushback and historical reappraisals to restrict the access to the archives on the one hand, and to underline what is presented as a “positive role” of colonization on the other hand.

2. Including Hajer Ben Boubaker, Nabil Djedouani, Kaouthar Harchi, Hafsia Herzi, Faïza Guène, Karim Kattan, and Dorothée Myriam Kellou, to name a few.

3. Pleasure Activism: the Politics of Feeling Good (Chico: AK Press, 2019).

4. See two illuminating works that shed light on the colonial continuum that affects how the post-colonial immigrant population has been treated for decades in France while still having repercussions in Algeria: Karima Lazali, Colonial Trauma: a Study of the Psychic and Political Consequences of Colonial Oppression in Algeria (Boston: Polity, 2021) and Leopold Lambert, States of Emergency: a Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (Toulouse: Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021).

5. Text originally published in May 2020 in French as “Une Cartographie de mondes parallèles” in the participatory fanzine Divine, created by Sido Lansari, and available in English at https:// thefunambulist.net/magazine/politics of-food/a-map-of-parallel-worlds between-algeria-and-palestine-by-lina soualem.

6. Naous is also exploring her multiple identities and belonging through nonfiction in Home Sweet Home (2014), in which she returns to Lebanon to reconnect with her parents. In a more recent film, Au Kiosque Citioyen (2019), on the eve of an election day, she explores the act of voting and what it means to be a naturalized French citizen.

7. https://rawiyat.com.

8. Frida Marzouk was Erige Sehiri’s cinematographer for Under the Fig Tree (forthcoming). It is the first narrative feature for Marzouk, who also navigates fluidly through her identities and multiple creative and physical spaces she inhabits.

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A

HUNGER

TO BE HEARD A Profile of Fox Maxy

by Cassie da Costa

These days, there’s a lot of talk about short-form video—again. Since the rise of the post-Vine video app TikTok, fashion, media, and tech platforms are “pivoting” back to the medium, hoping to draw in the ever-elusive marketing category of Gen Z. Yet the cynicism of that undeniable framing can cloud the minds of writers and critics who are supposed to care about moving image, at least those of us who are trying to hold on to precarious blogging gigs. If video’s in again, there looms another round of layoffs, already-recycled jobs thrown back to the dumping grounds.

San Diego (2020), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

No emerging filmmaker embodies this immediacy better than twenty-nine-yearold Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum), who is so open and unpretentious that discussing his thoughtful and ambitious work feels like talking with an old friend. Coming out of the fashion production world in New York, Maxy captured attention by posting super-short videos on Instagram—years of archival footage shot on his iPhone in and around his community in San Diego. All edited to a soundtrack of carefully selected songs and rhythms (one includes a Dolly Parton Easter tune interlude), some sequences feel like nature documentary, the only doc form Maxy is explicitly interested in.

Others are deeply experimental or come off like (auto)biography.

Maxy’s more recent videos, such as Maat Means Land (2020) and San Diego (2020), are longer, running around thirty to forty minutes, and more elliptical.

Watertight (in production), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

But really, who cares? Digital has always been a mess. You don’t sign on to online cultural production with the promise of stability; you do it with a hunger to be heard. And today’s most exciting video artists and shortform filmmakers are no different: whether their work is on TikTok, Instagram, or a major magazine’s website, what matters is that today, in this moment, eyes get on it. The future will have to sort itself out.

THE FUTURE WILL HAVE 36

TO SORT ITSELF OUT. 37

San Diego (2020), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

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MAXY ALWAYS EDITS WITH AN EYE TOWARDS ATTENTION SPAN AND ENJOYMENT; HE’S NOT INTERESTED IN PUTTING VIEWERS THROUGH A DURATIONAL TEST.

The longer duration allows for several shifts in tone and pacing. At the beginning of Maat, a Native kid in sweats and sneakers lethargically roams the land, the camera quickly cutting between perspectives, including another person’s sunlight-bathed profile and glimmering earring. A dreamy, tinkling soundtrack plays before it’s interrupted with a traditional American pop song a la Bing Crosby, with the line “where do you go when you feel your brain is on fire?” In San Diego, dynamic, irreverent scenes of Maxy roaming city streets with friends give way to stiller, high-tension moments of protest and then to calmingly detailed views of the desert.

Maxy’s films explore many diverging and converging themes—from being Native to living on and respecting the land. But they also emphasize affect and expression, visual rhyme and currents of emotion, popular culture and carefree subversion.

There are computer-rendered scenes, resembling the popular computer game the Sims, video overlaying trippy images, and moments of extreme attention to specific objects or people that cut through sequences of agitated movement.

Watertight (in production), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

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Maat Means Land (2020), dir. Fox Maxy. Film stills courtesy of Fox Maxy.

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My big thing is getting approval and feeling like when I put something out, I’ve checked in with the people that I’ve worked with.

San Diego (2020), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

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Maxy always edits with an eye towards attention span and enjoyment; he’s not interested in putting viewers through a durational test. Nonetheless, his videos have challenged expectations. He felt the need to go long: “I was really concerned that people told me before that my work isn’t very watchable,” he says. “And so, I was like, This is something I’m just going to make for me—and if nobody watches it, fine.

But that’s where I was kind of playing around with my editing. I was just making it for me.”

That personal mandate doesn’t come from a place of selfishness but from a focus on preservation—of the self and the work. At the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico, where Maxy studied film, he was in some ways finally able to fit in: “I teared up because, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by all Native kids 24/7, and our teachers were Native for the most part.” But there was a disconnect when it came to critiques of Maxy’s still-in-development feature Watertight, which is described on Maxy’s website civicfilms.org as “a collection of interviews interrupted by fantasy worlds of fake commercials, reality TV parodies, animations, and archival footage.” “They hated my work so much,” Maxy says. “I started Watertight as a school project, and everyone was kind of like, What the hell is this? This is not what a movie looks like.

Maybe this is a documentary. But no, that’s wrong.”

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He’s also found mentors in a group of critically acclaimed Native filmmakers—including Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, Alexandra Lazarowich, and Adam Piron—who created COUSIN, a collective that, according to its website, is “building an Indigenous-led film movement.” It’s in this group of filmmakers that Maxy has finally found a sense of shared artistic vision.

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San Diego (2020), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

Receiving such strong reactions early on has made Maxy— who is effortlessly casual in speech yet engaged and genuine in personality—skeptical of criticism and who it comes from.

“I haven’t heard one thing that has been helpful,” he says. “I hear a lot of: ‘This part is weird.’ ‘This part is creepy.’ ‘This part is hard to watch.’ And I’m like, Well, buckle up, because I’m not going to change it.” But in other ways, the filmmaker is becoming more collaborative, slowly beginning to work with a small crew and devising relationships built on honest feedback and shared priorities. “My big thing is getting approval and feeling like when I put something out, I’ve checked in with the people that I’ve worked with,” Maxy explains.

“And it’s hard, because there are film festivals and timelines and deadlines. But I really, really want to make sure that people are at the core of what I’m putting out, that people feel like they are part of something that they’re proud of.”

“They got in touch with me and were saying things that I had never heard before,” Maxy says. “That they believed in me and they could see me doing something bigger and could really help me figure out how to navigate where I want to go with [my work].

And they didn’t want to change anything about me.”

COUSIN has been helping Maxy take his work to film festivals, which he admitted, in a relatable aside, that he doesn’t understand, what with all their rules and categories. “If you want to see this film, I mean, just watch it,” he quips.

Still, Maxy is feeling surprisingly optimistic about working in Hollywood if the call comes. He tells me he’s been trying his hand at acting too and has spent time on big sets, including Netflix productions. “It’s very funny to me, because [the film world] seems a lot nicer than fashion. I’m shocked on the daily by how much more willing people are to help each other out and answer questions,” Maxy says. “Good attitudes, I guess.”

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Hollywood is big, though, and I ask Maxy where he’d hope to land. “I love the Safdie brothers and could see myself sitting in the world that they’re in,” he says. “I don’t know what world that is, but if that’s Hollywood . . .” It’s an apt identification, not only because the Safdies spent a lot of time making short films before their early features, but also because their own complex, dynamic, and provocative work elicits that classic “what the fuck” reaction from those who simply can’t get on their level.

Maxy is still working to fund Watertight, but despite the seemingly never-ending search for film financing, he’s finally feeling confident in his work and in himself. “Now I know that people will watch my stuff and not cringe. Or maybe they do, but they’re still watching it,” Maxy tells me.

“It’s just a cool, powerful feeling, knowing that I can make films and people will watch them.”

San Diego (2020), dir. Fox Maxy. Film still courtesy of Fox Maxy.

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To Build a World That is Not

conversations between Ahmed Bouanani and Nour-Eddine Saïl, translated from Maghreb Informations 48

Introduction and translation by Omar Berrada

Ahmed Bouanani, 1971. Photo by M'hamed Bouanani. Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

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Mirage (1979), dir. Ahmed Bouanani.

Film poster courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

Though limited in volume, Bouanani’s extant work is exceptional. His feature film Mirage (1979) is a classic of African cinema. His shorts—Tarfaya ou la marche d’un poète (1966), 6 et 12 (1968), Mémoire 14 (1971), and Les Quatre Sources (1977)—are enduringly fascinating experiments of cinematic self-determination.

He belonged to a generation of artists who grew up under French colonial rule and came of age in a newly independent nation. Like elsewhere in Africa, formal independence was a far cry from actual decolonization. Bouanani understood his work as a contribution to liberating the Moroccan mind. In the field of cinema, this meant “decolonizing the screen” after the long “colonial night” had imposed a distorted, scornful image of the (North) African natives.

Mirage (1979) screenplay notebook.

Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

Poet, essayist, and fiction writer Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) was also a protagonist of Moroccan cinema as a director, editor, and screenwriter. He was revered for his artistic vision and unshakable integrity.

However, such probity also turned him into a tragic figure. Repeatedly censored and banned from access to production funds, he died in solitude, surrounded by countless book manuscripts and unrealized film projects.1 The bulk of Bouanani’s oeuvre is yet to be viewed. His work and archive are slowly coming to light,2 thanks to the efforts of his daughter, visual artist and filmmaker Touda Bouanani, and a small group of artists, scholars, and aficionados eager to revive ideas and experiments the Years of Lead had silenced.3

dow into a radical filmmaker from Morocco.

This was a time when a national cinema was only a dream—only five feature films had been produced since the country’s independence in 1956.

The conversation begins with Bouanani’s montage film Mémoire 14, which aimed to recount the onset of colonization in early twentieth-century Morocco. Realizing the only available documentary materials were propaganda images shot by the colonizers, Bouanani decided to edit them against themselves by undermining their rhythm, their sequencing, their framing, as well as entirely transforming the existing soundtrack.

Manuscripts in the Bouanani apartment. Photo by Anna Della Subin. Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

1. For a poignant filmic portrait of Ahmed Bouanani, see Ali Essafi’s Crossing the Seventh Gate (2017).

2. Two of Bouanani’s books were published in English translation in 2018 by New Directions: The Hospital (fiction) and The Shutters (poetry).

3. The Years of Lead is the name given to a period of violent political repression in Morocco, roughly between the mid-’60s and the late ’80s, under the reign of King Hassan II. 4. Expressions from Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous book, La Septième Porte: une histoire du cinéma au Maroc 1907-1986 (Rabat: Kulte Editions, 2020). This history of film in Morocco is co-edited by Touda Bouanani and Berrada.

5. See note 4.

While many in positions of power did their best to sabotage Bouanani’s work, he also had his supporters. Nour-Eddine Saïl (19472020) was one. Trained as a philosopher, Saïl was an educator and a film critic. He launched the first Moroccan film journal, Cinema 3, in 1970, founded the Fédération nationale des ciné-clubs du Maroc (FNCCM) in 1973, and established the Festival du cinéma africain de Khouribga in 1977. Later in his career, he became the director of the Centre cinématographique marocain, Morocco’s National Film Center, as well as the director of the 2M television station.

From 1972 to 1974, Saïl edited a weekly column in the newspaper Maghreb Informations. On two occasions, in 19736 and in 1974,7 he devoted it to an interview with Bouanani. The second interview picks up where the first one left off, hence my decision to join them together here.8 These conversations from Maghreb Informations are a win-

6. “J’ai choisi la voie du mythe,” Maghreb Informations, March 23, 1973.

7. “Un film qui ne s’enracine pas profondément dans nos réalités ne m’intéresse pas,” Maghreb Informations, June 29, 1974.

8. The first interview is included in full. I omitted three questions from the second interview, for length and consistency.

Tarfaya ou la marche d'un poète (1966), dir. Ahmed Bouanani behind the scenes. Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

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Interview 1 There is no better Nour-Eddine Saïl: Why the title Mémoire 14?

Ahmed Bouanani: Mémoire 14 was initially a poem I wrote in 1967.9 I included some passages from it in the text that accompanies the film. I wanted to keep this title because in my opinion it conveys the foundations on which the structure of the entire film rests: by way of chaotic recollections and a labyrinthine memory, men and women who are at once active in and witnesses to their generation, to their Fourteenth-Century world,10 attempt to recover their own reality. This reality inscribes itself in letters of gold and blood against a specific political and cultural context.

N-ES: You chose the path of myth. You question Moroccan reality on a fundamental level by meticulously deciphering a whole set of popular myths. What status do you give to reality? In other words, isn’t the choice of myth a kind of escape from reality?

AB: I did not deliberately choose the path of myth. I would say that myths imposed themselves in such a way that rejecting them would have meant amputating reality of an essential dimension. Let me explain: it is through anachronistic memories, memories nourished by myths, that I attempt to recompose the “reality” of my characters and of their universe. These ancestors who

project for a filmmaker than to contribute with

lived in an epic, feudal world, who traveled on sheepskins and truck racks, can only conceive of their reality through stereotypical images—these may appear somewhat grotesque and “unrealistic,” but their legendary sources are true, not imagined.

The mythification of reality is simply an operation of sensitization. A mythologized reality does not lose its “mathematical” face; on the contrary, it inherently acquires a force that imprints itself in memory for good. Even when memory, a memory among others, visualizes the idealized image of the precolonial cultural and economic condition, it cannot ignore or reject the reality of that society— the fact that it was governed by a feudalism whose mask naturally emerges out of the exuberant Golden Age imagery.11 Dealing with reality on one side and myth on the other is therefore out of the question; there is a permanent interdependency between them. And I don’t see how one can speak of an escape from reality about a film that is entirely driven by reality, where each shot is a halftone print of the real and the fantastical. A linear arrangement of events and history would have produced a different film, something very impersonal. But I am not a historian and I don’t claim to “narrate,” in Mémoire 14, the history of Morocco since 1912.

his modest means to the radical and systematic 52

N-ES: What was the trajectory of this film for you? How did you come up with the idea of assaulting Moroccan viewers by questioning one of the fundamentals of their identity— the country’s history?

AB: My great ambition was and still is to make a film about the Moroccan epic of the early twentieth century. That period

is not yet “ancient history” for us. It is alive, terribly present. It cannot be approached in a casual, innocent way. And if the Moroccan viewer feels attacked by Mémoire 14, this is not due to any manipulation on the part of the filmmaker, but rather to the subject of the film itself. This is after all the story of an aggression, an aggression whose consequences we are still unfortunately suffering.

N-ES: Technically speaking, you did a remarkable job with the editing and the soundtrack. Can you give an overview of the research that allowed the technique you used (editing at the limit of the documentary) to be fully effective?

transformation of his society, with a view to building a world that is not traumatizing.

AB: In order to make Mémoire 14, I had to watch a great number of colonial documentaries—some very toxic shorts. The Protectorate’s political propaganda in these films is very simplistic, when it is not also sly and cynical. The “content” of these films is essentially based on a confrontation between two starkly divergent ways of life: a traditional, archaic, backward way countered by one that is modern, advanced, etc. There is a recurring scene in these films, where a peasant with a plow meets a settler with a tractor. This entire body of work is geared toward highlighting the transformation and modernization operated by France’s presence in Morocco. Hence my attempt to systematically undermine it by way of a method based on constant demystification. The shots I chose for my film are fragments of distorted reality.

The editing I opted for—which in some scenes uses [Sergei] Eisenstein’s famous “montage of attractions” technique—allowed me to place these fragments in an opposite perspective. For example, shots of horsemen, of a village attacked by bandits, of cattle raiders acting with impunity (as colonial films show us) in blad Siba,12 become in Mémoire 14 the elements

of a different reality, namely: faced with the aggression of the “pacifying” army and the panic created by its presence and its cannons, the peasants leave the plow for the gun and try to resist the invader. Many other examples of the same kind are found throughout the film. . . .

Technically, I did not invent anything. I applied, as much as possible, the classic cinematographic research on editing carried out by the 1920s Soviet school, Vsevolod Pudovkin in particular.

As for the soundtrack, it allowed me to express what I could not show or say openly through the text. Cinematographic research is curiously dependent on the “impositions” to which the spectator is subjected.

N-ES: Any new projects?

AB: Unfortunately, all Moroccan filmmakers live only in “projects.” Nothing more. It is the common curse of our generation. This year I am finishing a short color film on Sidi Ahmed Ou Moussa, which allows me to reconnect with the “mythical reality” of the past. As I study the tenth century of the Hijri calendar (sixteenth century of the Christian era)—the time of the Portuguese occupation and of the great poet Sidi Abderrahmane Al Majdoub—I find strange affinities with the reality we are currently living through. To reconsider the past is to understand the present in order to master it and find the adequate weapons for our defense and our survival. There is no better project for a filmmaker than to contribute with his modest means to the radical and systematic transformation of his society, with a view to building a world that is not traumatizing.

9. An English version of the poem, under the title “Memory 14,” is included in Ahmed Bouanani, The Shutters, trans.

Emma Ramadan (New York: New Directions, 2018).

10. Fourteenth century in the Islamic Hijri calendar, which roughly corresponds to the twentieth century AD. 11. While making a plea for maintaining the cultural memory of a precolonial past, Ahmed Bouanani warns against the trap of idealizing it as a Golden Age since it was a deeply unequal, feudal system.

12. Blad siba, which translates roughly to “anarchy zones,” refers to areas of Morocco that were out of the control of the central state.

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2 W E I V R INTE

AB: Thirty or forty million [dirhams] is not easy to come by.

Y N-ES: WHY DID YOU DELA Whereas everywhere else films SHOOTING YOUR FEATURE require hundreds of millions, if not billions, here in Morocco, FILM [MIRAGE ]? at the beginning, we make do with small budgets. But these budgets, however small, are not easy to find. For a long time, I was hoping for a private producer. That was a big mistake. People who have money power don’t give a damn about promoting any kind of national cinema; what they want is to make even more money, and at a lower cost. They even try to discourage all attempts by making people believe that a film cannot be profitable without a headliner, for instance—another stupid myth we don’t need. I looked at the other possibilities. Repeating the Wechma13 experience? It seems impossible for me to push my colleagues into that kind of ordeal again. They were too disappointed and discouraged. After all, they had sacrificed everything for that first film. I don’t have the right to ask them to make the same sacrifices again. So, what’s left?

The CCM,14 with its new policy, has helped the last two national productions enormously. They are willing to fund my project without any restrictions, while the private sector—if they had deigned to take an interest in the film—would have undoubtedly imposed a lot of nonsense on me in the name of profitability and commerce. With the CCM, I risk none of that. I should add that if I took my sweet time shooting my first feature, it is also because I was not ready. Making a feature film is not the be-all and end-all; it is as important to express yourself in a short film as in a one-and-ahalf-hour movie. It would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it, to say that a novelist is more important than a short story writer. Of course, with our short films we have no chance of reaching the general public. So far only the FNCCM has largely helped make our productions known through its network and has, by the same token, supported us enormously. As for commercial theaters, no law requires them to show Moroccan short films. The audience is much more used to seeing documentaries about Florida.

So, with feature films we will have to face the general public—assuming that our productions are given access to theaters in the same way as foreign films. This issue of distribution is not yet

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13. Wechma [Traces], which came out in 1970, is considered to be the foundational feature film of independent Moroccan cinema. It was produced by Sigma 3, a small cooperative of four filmmakers who all chipped in to the enterprise and pledged to work on each other’s films. Bouanani was a founding member of Sigma 3 and the editor of Wechma.

The collective came apart after this initial project.

14. Centre cinématographique marocain, the National Film Center.

fully settled. It took me almost two years to finalize my script. I first wrote it like a nove l. After a few months, I ended up with a voluminous manuscript of over two hundred pages. A vast epic.

Bringing such a novel to the screen was out of the qu estion. I neither have the capaci ty nor the financial means for it.

So, I limited myself to a less ambit ious subject. Now I am struggli ng with issues of a different na ture. I have not definitively sol ved some problems with the dialog ues; I have not yet chosen the leading actor. Our so-called pr ofessional actors have few opportu nities to improve themselves an d develop their talent. W hen the y are given work, on television an d on theater stages in particular , they are always left to their ow n devices; they work in haphazard ways.

For certain roles, I am thinking of taking nonprofession als.

DO YOU TAKE THE AUDIENCE INTO ACCOUNT IN YOUR WORK AS A DIRECTOR? TO WHAT EXTENT? N-ES:

AB: Too much is said about the audience. People thi nk too much in the audience’s place.

The distributors and ex hibitors pride themselves on kn owing the audience. They invariab ly describe it as a bunch of idiots wh o are incapable of appreciati ng a good film. These same peop le forget—or pretend they don’t know —that they alone are respons ible for the nonsense that floods the national market. Will they let the audience choose for itself ? Certa inly not.

As far as I know, no au dience has ever demonstrated in the streets to demand King Kong movies and, before that, Italian we sterns and Macistes.15 Very often I read in

the newspapers that such and such a theater, “by popular demand,” has decided to show such and such a film. How on earth was this demand made? By referendum? By mail?

They are keeping the audience in a state of fascination. People are no longer going to the movies to let off steam; they’re going to the movies to be repressed. I have heard it said more than once that the public is the only judge, etc. Sounds nice.

What a beautiful democratic rule. But does the public have the necessa ry weapons to be able to judge? Has it not, on the contrar y, been deprived of them? Haven’t they dulled its capacity for judgment and clearsightedness to the point of preventing it from reacting in a healthy way against harmful programming policies? So, what attitude should we adopt? I say: film or theater creator s, artists who respect themselves, must never try to please the audience, to please it by exploiting the weaknesses that were inculcated to it. On the contrar y, they must denounce them. We must be sincere with the public; that is the best proof of respect. In any case, whatever the degree of mystification it has been confined in, the Moroccan public will not get it wrong when it is eventually allowed to watch Moroccan films.

I actually pro claim my right to make bad movies, a this is not a jok nd e. My only ambition— the ambitio n of all Moroccan filmmakers—i s for the audience to get used to wat ching themselves on t he screen, to see their own problems being addressed and thus to be able to judge the society in which they live.

N-ES:

DO YOU HAVE PROJECTS OTHER THAN THE FEATURE FILM THAT YOU WILL START IN THE COMING WEEKS? TO WHAT EXTENT? AB: Sure. Among others, an adaptation of [The Siege of] Numantia by [Miguel de] Cervantes. But what good are projects, new projects, when we always have to conquer our own national market?

If we have to go through the same channels every time to get any old project done, and if we have to fight every time to get access to Moroccan theaters, it will be hell. We must manage to impose a common agenda with three main laws, namely: a national fund for film production, exploitation and distribution quotas, and a tax exemption for national productions. Some ill-intentioned spirits keep raising the problem of tax exemption for films without specifying their nationality. Next, they’ll demand a tax exemption for Hong Kong movies!

Lastly, I wanted to point out that a producers’ guild was just officially created. I am sure that they will be good interlocutors. As for me, I do not claim, as some do, to save Moroccan cinema by making a feature film, nor do I claim to make a masterpiece.

Only fools make such pompous claims. I actually proclaim my right to make bad movies, and this is not a joke. My only ambition—the ambition of all Moroccan filmmakers—is for the audience to get used to watching themselves on the screen, to see their own problems being addressed and thus to be able to judge the society in which they live. The screen must no longer be the privileged mirror of foreign realities.

15. A type of Italian film featuring the character of Maciste, a massively powerful protagonist who performs heroic feats.

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3

5 4 ↑ 11

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(1)

(2)

French translation of the dialogue of Mirage (1979).

Photo by Touda Bouanani. Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

Image from the book La septième porte – Une histoire du cinéma au Maroc de 1907 à 1986 by Ahmed Bouanani, Kulte Editions, 2020. Photo by Diyae Bourhim.

(3)

(4)

(5)

Ahmed Bouanani as an actor in Une porte sur le ciel (1988) directed by Farida Benlyazid. Photo by Kamal Dridi.

Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

Abandoned draft poster for Mirage (1979) by Ahmed Bouanani. Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

Cover of Les persiennes by Ahmed Bouanani, 1980, Editions Stouky.

7 2 8

6

10 9 ↑ (6) Memoire 14 (1971), dir. Ahmed Bouanani. Film still courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

(7) The cover of Cinema 3, n. 4, December 1970, featuring

filmmaker Ousmane Sembène.

(8) Ahmed Bouanani, 2009. Photo by Ali Essafi.

(9) Memoire 14 (1971), dir. Ahmed Bouanani. Film still courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

(10)

(11)

(12)

The cover of Cinema 3, n. 1, January 1970, featuring film still of Ahmed Bouanani's 6 & 12 (1968).

Maghreb Informations, 30 June 1974, featuring the original interview with Ahmed Bouanani by Nour-Eddine Saïl.

Preliminary sketch of the film poster for Mirage (1979) by Ahmed Bouanani. Courtesy of Archives Bouanani.

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Beyond the Colonial Camera: Three Departures Nanook of the North (1922), dir. Robert J. Flaherty.

translated to text by Nuotama Bodomo, based on a keynote

Mr. Mensah Builds a House (1956), dir. Sean Graham.

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Mr. Mensah Builds a House (1956), dir. Sean Graham.

Afronauts (2014), dir. Nuotama Bodomo.

Still from the video "Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas?

(Live Aid 1985)," 21 September 2018, published by Live Aid, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gifrd7ljNL4

delivered by Bodomo at BlackStar’s inaugural William and Louise Greaves Filmmaker Seminar in March 2021 Zairian singer Franco waving from his car, Kinshasa, 1962. © Photo Jean DEPARA / courtesy Estate of Depara - Revue Noire Paris.

Still from the video report "This is Cuba's Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify — all without the internet," by Johnny Harris, Vox, 21 September 2015, https:// www.vox.com/videos/2017/11/16/16658322/cuba-paquete-internet-netflix.

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Yɛ zimaane. N po pɛlɛɛ la yaga ne yɛ nang yeli ka N wa yeli yɛlɛ ko yɛ Zenɛ.

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That was me just thanking everyone in Dagaare for the honor of speaking in front of this very intentionally gathered community.

It’s such an honor to be able to speak to an audience I can really share with and get feedback from.

A few years back, at the BlackStar filmmaker symposium, I got to see [filmmakers] Roni Nicole [Henderson] and Iyabo Kwayana speak about how they constructed their practices, and how their personal lives gave rich material for the subject matter of their films. So jumping off from the gift of those presentations, I wanted to start by sharing a bit about my practice right now: where I’m at, what I’m doing, and how I’m conceiving of film.

Where I’m at always has a lot to do with what brought me to film: on the one hand, being African and being from the “dark continent,” being from a space that has been so willfully misrepresented by media—so much so that you grow up wanting to punch back, because you’ve seen something a majority of the world doesn’t get access to see. But then, on the other hand, being very diasporic and so, thinking: Let me remix, let me bring together, let me figure out, in my own way, what my traditional and Indigenous heritage is [by] using all of the tools at my disposal. This desire to speak truthfully, complexly, and authentically brought me to film.

And yet, in popular American film discourse, we get into these linguistic, discursive dead ends, especially around this thing of representation—like #OscarsSoWhite and the conversation around why so many historical African American figures are portrayed by Black British actors. These conversations and this sort of protest are very important. However, I’m also just thinking through the year when the Academy finally opened up to a lot of women and people of color. And I’m looking at that result and wondering if when we frame our protests as #OscarsSoWhite, we then encase our protest within that institution only. So that institution then responds and opens up, but only to usurp everything that we’re talking about into their own ranks.

I’m always left wondering if I can truly speak properly and speak to the fullness and the richness that I want to be speaking to, and especially if I can do that with other people.

When these questions come up for me, it’s at the scale of infrastructural things, but also at the scale of film-linguistic things, like how to put two shots together. So many threads have come up for me as to whether we can authentically, indigenously speak together using film language.

One of the threads that has come up is the idea of the colonial camera. I think most of us gathered here would agree that the camera has been used to define us but also to redefine how we define ourselves. So much so that Arthur Jafa said: “It doesn’t matter if a Black person is behind the camera or not, because the camera itself functions as an instrument of the white gaze.” 1 So there are these discourses around the camera being something that isn’t for us and wasn’t made for us.

When I think about the colonial camera, the sort of stereotype that comes up is blackand-white newsreel footage with natives demonstrating native things for educational ¹

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“If you point a camera at a Black person, on a psychoanalytical level it functions as a white gaze. It therefore triggers a whole set of survival modalities that Black Americans have. It doesn’t matter if a Black person is behind the camera or not, because the camera itself functions as an instrument of the white gaze.” From “Arthur Jafa in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” Moderna Museet, 2016, https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/arthur-jafa/arthur-jafahans-ulrich-obrist/.

purposes. A white male, usually British voiceover comes on and explains—not to an audience that includes the natives, but to an audience that includes only the people akin to that white British voice—what the natives are doing.

Even the movie I’ve been sitting with for a very long time now, Afronauts (2014), was introduced to me through a similarly colonial video:

Nanook of the North (1922), dir. Robert J. Flaherty.

Mr. Mensah Builds a House (1956), dir. Sean Graham.

But then we can also talk about how the camera itself was used to administer the colonial era. In Ghana, we had these movies like Mr. Mensah Builds a House (1955) or other educational films that would teach natives how to wash their hands and dress for an interview and clean up and be better citizens, be better colonial subjects. In this way, the camera had its place just in terms of administering the colonial era. And some of the earliest film practitioners in Ghana were making these colonial-educational movies, so those legacies definitely run deep.

Stills from the video "Faces of Africa - Mukuka Nkoloso: The Afronaut," 9 September 2013, published by CGTN Africa, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uzSSe8RP58.

So even though this video is not produced in the colonial era, you’re still getting this setup: camera pointed at native people doing “wacky” things; a news reporter who takes the place of the colonial voiceover explainer.

And even in trying to be a “nice white person” by explaining to his white audience that the people here aren’t what Zambians are—that Zambians are rational—he still others the

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people here that are being filmed and shown to us as crackpots. Beyond that, we only have free access to this video through this “50 Terrible Ideas” lampoon show. Only through this extra filter of, “we’re laughing at them” do we even have access to this video of the Afronauts.

So even outside of an expressly colonial context, these dynamics are still at play. It’s part of the reason why I was so captured by this story.

When it comes to the colonial camera, I also want to speak beyond something that feels like it’s stuck to a previous era and talk about how contemporary media plays into these dynamics around the camera being colonial. I want to talk about the image of Africa that still affects how Africans see ourselves today.

What I’m going to show is a video from the Live 8 benefit concert that happened in 2005 on the twentieth anniversary of 1985’s Live Aid concert. This all came out of the success of Band Aid, when a lot of British superstars (like Sting and Bono and Bob Geldof) came together to record the hit 1984 song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”2 to raise money for the Ethiopian hunger crisis. So, we’re in the context of this charity song—British people coming together to show you just how bad it is in Africa so that you will donate money. To enact this, they reinforce that we, the British, are generous and good people.

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There’s a world outside your window / And it’s a world of dread and fear / Where the only water flowing / Is the bitter sting of tears / And the Christmas bells that ring there / Are the clanging chimes of doom / Well tonight thank God it’s them / Instead of you And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time / The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life (Oooh) / Where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow / Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

From Band Aid, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

(Phonogram/Columbia, 1984).

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Stills from the video "Bob Geldof Message (Live 8)," 12 July 2010, published by angelosf2, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ugK7ycjI61w.

The Ethiopian hunger crisis was from 1983 to 1985, so we’re talking thirty-five, thirtysix years ago. That’s how young this image of Africa—potbellied kids, everyone’s dying of hunger, they have nothing, they’re destitute, we must give them charity—really is. That’s how young this very specific vision of Africa is. And it was constructed out of this charity industrial complex in which you have to necessarily show that people are suffering to incite people to donate. And the pathos of how Bob Geldof is speaking . . . that sort of pathos is needed to collect money, right? And this is even forgetting that, like, Live Aid, the (RED) campaign, and all these sorts of campaigns are constantly being held to task for corruption in getting these funds to the actual people and the percentage of proceeds that go into marketing. That’s even beside the point.

I really want to talk about the fact that, in the 1980s, a camera was used to film three-year-old Birhan Woldu— the Ethiopian person who now appears in this video as an adult—ten minutes from death. And then that video was paraded around the world for profit. And then twenty years later, she’s now being brought up and paraded on stage as a singular success story. So you’re saying millions of people were dying, and yet you’re parading out this singular example as the reason why what you’re doing works?

And now, because she and her translator have been given money to come here, they reinforce the dynamic by speaking with this language of “Africa loves you.”

The first is stills from the Congolese photographer, Jean Depara. I’m situating Jean Depara within African studio and fashion photography of the 1960s. That’s Malick Sidibe. That’s James Barnor. Just across the continent, there were photographers setting up studios for party and fashion photography. And for me, this is an example of how dynamics do shift when the person holding the camera shifts.

It’s not to erase the power dynamics, because there’s always going to be a power dynamic, but to give examples of how they shift. I start to theorize people as maybe wanting to be photographed. Obviously, all I can offer here is conjecture. I don’t know enough about who was photographed here. I can only look from the photographs as presented, but I start to see possibilities of other ways that people can be in front of the camera.

Beyond what is overtly within the colonial era, these dynamics evolve, but stay put.

I am not one to disagree when somebody says the camera is colonial. However, as a filmmaker, as somebody who’s been doing this since she was a teenager and as somebody who has really honed this skill and really understands what a camera is as a tool, it’s very hard to just sit back and say, OK, the camera is colonial.

A group of Sapeurs seated in front of glasses of Primus beer, Kinshasa, ca.1955-1965. © Photo Jean DEPARA / courtesy Estate of Depara - Revue Noire Paris.

So I start to think through what I can offer to complicate some of the thinking behind constructing the camera as colonial. I’m going to present just a few things.

A table of young women in a dance club in Kinshasa, ca.1955-1965. © Photo Jean DEPARA / courtesy Estate of Depara - Revue Noire Paris.

Four dancers sitting on a platform, Kinshasa, ca. 19551965. © Photo Jean DEPARA / courtesy Estate of Depara - Revue Noire Paris.

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I’m thinking about the desire to be documented, the desire to have evidence of your presence. And personally, I connect it to when I go to my village, which is in the Upper West Region of Ghana, and I’m holding a camera. I just have it because I want to take some vague shots and document the trip. . . . Once that camera enters my village, it becomes communal property. It becomes a communal tool. Everybody’s now coming in and directing me: “Take my picture, take my picture.” People want to go away, get dressed, come back, and have their picture taken.

I’m just using some of these examples to complicate what it means to point a camera, and to what extent people want to be filmed versus don’t want to be filmed.

But beyond changing who’s holding the camera, I also want to think through new media forms.

Now I’m thinking about Vines and TikToks, and meme culture, and the fact that Black youth are at the avant-garde of creating new media languages on these platforms.

"Photo taken by my cousin Zenɛyɛlɛ (15)." — Nuotama Bodomo

Once that camera enters my village, it becomes communal property. It becomes a communal tool.

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Stills from the video "Do It For The Vine," 26 January 2014, published by Fun Master, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24FaTsnkYYM.

The reason I really love this one is that in this one specifically, we have this dynamic between the child in the frame, the person filming, and then the person sitting next to the child. They’re saying, “Do it for the Vine,”—and so referencing this corporate platform, that if it didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be here doing this—but even considering these

For me, it’s very hard to sit and say that the camera’s colonial and then give it away. There’s too much power in that tool.

power dynamics, you can’t negate an intimate moment recorded between family. Let’s say that they love each other. Then those possibilities come into play, and the camera becomes this sort of nexus of play. It’s something to put on and play with and record this moment with. So it’s about documentation and evidence, but it’s also active in this moment, where it’s facilitating a certain play.

The last thing I’ll offer in terms of just trying to open up a little bit beyond the camera as colonial is how I specifically use the camera as a spiritual tool. I think about the moments in my life when I have been completely down and have kind of lost sight of who I am—I don’t really know where life is going anymore.

I’ve had quite a few moments like this in my own spiritual journey, and I’m honest about them. A constant for me has always been that moment when I just pick up the camera and start filming again and start documenting moments as a way to start to work through what’s happening to me. The camera becomes a tool of my own resurrection.

Nuotama Bodomo, "The camera as a tool of my own resurrection," photo series, 2021.

For me, it’s very hard to sit and say that the camera’s colonial and then give it away. There’s too much power in that tool. And as filmmakers—that’s why we’re all gathered here—there’s too much power in this tool to give it away. I think we tend to give too much away to the colonizer. When we want to get back to something that feels pure and pre-colonial and truly ours, we give too much of what we have worked for back to the colonizer.

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In a conversation with my father as I prepared this talk, he reminded me that a lot of the raw materials that are in these cameras most likely originated on the African continent.

So in what ways are you denying yourself something that is already yours?

But for me, a more personal way [that] I feel like I’m not going to give over the camera to the colonial or to colo-mentality, is that I think about how Dagaare—the language I spoke at the beginning of this—and English both share this G sound. And it would be too much for me to say that because English has the G sound, the G sound is simply English.

I’m not going to give over the G sound to English. No, I’m going to keep that as my own. So, if I break down language to its basic tools, down to that G sound, then I can reconstruct Dagaare just as much as I can reconstruct English.

That’s how I think about film language too.

If we’re able to strip down, come back to basics, and go down to the bare tools of this thing that we do, then we can reconstruct from these tools our Indigenous languages.

And that’s kind of the framework that I want to operate from. That becomes a really huge opening for me, because then I start to think about how those of us intentionally gathered here have inherited some of the most complexly organized narrative structures. Our storytelling traditions are genius. They’re just very complex. They are organized in ways that are so effective and amazing. If we’re able to look through the rich tapestry of the cultures we come from and use that to structure our filmmaking and structure how we make movies, I think that that opening becomes incredibly generative and incredibly powerful.

Departure 1 The first example that I’m going to give is a more formal linguistic one:

Stills from Nuotama Bodomo's work in progress Un-Braiding: Three-Act Structure (currently 2021).

Just to specify more of what I’m saying and situate it in different examples, I want to offer three departures from the colonial camera.

If you take a film class in the US, you’re going to come across the idea of a three-act structure, this way of writing that’s supposed to be all-encompassing and universal. I’ve always struggled with three-act structure, and for me it’s because acts come from theater and the specific material constraints of putting on a play that film does not quite share.

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But then there’s also this idea of a hero, both a male or masculine way of moving through the story, but then also the hero being a singular figure in this sort of narrative. There are just so many aspects of this story structure that can’t quite tell universal stories, right? You can’t quite tell, say, Okonkwo’s story from Things Fall Apart.

So, once I put aside three-act structure, I think about other things that could maybe start to be structures for our cinematic storytelling.

And for me, one such inspiration comes from kente cloth.

know of, what they did, and who they were besides that. And as you go across the film, just going from periods of activity in history to periods of quiet and, you know, nonhistory, we’re starting to build a picture of these revolutionaries whose stories we know, but in a way where we complicate what was written into history and what was left out.

That, to me, would be the structure of a film created from the pattern of this Kente cloth if I started to think beyond structuring it in the way that we’re taught in film classes.

Departure 2

Ewe cotton chief's cloth, ca. 1930-1950.

Just looking at this image of a kente cloth, I start to think about what patterns I see. And of course, kente has meaning already. The colors mean things. You can tell the ranking of who it was made for and the season or the era it was made in if you really know how to read a kente cloth. But I’m more interested in narrative structure and patterns. I just want to see if I can see narrative structures in this cloth.

And if I think in that way, I start to think about a lot of periods of energy and activity followed by equal amounts of periods of calm. It’s the stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe, and calm. Stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe, and calm. And when I start to look at that, I start to piece together something that could be a narrative. If it’s a movie, [for example], about revolutionaries, then in these periods of activity and striping, we’re seeing the activities we know about these revolutionaries—let’s say the history, the events, the speeches, such historical events that we already have access to. But in these calmer moments, we’re seeing something more behind the scenes: who they were when things were quiet, who they were when they were preparing for the events that we

For the second departure, I want to offer a look at pre-existing economies and industries that are basically Indigenous. And when I say this, I’m thinking about Tyler Perry and the Chitlin’ Circuit, I’m thinking about Nollywood or Bongo Cinema, I’m thinking about countless local film industries that are by us for us, and have always been made with us in mind only, and are never even thinking about a world outside of that. Sometimes, because these spaces are lo-fi or low production value, it can be easy to overlook what’s happening in them. But I think if we want to make movies that are seen by us for us, we have to honor these industries that have been very successful in creating profitable business models around sharing and releasing our films.

Still from the video report "This is Cuba's Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify — all without the internet," by Johnny Harris, Vox, 21 September 2015, https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/11/16/16658322/cuba-paquete-internet-netflix.

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Stills from the video report "This is Cuba's Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify — all without the internet," by Johnny Harris, Vox, 21 September 2015, https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/11/16/16658322/cuba-paquete-internet-netflix.

Departure 3 The one that I really want to zero in on is El Paquete Semanal, which is a Cuban example.

On one hand, because it’s Vox, they overemphasize that the hunger here is for American media. The reason why I wanted to show this specific example is, I see an Indigenous structure that shows that Indigenous doesn’t have to mean ancient or pure or pre-colonial. There was a problem that was local to a space, and then a solution that sprung up from that space to solve it.

And I think these kinds of things become huge possibilities when

we think not only about how to make films, but also about how to disseminate them and share them with the people that we want to share them with.

The last thing I’ll say about this point is just to think about how sometimes illegibility—it being underground, it being invisible in a way, it being lo-fi—is a way for it to propagate and move in the spaces that it wants to move in. So sometimes, when we, who are cultured in a certain way, look at these things and don’t see much in them, we may not be doing them justice. I think there’s a lot to honor there.

The third and final departure is a meditation on specifying our collectivity. And for me, I’m not going to sit in front of a group of Black and Indigenous people and preach collectivizing.

I think that’s something that we inherently do, and we know as the way forward. But I want to offer meditations on how to think about how our ancestors gathered, how they collectivized, and the sort of frameworks that they used to come together.

The example I’ll give here is a Twi proverb. It’s one my mother always tells me when I’m talking with her through the trials and tribulations of grouping, and teamwork, and gathering with people. It’s one I always rejected when she first used to say it.

Sɛ woyɛ dodo nam a ma wo wɛrɛ ɛnfi sɛwo anko wonam.

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The English translation is: when you’re walking with others, don’t forget that you’re also walking alone.

I used to resist this saying, but as I’ve grown, I’ve really kind of come to understand a collective as a group of individuals–and you bring yourself to the collective, meaning you bring your needs to the collective. And I think the impulse in us to be selfless and compete to see who is the best, say, Marxist in the group, the most selfless in the group, the most morally upstanding in the group, is peak whiteness infiltrating our collectivizing. I think that when you look at the way that Black and Indigenous people have collectivized, there is always space for needs to be a part of the collective. And, in fact, all of us bringing our needs into the space is the beginning of why we collectivize, why we consolidate power, and why we move forward to protect each other. That’s integral to a lot of organizational formations in African and Indigenous and Black organizing.

For me, personally, it also has to do a lot with learning to be OK with assertiveness. Because we are all equals here, right?

So speaking your point and speaking clearly and presenting yourself and being present in the collective is very OK, because no one is above another. Here we are all presenting ourselves just so that we can be seen amongst each other.

Can we see ourselves?

Can we see each other?

And can we see together?

So, to summarize this: I started by trying to share where I’m at in my practice. I’m thinking through ways to break out of our typical film discourse, and ways to think and imagine beyond how we usually construct films and what this thing that we do is.

One thread in that web of thinking is the colonial camera.

So first I showed examples that elucidated that, yes, the camera was definitely colonial. It has been and continues to be.

But then I tried to show examples of ways to start to open up and think beyond and find possibilities where the camera could not be colonial, because for me personally, I can’t rest on the fact that the camera is colonial because I use it as a spiritual technology for me that I call filmmaking, right? So in what ways can I break everything down, back to its core tools, and then reconstruct it to speak from my authentic voice? And in what ways do we all do that?

Then I gave three examples to depart from the colonial camera.

The first was formal linguistic.

I was thinking through how kente cloth could probably be the structure of a feature film. The second was about Indigenous economic systems, ones that have already validated us and ones in

which we’re already speaking to each other, and honoring those despite their lo-fi nature.

The third was a meditation on collectivity and asking that we be more specific when we gather and ensure that what we’re gathering around is our abundance, especially, and the abundance of our Indigenous cultures.

I’m going to leave it there, just to affirm what you’re working through in your practices on your own terms. I think that the discourse has been structured so that the light is over there, and we have to ask for visibility from over there. But for me, I’m more interested in: Can we see ourselves? Can we see each other?

And can we see together?

And then lastly, I just wanted to speak the Dagaare that I spoke at the top again.

Yɛ zimaane. N po pɛlɛɛ la yaga ne yɛ nang yeli ka N wa yeli yɛlɛ ko yɛ Zenɛ.

Good evening, everyone. My stomach has been brightened by your asking me to come and speak before you all today.

Thank you.

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The Inexpressively Expressive Cinematic Image

Quiet and the Black Interior in A Screaming Man and Bless Their Little by Hearts Kojo Abudu

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Top: Un homme qui crie (2010) dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Film still courtesy of Pili Films, Frank Verdier.

Bottom: Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), dir. Billy Woodberry. Film still courtesy of Milestone Films.

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Quiet is the expressiveness of the inner life, unable to be expressed fully but nonetheless articulate and informing of one’s humanity.

—Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of the Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture Quiet is a modality that surrounds and infuses sound with impact and affect, which creates the possibility for it to register as meaningful.

—Tina Campt, Listening to Images In one of the many captivating, quiet scenes in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie (A Screaming Man, 2010), Adam, the middle-aged Chadian protagonist, sits outside a security post, frontally positioned towards the camera. He lures the viewer’s attention with his penetrative gaze. The camera moves slowly, and smoothly, as it closes in on Adam’s visage. Centered perfectly within the frame, Adam barely moves or speaks.

Seemingly overcome with deep melancholy, he stares blankly just beyond the screen. The viewer may notice the lulling sounds of whistling trees and passing cars (otherwise resigned to the film’s sonic background) or the thin, teary line beginning to build in Adam’s eyes.

In another remarkably quiet scene, this time from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), the viewer similarly observes a character lost in inward contemplation. Andais, the wife of the film’s protagonist, Charlie, rides the bus alone from work to her home in Watts, Los Angeles. Andais stares out of the window for the scene’s entire duration, moving her hand from supporting her chin to tightly gripping the handrail in front of her. The bus’s motion gives rise to the handheld camera’s bobbing movement, the resulting vertigo suspended by Andais’s emotive silence and corporeal stillness.

In both these scenes, constructed and acted with deceptive simplicity, the viewer bears witness to the layered interiority of Black being, the presence of which necessarily troubles, escapes, and exceeds the camera’s technological capture.1 The pervading quiet that saturates Haroun’s and Woodberry’s scenes bespeaks the existence of an inner life: a dimension to Black being

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that is not beholden to constant surveillance, negation, or regulation by an anti-Black world, and which too often escapes the notice of discourses concerned with (overtly expressive) significations of Black resistance. Drawing on Kevin Quashie’s formulation of the “sovereignty of the quiet,” I propose that the still quality of these scenes deploys the formal approaches of vérité and minimal cinema to attune viewers to the lower ontological frequencies of Black existence, to the quiet of the Black interior.2 The quiet is the “inexpressible expressiveness” of the Black interior, a paradoxical idiom of Black expressiveness that eludes visual and discursive representation. Rather it makes itself known indirectly through absence of speech, subtle gestural movements, ambiguous emotive significations, and poetically choreographed cinematographic a/effects.

The interior needn’t be conceived of as an indulgently apolitical space, however, but one that resides parallel to, and in surplus of, the “political” (if by political, we are referring to a space that is necessarily social and therefore, to some degree, public). Neither Haroun’s nor Woodberry’s film plays down their characters’ thick immersion within a political and historical situation—far from it. Rather, these quiet films consistently forego directness and legibility in favor of poeticism, abstraction, and, dare I say, beauty. Shot on two different continents a quarter of a century apart, the films are connected by their male protagonists’ existential navigation through systems of quotidian structural violence imposed by the global neoliberal/neocolonial order.3

The quiet is the “inexpressible expressiveness” of the Black interior, a paradoxical idiom of Black expressiveness that eludes visual and discursive representation.

Top: Un homme qui crie (2010) dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Film still courtesy of Pili Films, Frank Verdier.

Bottom: Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), dir. Billy Woodberry. Film still courtesy of Milestone Films.

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Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), dir. Billy Woodberry.

Film still courtesy of Milestone Films.

The pervading quiet that saturates Haroun and Woodberry’s scenes bespeaks the existence of an inner life: a dimension to Black being that is not beholden to constant

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Set in postcolonial Chad, A Screaming Man focuses on the relationship between Adam and his son Abdel, the prestigious hotel they both work at, and the ongoing civil war, against which the film’s episodic narrative unfolds. Completely enamored by his son, whom he fondly calls “dark stallion,” Adam soon finds himself in a parental dilemma. As a result of the hotel’s privatization and the ensuing imperative of efficiency that follows, Adam is demoted from his long-held position as the head pool lifeguard to the more age-appropriate role of the security guard. Meanwhile his son—young, attractive, and fit—is hired to replace him. (The disparate audiences that populate the pool and its environs—white tourists and settlers, white generals and Black soldiers, Black children and white children, Black young adults and white young adults—at once renders visible the confluence of luxury, capital, and militaristic discipline within the African postcolony and points to the neocolonial collusion between Indigenous elites and Euro-American security and financial interests.) Prior to Adam’s demotion, he is interviewed by the hotel’s new, Chinese owner, who bluntly asks him why the hotel needs two lifeguards instead of one (the other lifeguard is Abdel, then his assistant). Adam simply states “the pool is my life,” going on to mention that he was the Central African swimming champion in 1965—the reason he is referred to as “Champ” by the other characters in the film. Adam’s affective attachment to the pool and to his titular nickname spectralizes (renders present through its melancholic absence) the bygone utopic era of early post-independence, a short-lived emancipatory dream traumatically interrupted by ensuing decades of civil war and global financial domination.

These latter historical episodes, and the atmosphere of violence and precarity they engender, structure Adam’s postcolonial disillusionment. For instance, throughout the film, the sounds of helicopters hum behind spoken conversations, although they’re never seen, further contributing to the deathly climate of the “postcolony,” as theorized by Achille Mbembe.4 Adam also listens intermittently to radio news broadcasts, which provide updates on the civil war, particularly the war crimes committed by the rebel groups. Like most other male citizens, Adam is coerced into offering part of his income as war contributions to mitigate the rebel incursion. When Adam is no longer able to pay his contribution, he is threatened by the fee collector, Ahmat, who warns that Abdel will be forced to join the army and fight on the front lines. Initially reluctant to follow through with Ahmat’s suggestion, but now driven by his desperation to return to the pool—literally and figuratively functioning as an oasis—Adam ultimately decides to surrender his son to the army.

The slow zoom-in scene described earlier occurs right before Adam, dressed in his new, badly fitted security uniform, walks

by Abdel cleaning the pool, leading Adam to simmer in envy, embarrassment, and despair.

Clearly, the homogenizing violence of capitalistic globalization shapes Adam’s world and subtends his emotional turmoil—his demotion, the eventual loss of his son, the continuous physical

harassment by Chadian soldiers, the perpetual threat of a rebel attack. Yet Haroun leaves space for the quiet, a sovereign space from which the inner lives of Adam and his fellow characters “speak,” albeit illegibly. We see this when Adam’s wife, Mariam, sensually feeds him watermelon while they silently watch television news depicting dead corpses from the war; when Adam shares a laugh with, and softly grasps the hand of David, his ill friend and the hotel’s former cook, as he recovers from a weakened heart at the hospital; and when Abdel’s pregnant Malian girlfriend, Mimi, sings a song (notably not subtitled) and sheds a tear after she listens to a tape recording of Abdel, specially sent to her from the front line, as Abdel talks about his fears and hopes for their future child.

Bless Their Little Hearts similarly leads with an insistence on the quotidian, the interior, the quiet. Like Adam, the main character, Charlie, falls into a listless existence as he is unable to secure full-time employment. Shot in black and white in Watts

by Charles Burnett (who also wrote the screenplay), the filmic geography is marked by the wreckages of American industrial decay, urban relics of neoliberalism’s weakening of trade unions, and exportation of manufacturing jobs. Hollowed-out factories, rusting train tracks, and empty transport carriages litter the cinematic frame and, in one short extraordinary scene in which Charlie rides silently in a car, serve as a ghostly window backdrop, visually punctuating his downcast expression.

A predominantly Black neighborhood at the time of the film’s production, Watts is the product of racial segregationist policies that concentrated Black working-class labor in the 1940s to fuel the growth of defense industries. The area erupted during the Watts Rebellion in 1965 in response to police brutality, social alienation, and systemic poverty. The film’s setting in Watts thus speaks to an anti-Black past that refuses to pass, of an embattled zone in which racialized residents perpetually lie prone to structural unemployment, physical injury, and unhygienic settlement—in other words, are forced to endure a “slow death”5 or “social death.”6 This climate of anti-Black violence, which is curiously diffuse and necessarily eludes visual representation, seeps into Charlie’s life and affects his interactions with others.

At the beginning of the film, he wanders about in a job center— unsurprisingly full of Black and Brown individuals—while filling out a bureaucratic form. He stops by a wall sign that reads, “Are You Interested in a Casual Labor Job? (Half Day, One Day, Two Day, Three Day-Only Jobs).” Charlie takes note of the contact number provided on the sign and finds himself performing a myriad of odd jobs—painting a house, cutting weeds, fishing, and so on—giving rise to the film’s loose, irregular rhythm.

Meanwhile, his wife, Andais, works a full-time job and comes home to Charlie and their three kids, whom she must cook for and look after. The expropriated labor power Andais sells at work and the unremunerated reproductive labor she performs at home take a toll on her body and psyche. Riding on the bus from work, she struggles to stay awake; while arguing with Charlie,

Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), dir. Billy Woodberry.

Film still courtesy of Milestone Films.

surveillance, ­negation, or regulation by an anti-Black world, and which too often escapes the notice of discourses concerned with (overtly expressive) significations of Black resistance.

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The interior needn’t be conceived as an indulgently apolitical space, however, but one that resides parallel to, and in surplus of, the “political.”

Un homme qui crie (2010) dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Film still courtesy of Pili Films, Frank Verdier.

1. As has been forcefully argued by various scholars over the last three decades, photography and film bear a complicated and typically fraught relationship to non-white subjects from Africa and its diasporas. Products of the world-historical space-time of “modernity,” these world-capturing technologies have been constitutively shaped by colonial orders of knowledge that seek to dehumanize, flatten, and objectify Black subjectivity. See Rizvana Bradley, “Picturing Catastrophe, The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning,” The Yale Review, Summer 2021: https:// yalereview.org/article/picturing-catastrophe; Mark Sealy, Decolonising The Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2019); Kobena Mercer, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); and Teju Cole, “When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.),” New York Times, February 6, 2019: https://www. nytimes.com/2019/02/06/magazine/when-the-camera-was-a-weapon-of-imperialism-and-when-it-still-is.html.

2. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of the Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

3. By neoliberalism, I am referring to a diverse set of political and economic practices that came to the fore in 1980s, including the privatization of state assets, financial deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate tax cuts, public spending cuts, and corporate control over the masses via debt. By neocolonialism, a related practice to neoliberalism, I am referring to the continued domination of Global South economies by Euro-American (and now Chinese) companies, institutions, and nation-states via raw material extraction, exploitative labor practices, the levying of high interest rates on national debts, and intelligence-led interference in local governance and policy making.

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4. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

5. See Laura Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No.4, Summer 2007, 754-780.

6. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

7. Haroun has mentioned the influence of directors from around the world on his observational, minimalist style, including Yasujirō Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Robert Bresson. Woodberry has also cited Ousmane Sembène, and Third Cinema more broadly, as influences. Haroun’s and Woodberry’s films thus make evident the embeddedness of migratory logics of cross-culturation, translation, and adaption within the reception, production, and distribution of international art cinema.

8. Quashie, Sovereignty of the Quiet, 22.

who begins to cheat and gamble, she repeatedly utters, “I’m tired!” When Charlie tugs at her arm late at night in their bed as he smokes his cigarette, she refuses his advances by appearing fast asleep. Near the end of the film, after one of their daughters breaks her arm, Charlie breaks down crying at the dinner table, wishing that the family “lived in a better neighborhood.”

Andais gently walks across the table, massages Charlie’s shoulders and consoles him, telling him that it’s going to be OK. While Andais does seem to care for Charlie, the viewer is left wondering whether her act of consolation is a performance of affective labor, one that begrudgingly serves to manage Charlie’s failure to live up to the patriarchal ideal as a breadwinning father.

The desire for patriarchal normalcy is depicted in an earlier scene when, without any dialogue at all but merely through an exchange of gazes and gestures, Andais stealthily hands over cash from her wallet to Charlie in the corridor. Charlie walks into the living room and gives each of his three children the cash, as church offerings, as if the money were his. Woodberry’s remarkable direction thus works to reveal the nuances between Charlie and Andais’s inner lives, which inevitably are modulated but not determined by the differential of gender.

The power of A Screaming Man and Bless Their Little Hearts lies in their striking ability to balance sociopolitical decay and existential ennui with the open-ended suggestion of otherwise possibilities. These are possibilities encased within the moving image that are unlocked through poeticism and abstraction, both formal techniques and sensibilities that are better suited to attuning viewers to the lower frequencies of the quiet.7 For example, although Charlie performs a variety of jobs throughout Woodberry’s film, these scenes of aestheticized manual labor take the viewer out of linear time, encouraging alternative modalities of perception that strikingly speak against Charlie’s narrative struggle. In one quiet, meditative scene, Charlie carefully removes the graffiti from a wooden shed by painting it white. Alternating between distant and close-up shots, the viewer observes Charlie at work, the beauty of his solitary physical exertion leading one to imagine that this could be Charlie’s house, that he is engaging in a leisurely, nonalienating act of maintenance on his own property. In another scene without dialogue, Charlie works on a field with a few other Black men.

Burnett’s camerawork transforms the field’s extensive branches, which fill the entirety of the screen with glinting lines. The lines obscure the men’s laboring bodies, forming a defamiliarized abstract composition enabled by the interplay of light, shadow, and movement.

In Haroun’s film, the cinematographer, Laurent Brunet, invites viewers to feel and think by nondiscursive means—where interiority resides—via his careful handling of color and light. In the last scene, dripping with pulchritude, a shallow lake appears and fills the frame, its almost silvery surface tinted with the ochre haze of the Saharan sky. Adam walks into the frame, causing greater ripples in the water, his figure entirely backlit like a wandering shadow. The camera moves patiently with Adam’s reserved steps, the illumined surface of the lake changing from ochre to a pinkish sienna to navy blue and, finally, fading into pitch blackness. The destination to which Adam’s quiet walk is directed remains undisclosed, not unlike Charlie’s concluding solitary walk in a grass field. The articulate inarticulateness of these two films evidences their critical engagement with the reticent aesthetic of the Black interior, of an inner life that can only ever be “approximated, hinted at, implied.”8

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Waikiki (2020), dir. Christopher Kahunahana. Film still courtesy of Christopher Kahunahana.

Waikīkī and Its Discontents 78

Chris Kahunahana’s Hawai’i

by Jeff Chang

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The world of Christopher Kahunahana’s first fulllength feature film, Waikīkī (2020), is far from the one of the American imagination. It’s not a White Lotus all-inclusive resort experience where malihini1 seek enlightenment and the perfect tan while Native Hawaiians serve as unseen help. Nor is it a Hawaii Five-O amusement ride for white heroes propped up by underpaid Brown sidekicks. To the director, these are all foreign desires, invasive notions.

In Kahunahana’s world, visitors enjoy the version of life they can afford—lying on a man-made beach, taking selfies with turtles, or ziplining through sacred sites. Native Hawaiians try to secure a golden ticket for the privilege of serving the malihini. At the same time, Zuckerbergian real estate speculation intensifies displacement—making Kanaka Maoli2 people, homeless in their homeland, improvise shelter in cars and tents, in beach parks, on the countryside, and the thicket of trails hidden along the slopes of Diamond Head.

“Hawai’i has always been Hollywood’s backdrop,” Kahunahana says. “That façade has always been present. I’m just pulling it back: Who’s behind the

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curtain? What’s going on for real? In Hawai’i, you can’t just get by. You have to actually make a shit ton of money to begin to appear to be normal, to have a roof over your head. Everyone is working two, three jobs.”

Waikīkī’s Native Hawaiian protagonist, Kea, played with profound sensitivity by Danielle Zalopany, sleeps in a van, bathes in a beach shower, and holds down three jobs. In the morning, she is an ‘ōlelo schoolteacher, an exemplar of the ongoing Hawaiian cultural renaissance. But the rest of her days are spent servicing the American dream and its ceaseless waves of believers, deplaning into the airport every hour of every day.

1. Visitors or foreigners.

2. Native Hawaiian people, literally “true people.” Native Hawaiians also use the term “Ōiwi” or “Kanaka Ōiwi.”

3. The Native Hawaiian language.

4. From Haunani-Kay Trask’s essential 1993 book, From a Native Daughter (reprinted in 1999 by University of Hawai’i Press) and also excerpted here at Cultural Survival Quarterly: https://www. culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural survival-quarterly/tourism-and prostitution-hawaiian-culture.

5. Queen Lili’uokalani was the last Queen of Hawai’i, deposed by American capitalists backed by American troops hell bent on expanding their sugar fortunes and forcing annexation.

Waikiki (2020), dir. Christopher Kahunahana. Film still courtesy of Christopher Kahunahana.

In 1993, around the hundredth anniversary of the US takeover of the islands, the Native Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask had written boldly, presciently, and shockingly of the brutal impact of tourism, which in 2019 brought the equivalent of seven times the entire population in visitors to the islands.

“To most Americans . . . Hawai’i is theirs: to use, to take, and, above all, to fantasize about long after the experience,” Trask wrote. “Mostly a state of mind, Hawai’i is the image of escape from the rawness and violence of daily American life. Hawai’i—the word, the vision, the sound in the mind—is the fragrance and feel of soft kindness. Above all, Hawai’i is ‘she,’ the Western image of the Native ‘female’ in her magical allure.”4 This is the role Kea takes up at night. As a Waikīkī showroom hula dancer, Kea sells the American dream—the “magic of Waikīkī,” as the song goes— back to bourgeois tourists. She ends each night as a Chinatown karaoke bar hostess catering to a clientele of unsavory white men who bought the bar a long time ago. Kea cannot find a place to call home. She is separated from her daughter and trying to escape an abusive boyfriend and a family that has let her down. She is always perched on the precipice of catastrophe.

Fleeing her abusive boyfriend, she hits a homeless man with her van and quickly begins to unravel. The man she hits, Wo, becomes a mostly silent witness to her descent, and yet he may not even be real. Even the land, the water, and the statues feel her bottoming— in one affecting scene, she encounters a monument of Queen Lili’uokalani and considers both their fates.5 As the movie builds to a stunning conclusion, Kea’s external and internal worlds implode into each other. +++++ Kahunahana’s road to Waikīkī was long and winding.

In the 1990s, Movie Museum owner Dwight Damon exposed him to his personal stash of the works of Akira Kurosawa and John Cassavetes, and rare classics like Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1981) and Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (1964). To continue feeding his cinema jones, Kahunahana started the Underground Film Festival on O’ahu in 1995.

Disillusioned with the competition for low-wage tourism jobs, he moved to New York and, later, San Francisco, where he ran a nightclub and an art gallery.

He returned to Honolulu to join friends in opening the Next Door nightclub in a then still-shunned Chinatown. His success—he featured the likes of DJ Kool Herc, Kid Cudi, and Diplo—helped transform the red-light neighborhood into a destination, now an officially designated “Arts District.” In 2014, he sold the club and went all in on filmmaking, landing the first of a set of prestigious fellowships with the Sundance Institute.

Waikīkī began as a script he wrote called “Karaoke Kings,” based on the bar next door to the Next Door, which held monthly karaoke contests, offering a week-long open drink tab as the prize. The regulars inspired the characters of Kea, Wo, and Amy, the bar owner. “You just learn their stories and you start feeling for them,” Kahunahana says. “One little wrong decision or stuff didn’t go their way or if there was no one to take care of them after a health issue, and it’s very simple to cross over that line, especially when the cost of living is so exorbitant.”

He was increasingly drawn to the character of Kea, and the idea for Waikīkī began to grow. Current events accelerated the process. In 2014, Native Hawaiian protestors succeeded in temporarily halting expansion of the Thirty Meter Telescope atop the sacred mountain of Mauna Kea. (The character Kea’s name means “white” and is a subtle reference to the mountain’s snow cap.)

Their struggle to stop further development

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became the Pacific analogue to the Standing Rock movement. Kahunahana, along with many other ‘ōiwi filmmakers and creatives, would heed the call to come to the mauna. Other incidents, such as the battle between homeless campers and a coalition of police, surfers, and residents for control of the Diamond Head hillside, affirmed the importance of the new direction.

The line between fiction and reality blurred. As Kahunahana finally lined up money for production, Zalopany was offered a solid union job at Pearl Harbor. She decided to take both the job and the movie. “They would start at 4:00 in the morning, and she would come straight to set. We’d shoot all night,” Kahunahana says. Between scenes, she slept in the van. “Dani was living as Kea would.”

The University of Hawai’i’s Academy of Creative Media8 and the local network ‘Ōiwi TV have been hubs for an emerging generation of talented filmmakers, including Erin Lau, Ty Sanga, Justyn Ah Chong, and ‘Āina Paikai. Standout works like Lau’s piece The Moon and the Night (2018), which explores intergenerationality, masculinity, and responsibility, and Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu’s animated film Kapaemahu (2020), which refigures gender, healing, and Hawaiian history in ancient ‘ōlelo, are part of the promising new wave of Native Hawaiian fiction.

“Storytelling’s in our blood. Everything’s mo'olelo,”9 Kahunahana says. “That’s how we share. That’s our culture. So how the hell do we not transition into making narrative features?”

Its push for cultural justice—the restoration of ways of living, being, and sense making, and the right to define a people’s identity and be seen in their full complex humanity—is always timely. It responds to the materiality and the psychology of colonization.

But its answers, however contingent, migrate to the realm of the spiritual because they speak beyond the base objectification of our lives.

+++++

+++++

For cinema from Hawai’i, Kahunahana’s unorthodox story and work may mark a breakthrough. Waikīkī, described by Filmmaker Magazine as the first Native Hawaiian–directed fiction feature film, won Best Feature and Cinematography from the Grand Juries of the 2020 Hawai’i International Film Festival and the 2020 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.

Fijian filmmaker and scholar Vilsoni Hereniko called it “the most important feature film ever by a Native Hawaiian.”

Until now, the nonfiction form has dominated Native Hawaiian and island film. Kahunahana describes the work of Puhipau and Joan Lander’s collective Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina6 as a major influence. More recently, continental-born Anthony Banua-Simon’s Cane Fire (2020) and Local Japanese American filmmaker Chris Makoto Yogi’s Occasionally, I Saw Glimpses of Hawai’i (2016) have deconstructed the North American gaze. Maoli director Ciara Lacy, Los Angeles–based Tadashi “Tad” Nakamura, and Local filmmaker Michael Inouye have made powerful contemporary explorations of incarceration, cultural recovery, and the rising social movements in the islands.7

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Waikiki (2020), dir. Christopher Kahunahana. Film still courtesy of Christopher Kahunahana.

Having once lived at the edge of homelessness, Kahunahana bemoans “the global demand for paradise” that drives displacement. He says that after casting Zalopany, his second big decision was to buy the van. “I was like, Yo, it’s going to function as the picture car. Prep car. Also mobile studio. And if this movie doesn’t go anywhere, I got somewhere to live. My plan B: the van.”

Native Hawaiian film announces the urgencies of the moment, but also the history of violent marginalization, suppression, and erasure of ‘oiwi cultural practices, expressions, and knowledges.

6. Nā Maka o ka ‘Āina’s best known works are Mauna Kea – Temple Under Siege (2005) and Act of War – The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation (1993).

7. Lacy’s movies include the award-winning Out of State (2017) and This Is the Way We Rise (2021). Inouye’s Like a Mighty Wave (2019) can be seen online or on the Criterion Channel.

8. The academy was founded in 2002 by Chris Lee, an accomplished Hollywood producer who came home in part to realize this vision.

9. Story or record.

For most of the twentieth century the Hawaiian language was banned from island schools, part of an Americanization process that accompanied the dispossession of Hawaiian lands. One place where ‘ōlelo—and the native cosmovisions embedded within—persisted was in music and hula.

Waikīkī’s careful musical selection charts an arc of colonization’s impact. Mary Kawena Pūku’i’s 1930s children’s oli, “Ke Ao Nani,” gives way to the wistful melancholy of Na Leo Pilimehana’s version of Andy Cummings’ 1946 hapa-haole10 classic, “Waikiki,” written at the height of Americanization after World War II. The movie closes with Brother Noland’s 1980 protest song, “Look What They’ve Done.”

But even in English-language songs like “Waikiki,” Hawaiians embedded kaona, hidden meanings. So as Kea performs for malihini, she helps summon a Native Hawaiian imagination of Waikīkī—in which streams poured down from fertile mountains and valleys into a latticework of taro lo’i (farms) and fishponds, fronted by a long strip of beach where queens and kings kept lush gardens and commoners gathered daily to surf, fish, and flirt with each other.

Waikīkī’s name itself referred to the water springs of the area, known as “the spouting spray.”

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In Hawai’i, you cant just get by. You have to actually make a shit ton of money to begin

to appear to be normal, to have a roof over your head. Everyone is working two, three jobs.

Waikiki (2020), dir. Christopher Kahunahana. Film still courtesy of Christopher Kahunahana.

The royal estates and local markers are long gone, leaving behind their traces in the street names malihini can’t pronounce, and the words, music, and dances of songs they don’t understand. In the early 1970s, the martyred singer and activist George Helm12 (a family friend of the Kahunahanas) introduced a song that Queen Lili’uokalani had written of her Waikīkī garden, “Ku’u Pua I Paoakalani” by saying, “It was written in a prison. That prison was the ‘Iolani Palace. . . . She wrote this song for a place in Waikīkī that is now the location of the Holiday Inn hotel.” Those who knew understood that Helm, who sang in a downtown bar not far from the palace, was referring obliquely—and not at all nicely—to the Americans’ imprisonment of the queen. For Hawaiians ensnared by the present-day carceral system, the allusions remain all too real.

Kahunahana drops kaona even in the landscape scenes that stitch together the narrative. For instance, a breathtaking shot of mountain mist connects to shots of ‘auwai stream flows—moving wai to kai, mountain to sea, in the traditional Hawaiian way of thinking of land “division,” as opposed to the American capitalist way. But the water’s journey also tells a story. In the uplands, it flows freely, but as it proceeds toward the sea it’s increasingly contained by concrete ditches. It ends up in the legendarily toxic Ala Wai Canal, constructed to allow hotels to be built atop the fertile mud. In this way, Kahunahana connects Kea’s mental and economic breakdown to an entire history of colonization.

+++++ In the summer of 2021, as the pandemic briefly waned, US tourists poured back into Hawai’i like a firehose whiplashing at high blast. These visitors encountered long food lines, rental car shortages,

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Waikiki (2020), dir. Christopher Kahunahana.

Film still courtesy of Christopher Kahunahana.

But to haoles11 with God and money on their minds, this land was just a muggy swamp. After their ships brought disease-ridden mosquitos and the Bible thumpers declared Hawaiians’ sporting ways in the surf lewd, barbaric, and ungodly, they set about to remake it. They built racially exclusive hotels and surf clubs that required full-body clothing. They built a canal to drain the area and conscripted the farmers, fishers, and surfers into laboring in their economy. Waikīkī became their playground resort, and the American dream of Hawai’i was marketed across the continent through the music and movies of Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, even the Brady Bunch.

10. Literally meaning “half-white.” This name was given to the popular music of Hawai’i in vogue from the 1900s through the 1970s, almost always sung completely in English. The music— from “Waikiki” to Don Ho’s “Pearly Shells” and Kui Lee’s “I’ll Remember You”— served as a living advertisement for the tourist industry.

Hula, too, was modified for Waikīkī showroom audiences, simplified and often speeded up. To this day, of course, the sound of hapa-haole music and image of hapa-haole hula form the bedrock of most touristic impressions of Hawaiian culture.

11. White people. Originally it meant foreigner, but it colloquially shifted in the context of colonization.

12. ‘Aina Paikai’s short film on Helm, Hawaiian Soul, debuted in 2020.

But the water’s journey also tells a story.

and beaches packed with their kind—unmasked, sunburnt, and behaving badly. Everywhere they exploded at beachboys and hostesses, drivers and chambermaids: Where is the paradise we purchased?

On the other side, something finally cracked.

Community leaders heard angry calls to limit tourism. Vendors chose to shut down during peak hours rather than serve ill-mannered visitors.

Airlines texted travelers to expect airport delays because of protests. Legislators overrode a governor’s veto to defund the Hawai’i Tourist Authority. In the middle of it all, on the July Fourth weekend, word came down that Trask, the prophet of the Hawaiian resistance, had passed.

Kea’s journey climaxes in a surreal sequence set on Sand Island, the site of another historic clash between the state and Native Hawaiians. ‘Oiwi fishermen had built a traditional shoreline village in an area that the state wanted to redevelop as a beachfront park. The brutal evictions were captured in Victoria Keith’s film The Sand Island Story (1981).

Kahunahana means to connect that failed battle to the sprouting of exclusive high-rises in the Kaka’ako district across Honolulu Harbor. These condos are marketed to jet-setting Pacific elites who use them as investment properties or personal hotel rooms.

They are prohibitively expensive for most islandborn Locals and major factors in the skyrocketing cost of living.

The film inspires optimism about the future of Native Hawaiian cinema, but it also leaves uncomfortable questions about the future of Hawai’i. “People ask, ‘What do you have to do to be a filmmaker?’”

Kahunahana says. “Honestly? Rule number one: stay alive. I’m like, fuck. I feel lucky to be alive, you know?”

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Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021), dir. Sophia Nahli Allison. Film still courtesy of Sophia Nahli Allison.

“The Voice I Sing Is an Echo” : the Power of Black Collectivity

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“Be a voice, not an echo.” This quote regularly makes its rounds across social media platforms and, although unconfirmed, is often attributed to Albert Einstein. But it is another version of this quote, born of a night of thinking, talking, and dreaming with my friends, that sits deeply with me: “The voice I sing is an echo.” I cannot tell you its exact source or what directly inspired it, but in that time and moment, all we knew was that it resonated with us profoundly.

We were Black graduate students at different stages of our careers but enrolled in various programs at one of the top-ranked film schools in the world. We had somehow been guided to one another. (I say guided to be very clear that our communion, friendship, and subsequent work is the result of an effort that was beyond our own imagining and intentions.)

We are three members of a larger Black creative community who flourished through and beyond the gates of film school. Our conversation below is contingent on years of gathering, studying, building, and creating space intentionally devoted to crafting stories that honor and engage Black diasporic practices. Our experiences in and outside of film school lay bare the inherent struggles of contemporary Black filmmaking, as well as the radical possibility that remains available through Black collectivity. As a Black film and media studies professor, I understand the value of higher education; however, I am also fortunate to have been a participant and witness to the power of community and care fostered outside of institutional control.

a conversation with Sophia Nahli Allison and Merawi Gerima by Philana Payton From our earliest conversations to now, an undeniable ancestral presence required our attention and demanded that our creative practices be shaped by Black collectivity and cultural memory. And in spite of the omnipresent violence that graduate schools enact on Black students, we fostered an environment that prioritized care, joy, and radical creation that continues to resonate in our work.

A few years have passed since that time of intense study. In the spring of 2021, I had the opportunity to moderate a conversation with filmmakers Sophia Nahli Allison and Merawi Gerima, members of this chosen community who have both achieved critical success on projects that were envisioned in that Los Angeles living room. Allison is an Oscar-nominated director whose recent short documentary, A Love Song for Latasha (2019), tenderly (re)introduced audiences to Latasha Harlins, a Black girl and aspiring lawyer from South Los Angeles whose life and premature death spirited the 1992 LA Uprising.

Her feature-length documentary Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021) premiered at BlackStar Film Festival in 2021. Gerima’s directorial debut, Residue (2020), is the winner of several major film festival awards around the globe and takes an unapologetic look at the disorientation and violence of gentrification in Black neighborhoods.

This particular conversation is a small segment of a series of ongoing dialogues centering the LA Rebellion film movement, cultural memory, and contemporary communal filmmaking practices. It was made possible through the organizing efforts and generosity of Professor Desha Dauchan and the film and media studies department at the University of California, Irvine. The focus of the series was to (re)introduce audiences to the creative and industrial practices that were crafted by the contingent of Black student filmmakers who attended UCLA from the late ’60s into the ’80s, formally recognized as the LA Rebellion. Over several weeks, a selection of LA Rebellion artists and contemporary filmmakers who were deeply influenced by the legacy of the LA Rebellion participated in conversations spanning various aspects of art making and creativity. My conversation with Allison and Gerima touched on the power and possibility of communal care and collaboration beyond the purview of institutional validation. More so, however, this dialogue pays special honor to the echo of our ancestors’ voices that we hope to continue to visualize.

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Philana Payton: Both of you come from

a lineage of artists and were surrounded by and grew up with art prior to what institutions would consider “formal training.” How did that impact you, and how did that deep sense of knowing encourage you to step into being an artist?

Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021), dir. Sophia Nahli Allison. Film still courtesy of Sophia Nahli Allison.

Sophia Nahli Allison: I grew up in South Central [Los

Angeles]. My mom1 was a storyteller in Leimert Park, and my dad2 was a musician—and [art] really is my foundation. I think there was a period of my life when I was disconnected from my own memories, my own childhood, and needed the space to remember what my lineage was. You know, remembering my childhood—when I would spend time with my mom, going to different libraries or [watching] her [perform] throughout the community. There were times when I did some storytelling events with her, and my mom instilled within me this hunger for the imagination, for really allowing folklore to be a truth and to be surrounded by these histories and these memories that felt ancestral.

1. Sybil Desta.

2. Rutherford “Scootie” Allison.

3. Haile Gerima and Shirikiana Aina of the LA Rebellion.

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My dad is a musician, and I remember every day after school when he would come home from work, he would always play his upright bass in the living room, and he would have his electric bass, so I was always

surrounded by the richness of Black art. And it felt like my survival, you know? It was my way of understanding, something that made me feel connected to the past, made me feel like I had a purpose. And for me, as a young child, I felt like I was always trying to understand where I fit in the world, and through the art and through this understanding of ancestral memory—that’s where I felt connected. That’s where I always felt safe.

And I am grateful that my mom taught me how to dream. My mom taught me how to build a story; my mom taught me how to make something out of nothing. I don’t think I would be doing this without her and without my mom and my dad’s love for art and finding a way to keep that a part of their everyday even though they had to take care of me [and] my brother. You know, having different financial issues and having their own nine-tofive jobs, but always finding a way for art to be how they ended their day, how they spend their time. It’s an energy that I’m so grateful that I was surrounded by. It’s inspired me so deeply.

Merawi Gerima:

I am grateful that my mom taught me how to dream.

—Allison

It’s wild because when you’re a kid, you’re just in it, and it’s only as an adult when I had enough distance to really see my parents3 for the things that they had done and the magnitude of their accomplishments and their attempts. But my first year in graduate school was just an emotional awakening in many ways. Y’all would come to me talking about, “Yo, read this excerpt from this thing that your dad wrote when he was a student,” and it was stuff that I didn’t even know. A whole aspect of his career and development that I had no clue about, so there I was—along with y’all—learning about my own parents. It was a process of me finding out later about the gifts that they had given me.

I’m reminded of my dad telling us Ethiopian stories in Amharic when we were kids—scary stories at night with all six of my siblings being in bed, crying but also having a great time. And my mom would lay out the whole scope of Black revolutionary struggle in the United States in a way that a little kid could understand, which situated me so firmly in Black radical politics and tradition. Only now am I able to reflect on the skill and intention behind those things, not to mention seeing them in the stories that they were trying to bring to life in film and the struggle that they had to wage throughout forever, even to this day, just even to have [their films] distributed under normal means. [I was] watching them, despite all kinds of obstacles, fighting against this behemoth of a racist industry, which we still are in today.

PP:

Both of you also have somewhat nontraditional paths of starting and completing MFAs. What were some of the biggest lessons that you took from that experience and being in these institutions? How has it informed your overall relationships with institutions?

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MG: I [consider] the folks who we look up to—the Black filmmakers

who were able to somehow, someway thrive despite UCLA or any other racist institution. I felt the same exact way at the school4 that we went to because, despite its best intentions, it was still incredibly suffocating and racist in so many ways. I think that when you are trying to develop a specific toolset and craft, you don’t even come into that thinking that you’re going to have to deal with such low-level bullshit day to day. You can ignore that to a certain degree, until it starts to affect the actual craft that you’re trying to focus on.

4. University of Southern California.

Trying to tell stories as a Black person in these institutions is already difficult because you are in classes with professors who don’t know what that means. Well-intentioned teachers don’t know how destructive it is when they pass judgment on your stories because they know nothing about its context. I think that Black stories often do not fit into these typical three-act structures. I had teachers telling me, “I’m sorry; this isn’t a story,” flat out in those terms. Had I been oriented a different way coming in, it could have done a lot more damage than it did.

Fortunately, I had people like you, Lishan [Amde], Janice [Duncan], Jheanelle [Brown], Darol [Kae]—the whole collective that we built out of desperation in order to survive this environment. Thankfully I had that, but think about how many Black students we went to school with who did not have that type of collective; who are trying to find their way every time you see them. You get this sensation that they’re just drowning and trying to stay afloat amongst folks who really don’t know what to do with them. I got some good technical skills, but it was a battle to protect my own inherent, amateur, unique way of telling stories, which is the most important task of any film student.

SNA:

I love that you said, “I got technical skills,” because I was thinking that these institutions cannot teach you how to tell a story.

They can give you the tools you need, but you must unlearn everything you’ve been taught because it’s all rooted in a very Western gaze. And what’s interesting about the time period of when I met you all is that I was taking a break from grad school. I felt that I had hit a wall, where I had everything I needed, but I didn’t know how to keep moving forward. I felt really stunted, like I didn’t have the support system to really nourish the spirit of storytelling. I took a year off from grad school, moved back to LA, started working at a company, and then I realized, “Oh, it’s the same as any institution. No one’s going to trust you as a Black person telling a story, and I am going to have to find a way to do this myself.”

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I always felt really insecure when I was in institutions. It made me question and doubt myself, and until I was surrounded by other storytellers—Black folks who were connected to spirit, who were connected to ancestors—that’s when I understood that I knew what I was doing and that I needed to trust myself. And I still have to remind myself of that working in the industry. People will continue to challenge you. They will continue to want to make you conform. They will want you to tell a “traditional” story, and I think it is up to us as a collective— as a people—to fight for Black liberation within our storytelling process and to return back to what we know. I just remember crying a lot in undergrad and in my first year of grad school. I eventually went

back and did graduate and got my master’s, but I don’t think I’ve used anything I really learned from school to get me to where I am now. I had to surround myself with literature from Black feminists to teach me how to do what I’m doing and to affirm everything I’m doing. School will give you the technical tools you need, but it will not teach you how to tell an authentic story. It will not teach you how to trust yourself, and it will not teach you how to listen and try something radically different.

You must unlearn everything you’ve been taught because it’s all rooted in a very Western gaze.

-Allison

MG: I also want to add that [in school,] they’ll never talk about

all the debt that you’re taking on. I went to school, but I could not afford that shit. I think that, ultimately, the technical things that we learned at these schools, you can learn outside of school. I think that it’s nice to learn it in that format with that type of regimen and timeline, but it’s not worth $200,000 to $300,000, which is the type of debt that students take on in film school to go be starving artists.

There are so many things that you can do, so many alternatives to film school. It has not qualified itself as necessary, and I’m saying this on the other side of Residue. If [the school gives] you money, it can make a little more sense—if [it is] paying your way or part of it— but don’t be so quick to take on that much debt. It is the type of debt that you pass on to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. You don’t pay it off in this lifetime. You are basically expected to wish that you are the one person that’s cherry-picked by Hollywood who makes it—the one out of a million every year or every three years.

They use big names to sell you, like, “Oh, so-and-so went here.” But so-and-so went there like five years ago. How many other times has somebody followed and ended up in that same type of route?

I think, in many ways, it’s making itself more and more obsolete.

The more and more expensive it gets, I don’t see it as necessary for filmmakers.

Residue (2020), dir. Merawi Gerima. Film still courtesy of Merawi Gerima.

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PP:

Let’s talk about collaboration. At one point, we were all in the midst of thinking and working toward projects that we’ve very recently completed.

What does it mean to gather outside of institutional gates to commune, to study, and to think together?

And in hindsight, how did that time influence your current artistic ethos?

SNA:

I’ll never forget when I was sharing a later rough cut with Rachel Summers, and she said, “I want to see these women now at the end.” I was never going to show their faces at the end of A Love Song for Latasha. She’s the reason that you finally see them at the end. Having a community of people who support you and understand you, and understand that you are staying authentic and being intentional in all of your choices, and they can hold you accountable for that. . . . I mean, Philana, I can’t explain how inspired I always am by you. You know we weren’t always in deep conversation throughout the years, but every time I saw you and what you were doing, every time I was in witness to your brilliance, it reminded me what we were working toward. Lishan was someone that I was so inspired by and how she was thinking about interactivity beyond the 2-D experience. Janice Duncan, the creative producer and my boo (who Merawi introduced me to), who was a part of this group— she challenged me in ways that I didn’t let other people push me.

Everyone brought their own energy. Everyone brought their own brilliance. When we gathered, we understood the weight.

You had to continue carrying for everyone and with everyone.

Merawi, we were filming the same summer, and we were telling stories about our homes, and I don’t think it’s by accident that this parallel exists. And to see the trajectory we both had. . . . I am so deeply inspired by everyone in this group. I am thinking about Darol, Cali [Lyons], Russell [Hamilton]. Thinking about Jheanelle and her brilliance. When she opens her mouth! All of the artists I didn’t know about, and the language I didn’t have until I met you all. I was struggling to discover the language to explain what it was that I was doing, and I think you all kept me on my toes and you kept me wanting to evolve. I knew I couldn’t stay stagnant in a group like this.

MG: [I] want to second that shout-out to everybody—JB, aka Jheanelle

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Brown, who was central to all of this because almost everything happened at her and Lishan’s house. On the question of collaboration, it was always important for me to shoot a feature film before I graduated, just as my own personal goal. And it was Bradford Young who was in my ear that summer before film school. I was like, “Yo, should I go? This shit mad expensive.” And he was like, “Go. Find your cadre.” That’s what he said to me. He said, “Go find your cadre, because you want to go shoot films, but who are you going to do it with?” From there, Philana, Rachel Summers, and Cali Nicole Lyons were critical to getting Residue off the ground that first summer. Philana and Rachel came through.

Y’all were the whole pre-production. Deep introspection was made possible because it was us three and Raquel [Lake].

PP: Sticky notes—

Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021), dir. Sophia Nahli Allison. Film still courtesy of Sophia Nahli Allison.

MG: Sticky notes on the wall. The moment before y’all got to town

was the darkest moment of the film, which is saying a lot, and is actually a good thing because it wasn’t that much. It was a brief moment when I was like, “Yo, like what am I doing? Is this even possible?” And, of course, the example my parents set was important, but it was the people behind it, the actual labor that went into it. I was confident that we had what we needed because we had this collective that gave me the confidence. We had people to help out, and we were always driving towards a project from day one. It was like, of course we’re going to be shooting projects together. We have other short films that we worked on as part of that work. We worked on small projects, and one of them eventually developed into a feature film. Meanwhile, while I’m at school, they’re like, “Oh no, your thesis should be a fifteen-minute, $20,000 short film.” Nah, actually, I don’t need to do that. I am going to

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do a feature film with less money if I can. In fact, I got homies to help me if nobody else is down. So it was confidence-inspiring to have that kind of village. My dad says a lot about conflicting decisions that you might have to make when it comes to the industry and film school. And he said this: “If you go, you gain something. And if you don’t go, you’re gaining something else.” I think the problem becomes when film school presents itself as the only viable path, and I want to push back on that.

SNA: I don’t regret my undergrad. I don’t regret my grad school. I

am who I am today because of all of my experiences, but you don’t need this to become the artist that you want to be. And if it weren’t for me going to grad school, taking time off, I never would have met you all. I want to lift up Janice Duncan because she was my ride-or-die for A Love Song for Latasha, and without her I don’t know how we would have done it. And then my other producer, Fam Udeorji, as well—another South Central native. I couldn’t have done it without him. These were my two folks who were with me the entire time, and just feeling so grateful that it was such a small team, but we were able to remain intentional.

We were able to be honest with what the story was going to be, and we didn’t have to follow anyone else’s rules. It was difficult, but when you have your people who believe in you, it will happen. It will manifest.

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Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground (2021), dir. Sophia Nahli Allison. Film still courtesy of Sophia Nahli Allison.

I think the problem becomes when film school presents itself as the only viable path, and I want to push back on that. —Gerima 97

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INTERVIEW WITH MIKO

BY AMIR GEORGE

Distancing (2019), dir. Miko Revereza. Film still courtesy of Miko Revereza.

AN REVEREZA

No Data Plan (2019), dir. Miko Revereza. Film stills courtesy of Miko Revereza.

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His follow-up to No Data Plan, the short film Distancing (2019), is rich with themes of family, loss, alienation, and displacement. We see the procedural shots of a doctor with Revereza’s ailing grandfather lying on a medical table, riddled with images of Revereza thumbing through the blank pages in his passport from the Philippines. Empty phone banks and abandoned suitcases circle in a deserted baggage claim, and grainy night footage is taken at LAX. Revereza continuously merges tantalizing conversations with moments of intense mobility.

In his films movement is constant, a reflection of his lived experience. Revereza’s films operate on functions of objectivity, truth telling, and reflexivity.

He has carved out a distinctive fingerprint through impulsive documentation that grants the ability to access the unknown.

Revereza recently relocated to Oaxaca, where he has been polishing his latest work, El Lado Quieto (2020), a documentary-style collaboration with Carolina Fusilier. It takes place off the Pacific coast of

Mexico, on the island of Capaluco, at a once-bustling vacation resort that is now deserted. Revereza and Fusilier together activate the essence of the Siyokoy, a mythological sea creature from the Philippines, contorted with science fiction motifs. Curiosity unravels as the Siyokoy sea creature emerges from the water after traveling the strong current from the Philippines. The Siyokoy interacts with the spectral sounds and navigates through the architectural afterlife of the Capaluco island.

El Lado Quieto speculates on the future inhabitants of architectural remains and takes on a triple consciousness, performing acts of provocation, presence, and invisibility. Meditations of the Siyokoy develop in real time to the sounds of ghosts from the island’s past.

Since Revereza and I first met in 2018 at True/False Film Fest, I have gravitated toward his work and how

THESE DAYS, I FEEL LESS OBLIGATED TO PICK UP THE CAMERA...

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effectively he considers an alternative approach to the nonfiction film genre as a whole. There are a myriad of textures surrounding reality, which Revereza masterfully blends without relying upon traditional documentary aesthetics. Our conversation touches on the creation of El Lado Quieto and the navigation of life and practice with an internal compass.

Amir George: How has your practice been since Distancing?

Miko Revereza: It is sort of an ongoing, diaristic video film practice, writing practice. It just kind of goes along with living life and seeing, filming when I feel like it, whenever I feel compelled to.

These days, I feel less obligated to pick up the camera, and I’m enjoying the sort of off-camera time, a lot more of just letting things resonate, and using the most inspired moments.

sort of infrastructure, like the port, has evolved into American hegemony after the Spanish empire, and now it has evolved into a party city. This is sort of the remnants of all the evolutions of vacation and also exploitation. So I think there’s a lot of feelings going through these spaces. It’s kind of interesting to just feel the spaces emotionally and also approach them intuitively. Certain stories seep into the film itself, creating a new life of the struggles or things that have been forgotten or ignored.

Since I bought this Sony camera four years ago, I’ve been triangulating my personal path, but also in relation to the sort of path of different empires, the US and Spanish empire.

AG: When you see a place like that, you just expect to see people. Whether it’s people at the gate or those people in line, or people getting tokens, laughing, or walking, it’s always an active place.

AG: In El Lado you speak of empires as apocalyptic cults. Did that idea come out of your journey?

MR: Yeah. In other places in Acapulco, it’s still very active.

MR: It was literally a conversation throughout and just [Carolina Fusilier’s and my] minds thinking out loud. We were having these ideas in our minds, and it’s just like our streams of consciousness.

AG: What was the process of making El Lado?

MR: I think we pitched the concept of the film to the Asia Culture Center. We were applying for this grant for it, and then it was like writing a synopsis for a fictional film of this creature. That was the premise, the creature going from the Philippines, getting sucked in this current, and ending up in Mexico. So we were writing just the premise and then just kind of took a more documentary approach of making these filmic portraits of places as if navigating an island through the eyes of this sea creature.

AG: How were you thinking about architecture while making this project?

MR: We were exploring these immense structures, these potential sites. The

AG: Your previous work has a lot of movement going on—you’re moving through memories, train stations, airports.

How does it feel to be still for a while?

MR: It felt good. We were thinking more about this film just being underwater, where there’s this sense of constant movement, there’s this flow, and then everything is expanding and contracting.

Underwater, light is constantly bending, perception is bending. And then outside you have these really straight lines like columns, and you do have movement sometimes.

AG: What does the sea creature represent to you?

MR: We wanted to retain a sense of mystery about the sea creature, not to project much of ourselves. We were creating antics for the sea creature, but it’s impossible to write a narrative for a sea creature. It will always be a sort of personification of humanness, like Nemo or something.

AND I'M ENJOYING THE OFF-CAMERA TIME. 103

Left: Disintegration 93-96 (2017), dir. Miko Revereza.

Film stills courtesy of Miko Revereza.

104 Right: Distancing (2019), dir. Miko Revereza.

Film stills courtesy of Miko Revereza.

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MR: I suppose we kind of modeled it to be movie-esque. But Siyokoy has been in a lot of horror films in the Philippines, so we went off of that basis of what it looked like and then just played around with it.

AG: Can you tell me about how the collaboration with Carolina came about?

MR: A pandemic romance. We were both in the triannual together in Manila.

Carolina is a digital artist and also does video work, mainly does paintings and installations. So we met and bonded.

Around March or April, Carolina had this online reading that she had to do. So she created this story about this sea creature emerging from the ocean and being able to explore in human form. Then we kind of just played around with it. We had this idea, and pitched the project for funding.

It all came together pretty fast. The movie is in a sense a pandemic film. There’s no people in it.

AG: Only ghosts and shadows.

MR: Yeah.

AG: Which is cool. There are the voices too. How does improvisation play a role in your work?

MR: It was all improvised. Before filming, maybe we observe the place and see what catches our eyes, exploring the place, filming slowly. We may have had only one opportunity with a place where we may not be able to return. I think the biggest improvisational part was in editing.

Our conversations with each other and how we relate to these spaces, they’re improvisational because our conversations were improvised.

AG: Is the sea creature the destroyer of these empires? Or are these places a refuge for the creature?

MR: We had these questions, like does the creature fantasize to be human? Or why

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does the creature fixate or explore these spaces, and what types of imagination does the creature have in relation to spaces?

Also, how well do creatures repurpose human architecture when it’s evacuated? Is it merely a functional sort of sanctuary to protect oneself from the forces of nature or something? I read somewhere that Godzilla got his power by nuclear atomic energy, so it’s like negative energy, how it terrorizes.

AG: Is the creature in El Lado powered by peace?

MR: Yeah, and by curiosity.

AG: They’re a peacemaker.

MR: That’s true.

AG: Then that leads me to think about home and abandonment.

MR: Estrangement, exile, places you haven’t been a while, but these are like personal places. Then consider being on the other side of the border of the United States, in the Philippines, and not being even American—literally feeling out of water, and in a completely different context from myself, where it’s not the language that they used, that I grew up with. Tagalog is my first language, but I didn’t grow up using it. So then it sort of re-assimilates. But it felt like a fish out of water. That’s kind of a direct metaphor, I suppose.

AG: Selfhood is home.

MR: Yeah, selfhood is home. I never really identified with any places as home no matter how long I’ve lived in that place.

When I was in the US, it wasn’t home—I wasn’t a legal resident. So then, on paper, bureaucratically, they didn’t allow me that home. But spiritually, the Philippines didn’t feel like home either. So I don’t know. I feel torn. The concept, the word home, it brings up complex emotions or attachments to it.

Images on pages 108-113: El Lado Quieto (2021), dir. Miko Revereza.

Film stills courtesy of Miko Revereza.

AG: The shadow of the creature was Godzilla-like almost.

SELFHOOD IS HOME. I NEVER REALLY IDENTIFIED WITH ANY

PLACES AS HOME, NO MATTER HOW LONG I'VE LIVED IN THAT PLACE.

El Lado Quieto (2021), dir. Miko Revereza.

Film still courtesy of Miko Revereza.

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AN

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INTERVIEW

WITH

MAYA

BY JONATHAN ALI PHOTOGRAPHY BY SHAR'DAI GABRIELLE

COZIER

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“Caribbean cinema remains forever in obscurity,” declared Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, with more than a touch of provocation, in her 1992 essay “Cinema, Literature, and Freedom.”1 In spite of achievements like Cuba’s state-run filmmaking system, and lauded titles such as Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972) and Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley (1983), this daunting seeming reality cannot be undone. Instead, these examples serve as outliers, emphasizing the myriad challenges of creating a robust regional cinema.

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1. Maryse Condé, “Cinema, Literature, and Freedom,” in Ex-Iles: Essays on

But forty years later, cinematic images from the Caribbean proliferate as never before, as do the ways and means for these images to be seen, from film festivals to online platforms (and, since mid-2020, film festivals as online platforms). Unfortunately, while often competently fulfilling the role of representation, much of this work is more or less negligible as cinematic art. The strides in technology that help democratize film production and exhibition notwithstanding, many of the material and immaterial challenges that have traditionally inhibited Caribbean cinema remain.

Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye B. Cham (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992).

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She Paradise (2020), from Trinidad and Tobago, is a notable example of what a thoughtful and accessible Caribbean cinema can look like. The first fiction feature by twenty-eight-year-old writer and director Maya Cozier, it’s the story of Sparkle, a shy young Black woman, and her attempts at self-realization. Set within a contemporary working-class, urban milieu, the film uses the glittering Carnival subculture of soca music dancing to intelligently explore issues related to feminine solidarity and survival within an exploitative society. In the film, women like Sparkle form a demimonde, constantly negotiating their power and agency in relation to patriarchal norms.

“There was a DVD store in Trinidad,” she says to me in a Zoom from New York. “I remember visiting the store pretty often, and they had a ‘foreign’ section.

We were calling European films and films from nonAmerican places ‘foreign.’” She laughs at the memory.

“From that section, I remember my parents bringing home films by [Pedro] Almodóvar and seeing Volver [(2006)]. I also remember seeing scenes from Persona [(Ingmar Bergman, 1996)] and hearing my dad talk about it, but I don’t really remember that coming from outside, or the society at large.”

Made on a low budget on location with nonprofessional performers, She Paradise embraces the challenges of its production context—of the Trinidadian socioeconomic reality—to beneficial effect. The film is a success within, and arguably due partly to, its modest scope, with its focused gaze on recognizable characters that feel rooted in a lived-in setting. This has led to other achievements: having been selected for a Tribeca Film Festival world premiere in 2020, She Paradise has gone on to screen at AFI Fest and other notable festivals.

“Outside” were the multiplexes, which had replaced the cinema palaces of an earlier age. But despite the proliferation of screens, there was no diversification of what was projected onto them. It was still virtually all Hollywood, merely more of it. “There wasn’t any independent cinema being shown,” she continues.

The arrival of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2006 represented a disruption of the prevailing culture. “That was the first time when it felt like things were diversifying. Trinidadians started to go to see their own films, and Caribbean films, and international films. That was a pivotal moment, but the festival happened only once a year.”

Cozier is now in her second year as an MFA film studies candidate at Columbia University, and her filmmaking reflects her Caribbean experience. The daughter of artist parents, she had a less-than-typical childhood, one that circumvented Trinidadian middle-class obsessions of respectability and conformity. This was certainly so when it came to cinema, which for most meant (and still means) one thing: US cinema.

The quasi-bohemian nature of Cozier’s upbringing and the porous characteristic of Trinidad’s complex class system meant that she was exposed to the island’s working-class culture from an early age, in school and elsewhere. This included dance classes, which she began taking at the age of three. Her teacher, Heather Gordon (“one of the few Black women to attend Julliard”), taught various dance styles, from ballet and tap to limbo and hip hop.

The result was a mix of students: girls from different classes and races, which could be reflected in the style of dance being taught. “It represented different parts of the Trinidad society depending on what style you were doing. When we did ballet classes, it was all white girls,” Cozier says. It was through these classes that she began soca dancing, performing on television and for Carnival shows. She made particular friendships with her fellow dancers, and the world she experienced as a performer would go on to form the inspiration for She Paradise.

After winning a government scholarship, Cozier went to the School of Visual Arts in New York. Even then, however, she wasn’t settled on becoming a filmmaker, having enrolled as a general arts student. She took a documentary class and made a short portrait of

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her best friend—a dancer she would go on to fictionalize in She Paradise—and then switched to studying film. Crucially, she began watching films as she never had before.

“I started looking at a lot of films for the first time,” she explains. “There was this film history course where the professor showed films by white men for the whole semester, but this other course was the first time I saw films by Mira Nair and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul [(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)]. That film stayed with me for a long time afterward.” Yet even with these valuable cinematic experiences, as well as her graduation film—a short Trinidadian road movie called Short Drop, inspired by the films of Abbas Kiarostami—in the can, a future in filmmaking was no more apparent to her than before.

“I didn’t know what to do. Short Drop hadn’t got into any festivals yet, and I really was unsure what step I would take. Was it realistic to try to become a director?” she remembers wondering. “And then I went to BAM cinema in Brooklyn, and I looked at Moonlight [(2016)].” Barry Jenkins’s visionary second feature, at that point yet to become the most unlikely best picture winner in Oscar history, worked its magic on her.

“I remember right after that screening, feeling that I had to tell my stories, that I had to try,” Cozier says, obvious emotion in her voice. “There was this pacing to it, and this very tender, patient sensibility in the way that he filmed these Black characters,” she describes. “For the first time, I felt: These are people like myself. I come from Trinidad, I can see people like us on screen, but the sensibility here feels like one that I can connect to as well. And that just got my brain turning. There’s something here that I can go after.”

And go she did. Scripting She Paradise with cowriter Melina Brown, Cozier had a clear idea of what she wanted to do with her first feature film. She tells me: “I had this idea of the characters I wanted to explore, and I definitely feel that while I had seen some films being made in the Caribbean in recent years, there was this gap. I felt I hadn’t really seen

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films about women from a woman’s point of view.

There was this absence. The experience of growing up as a young woman, partying, what happens between friends, the sisterhood—all of that was my experience growing up, and I felt like I hadn’t seen anything on-screen yet that explored that point of view.”

Filtering the universal experiences of female teenagerhood through the dynamics of Trinidad’s Carnival and attendant soca music scene would give the film its cultural specificity. Meanwhile, Cozier’s own knowledge of that world, as well as the testimonies of other young women she interviewed, would seek to make it authentic. Following a proofof-concept short version of the film that led to a Trinidad government grant, She Paradise went into production. And the challenges inherent in shooting a film in the Caribbean formed an indelible quality of the film.

“It takes an open mind,” Cozier admits of filming in her native country. “You cannot make—I mean, you could try, but I don’t think someone can make a film in a space like Trinidad thinking that they’re going to keep industry standards or be professional or do everything by the book. It’s not going to work. You have to have an open mind and almost approach it as though there is no script.”

Yet it’s precisely the inability to shoot a film according to “industry standards”—which only raises the questions of whose industry and whose standards— that provided Cozier with the opportunity to be creative (and no less professional). This makes for an “imperfect cinema” of the kind extolled by late Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa. Cozier’s understanding of this, and the willingness to see virtues where others might see limitations, is central to her work ethic and the aesthetic of She Paradise.

“You have to adapt constantly,” she says, and goes on to provide an example that could serve as an object lesson in fiction filmmaking in the Caribbean. “I remember we had some extras for a beach scene that did not show up. And it was the knowledge of: OK, I am making a film in this circumstance, and these extras didn’t show up who are crucial to the scene. So, what’s in front of me? OK, we have a beach, we have the girls; how can I rewrite the script to keep the story going? And I rewrote the script on the spot. It takes this trust in the unpredictability of the process to make it happen.”

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Above and left: She Paradise (2020) , dir. Maya Cozier.

Film stills courtesy of Maya Cozier.

Working primarily with nonprofessionals, people playing fictionalized versions of their actual selves, was also a key feature of Cozier’s filmmaking ethos.

“I don’t think it would have done the film any justice to cast people who aren’t in that dance world. And it was also more meaningful because all the women in the film are already so close to the story, to the characters they’re playing. It felt more fulfilling knowing that everyone really cared about the story and felt connected to the world, to the characters,” she explains.

This didn’t mean preparation for shooting wasn’t important. “We did do a lot of work,” she says. “We spent weeks rehearsing the roles together. And with the lead, Odessa Nestor, leading up to shooting, she would come over by me a lot, and we would look at movies together. I remember showing her Girlhood”— Céline Sciamma’s acclaimed 2014 portrait of French banlieue life through the eyes of young Black

women—“and some Andrea Arnold films as well. I think it was important for her to see the type of film I saw in my mind.”

Cozier’s casting strategy and her method of working with actors led to an unforeseen blurring of reality and fiction. “Because we were working with nonactors and people who are so close to their characters, there was this interesting dynamic that started to happen, where the girls themselves formed similar bonds and connections in the same way as in the film,” she says. “The dynamic on-screen was the real dynamic of the girls while we were filming. And I found that interesting: when you’re working with nonactors, reality and fiction intertwine. And so you have these situations off-screen and on-screen that all feel blended.”

The result is both an exuberant and unashamed celebration of distaff power and sexuality, as well as a

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subtle examination of how women— in particular subaltern women, for whom agency is fraught in specific ways—attempt to negotiate the limitations of those things when a countervailing hegemonic male power is introduced. And while responses to the film so far have mainly been appreciative of its attempts to do this, other readings have revealed that a possible disconnect exists between various racial-cultural realities, a point Cozier is not shy of noting.

“I remember reading the Hollywood Reporter review of the film, and it was so obvious that it was written from a white woman’s point of view. She says these women may not be as free as they think because they’re still trapped in the male gaze,” she notes. “But my desire to make the film came from a feminist point of view, of wanting to explore certain themes— sexuality, respectability politics, slut shaming, and so on—and the idea of a female object, especially one in the performance space, who’s able to wield greater agency by turning herself into a subject and manipulating the male gaze to her power. And even though there are a lot of predatory men, there’s a lot of toxic masculinity in that space, Sparkle’s still able to navigate that space and extract what she wants out of it, whether that is money or the ability to perform and wield agency and power and still keep going. This is a Caribbean Black woman’s experience, and it won’t necessarily fit a white feminist experience.”

The film’s bracing resolution has also divided spectators. Yet, and without wanting to spoil the ending, it’s something Cozier is more sanguine about than one might imagine she’d be, given what happens: “I like the idea of leaving the ending open to discussion. A lot of people see the end of the film as the end of the sisterhood. But I don’t necessarily think it communicates a message about the sisterhood being bad for Sparkle. I remember being in groups where there were falling-outs over a lot of things, like money. These things happen. In my mind, the next day, they’ll talk it out. They’ll work together next week. And they’ll have more respect for Sparkle.”

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AN

INTERVIEW

WITH

WANG

QIONG

BY ABBY SUN COLLAGE

BY

CAROLINE

XIA 125

Despite decades of defiance, pushback, and uneven enforcement, the Chinese Communist Party’s onechild policy continues to dominate Western depictions of mainland China as a sign of Chinese compliance with authoritarian rule. One recent example is Nanfu Wang’s One Child Nation (2019), a film that chillingly traces the white savior American understanding of the policy to the rise of the international adoption industry but frustrates in its continued centering of white American audiences. I’ve found that it can be easy for us to accept that oppositional narratives from within China will never circulate outside the country because of its repressive environment, which is real and consequential. But this acceptance is also a failure of our imagination.

Standing in contrast is Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters (2021)—a longitudinal reverberation of the one-child policy across three generations of the filmmaker’s family. The film combines interviews of Wang’s family members, her sisters’ and mother’s doctors, and state-employed enforcers of the one-child policy with observational footage filmed over seven years. The central figure in the film is Wang’s younger sister, Jin, who survived a lethal medical injection and abandonment by their parents before being raised by their uncle as his own child. Never voyeuristic and endlessly constructing layers of meaning, the film premiered at the June 2021 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

In addition to the personal story at its heart, the film’s emphasis on the value of oral testimony can be traced back to Wang’s involvement in the first participatory documentary nonprofit in China. This organization, the IFChina Original Studio Participatory Documentary Center, was cofounded by Jian Yi, Douglas Xiao, and Eva Song in 2009. IFChina trains filmmakers to conduct oral history interviews about topics both ordinary and taboo, reaching the migrant workers, rural residents, women, and children who live in and around its headquarters of Ji’an, in the landlocked Jianxi province of central China.

I admire participatory filmmaking projects like IFChina for creating an experimental counterarchive, especially in a country where so much of mainstream media is state sponsored. But we usually don’t hear about how people who participate in them are then empowered to tell and collect their own stories. For Wang Qiong, IFChina provided not only a conceptual foundation for her documentary work but also introductions to English-speaking filmmakers and industry professionals to bolster her scholarship

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applications for an MFA program in the US, where she finished editing All About My Sisters. In our conversation, Wang explains the catalytic effect of participatory documentary, where it’s led her since, and why her filmmaking is a practice of durational mediation.

Abby Sun: How did you learn about IFChina’s work, and how is it related to All About My Sisters?

Wang Qiong: In my second or third year of undergrad studying broadcast journalism and television, I was unhappy with the classes I was taking. The professors taught us how to use the camera, how to zoom in, zoom out, and how to record, how to edit—but not the reason to film. Then I was introduced by a friend to IFChina.

When I got there, I saw people doing documentary photography or films, which was really new to me.

One of the projects was called Story of Birth, and the idea was for literally everybody around the local community, or even further—people from different cities or different countries—to participate. I invited everybody I knew to interview their mothers about their birth story, and of course, I also participated in this project.

I took a [digital video] camera back home and interviewed my mother. I was surprised that she gave me so much information about the process of giving birth to me. She also talked about her other pregnancies, how hard it was for her to have my Right: All About My Sisters (2021), dir. Wang Qiong. Film stills courtesy of Wang Qiong.

Above: All About My Sisters (2021), dir. Wang Qiong. Film still courtesy of Wang Qiong.

younger brother, and how hard it was for her to hide from the officials who were in charge of the one-child policy. Everything my mother spoke about I thought about for a long time. Then my older sister, Wang Li, sent me a message about her plan to abort the baby she was pregnant with if it was a girl. I thought about my mother’s story and about my younger sister, Jin, whose story was known openly in my family. At that point, I decided to make a film about my own family. You could say it was inspired by IFChina’s Story of Birth.

AS: I thought a lot about images and self-representation while watching All About My Sisters. Many of the conversations and family dinners take place in the lobby of your parents’ photo studio. In the background of these scenes there are photos behind you, and they’re doubling as both idealized family portraits but also advertisements for the family business. What did your parents understand of your documentary project?

Their life also revolves around making images, but in this idealized way, right?

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WQ: My parents understood that I was recording their activities, but they didn’t really understand what I was doing. They didn’t really know what documentary is and why people did that. They take photos as a livelihood, to make money, but I record for nothing. But regarding this story of the family photo studio inside the film, my father is super proud of his expertise in photographing family portraits. He even tried to teach me how to take a good family portrait—when everyone is in the studio and there’s a cameraman and everything is prepared, like a performance: smile and your family shows happiness and harmony. You can even do a second take if the first smile doesn’t look good. So there is a self-censorship among people inside this system, about how they want to be seen and remembered, which is also human nature. To some extent, I think the photo shop is a metaphor for China as a country.

Documentary is something that I want to do to update what my father was doing—instructing people to show their best faces in front of the camera. For me, I want to see the complexity beyond the performance.

WQ: The camera, for me, is an encouragement to ask a question. In Chinese families, people don’t really like to sit down and have a serious conversation about the past.

A camera gave me a reason, power, and encouragement to start to ask questions. So when I offer the camera to Jin, it is because I want to share this encouragement, because I wanted her to start asking questions too. I want her to question me, which is why the question she asked me is at the beginning of All About My Sisters: “Why are you making the film?” That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that switching the camera to Jin is a form of intimacy. When I was a child, I always felt that we were so different, as I have more than Jin has.

She lives in the village, she has to labor in the fields, whereas I had nice clothes and everything was fancier in the city. From when I was a child, I wanted to share everything I had with her. So when I have the camera and its power, I want her to have it too. Although she took over the camera, she didn’t make a film. She didn’t ask many questions like I did, but she did accept one of the most important things in my life.

AS: Have you talked to your dad about how you made a family portrait as well?

WQ: I told my parents my intention of making this project is to mediate understanding between Jin and them, but I’m not sure they understand. I won’t show this film to them for ten or twenty years, because the relationship between my parents and Jin is more important than the film. There are things that Jin complained about my parents in the film, and then there are some things that my parents and my older sister Li complained about Jin, separately. If I show this now, I’m afraid that they will deliberately misunderstand.

I’m afraid to destroy the improvements that I have made to mediate their relationship, because they’re much better than before.

AS: All About My Sisters is the first part of a tetralogy that you will spend a decade making, following the Buddhist cycle of life. What’s up with this idea, and why is it so important to you to spend a long time on this series?

WQ: This idea has been in my mind for many years, almost since the beginning of making All About My Sisters—the forces of birth, death, illness, and aging.

1 . In Buddhism it is the four stages of We call it life that none of us can avoid. I’m a Buddhist and I’m very interested in how people deal with things during every state. I also feel that when I’m making these films, I’m meeting people who can teach me how to face my own life. I will be satisfied if I can finish this within my life, before I die.

1. Si ku, or four sufferings.

AS: The photo studio kind of engulfs everyone’s lives, including that of Jin, when your parents help her and her husband out by helping them start their own shop.

You introduce Jin to the idea of documentary film—at the end of All About My Sisters, some of the footage is filmed by her. You also use a scene as a sort of bookend, when the camera swaps from your hands to hers. But the way it’s used makes it clear that Jin’s participation in the project is not one that leads to an easy resolution.

Why was it important to you to have Jin holding your camera and to use these recordings in your film?

AS: I have an urge to classify your film as part of a current feminist resistance to official state, Beijing-run narratives of nationalist fervor. What do you think of this idea of making films that are part of a counternarrative and part of a larger feminist movement?

WQ: I would say filmmaking, to me, is giving a different voice than the mainstream [or] governed narrative. It’s a reflection of what was said and what is being said, a discovery of what was not said and what is being silenced. An analogy that we brought up before is what photography means to my father versus what it means to me. It’s a secret freedom that I use to learn more about the incomplete, inaccurate history and present.

I don’t feel my film or I belong to, or are part of, any movement. On the contrary, [we] belong to nowhere, though I want to have a sense of belonging. But that is always absent in my life. However, I believe there are connections between All About My Sisters and other films regarding the topics it touches upon. To me, making this film is a personal question-asking experience. But since it is completed and published, to a certain extent, my film became an independent life that may have conversations with other films out of my control, which I think is beautiful.

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BITCHIN' IS A RIGHTEOUS INTEGRATION OF MULTIPLE SELVES.

The usual names that surface in a conversation about Little Richard’s heirs are Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Prince, and, depending on who you’re asking, Andre 3000. But when Little Richard made his interview rounds in the 1980s, having retired from the music industry as a Christian minister of clean and sober (non-gay) believers, I added Rick James to that list— though he was none of those things. A deeper dive into Little Richard’s story will surface the fatal pleasures attached to Black life in the making of rock ’n’ roll.

With Black glam flair, Rick James co-witnessed the additional taxes one must pay (segregated genres, white music executives, erasure of originality, and addiction) as a Black musician. A well-done telling of this story requires special consideration and a lens that rejects the allure of trauma-ridden biography, even when the biography is trauma-ridden.

Sacha Jenkins’s new documentary Bitchin’: the Sound and Fury of Rick James (2021) is a layered exploration of one of the most complex and controversial figures in Black music history, one whose genius is also his darkest magic. Bitchin’ is a righteous integration of multiple selves. As a co-writer and co-producer, Jenkins the music journalist, tastemaker, informal historian, editor, and curator of the underground arts creates an interdisciplinary investigation of Rick James’s life in cinematic form. Jenkins’s directorial debut, Fresh Dressed (2015), and the Wu-Tang Clan: of Mics and Men docuseries (2019) were homecomings for Black folk who watch these films with the hope that it’s us behind the camera. His work stands in contrast to a long history of white directors such as Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese, who’ve become synonymous with documentaries about genre-based Black music—documentaries that replicate centuries of symbolic and material imbalance between Black performers and white industry men.

In the spirit of his Black American father, the late Howard University professor and filmmaker Horace B. Jenkins, and with the eye of his Haitian mother, visual artist Monart Renaud, Jenkins understands how the storytelling of music—be it an era, artist, or decade—can inspire a diasporic imagining. He knows that compassion and a politic of care are necessary to understand how the music sounds artistically and how it can be heard beyond its entertainment value. It’s a delicate balance that requires close listening. Mass Appeal, the record label turned online magazine turned production company where Jenkins helms as chief creative director, has now fashioned

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a filmic brand specializing in the presentation and the performance of rare archives using a hip hop aesthetic. Jenkins approaches the documentary as a DJ or producer would approach the art of sampling: repurposing found objects, images, and ideas to build on what’s already there. It’s an intentional layering that calls for dexterity and soulful orchestration.

Bitchin’ opens with Rick’s daughter Ty James driving through Cali to a storage space where artifacts from his Buffalo and Woodland Hills homes are held.

She’s blasting “Mary Jane,” a song her father wrote about his romantic relationship with weed for his first album, Come Get It! (1978). Before opening the boxes and shuffling through ephemera, she’s met by the crew who oversees the storage facility. They greet each other, guess how long it’s been since she’s visited, and agree on twelve years. This choreographed reunion at the Rick James vault is the portal to the chorus of family, friends, fellow musicians, lawyers, and ex-lovers who fill in the archival gaps with intimate testimony. Ty picks up items that strike emotion, and she shares memories that become explanations about his journey through the industry and his relevance to the lives of his fanbase. Before the discussion about his music, we learn about some

Rick James. Photo by Mark Weiss. Image courtesy of SHOWTIME.

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of his things. A framed poster of Tupac on the cover of Vibe magazine, an antique couch with removable pillows, and a life-size African sculpture are indeed part of the story of James’s music. The man who wrote, produced, and brought a new level of nasty to Motown was privately and publicly audacious and flashy. An heir to the Little Richard dynasty.

Rick James was born James Ambrose Johnson in 1948. He grew up in 1950s Buffalo, New York. His mother, Betty Gladden, was the first hustler Rick encountered. Like the great Stephanie St. Clair, a woman whose stunning criminal legacy gets lost in the respectable translation of Harlem Renaissance greats, Betty Gladden ran numbers. Her son James was responsible for picking up payments and debt.

Gladden took a young James with her to jazz and blues clubs and had a record collection that stood in as a co-parent in the absence of Rick’s father. The pivot to James’s early life illuminates his discography, as well as his complicated relationship with women.

Within the first few minutes of the film, abuse and its proximity to music become a theme. “My mother,” Rick says, “was a strong disciplinarian, and we used to get a lot of whippings. . . . So I guess you could say I was an abused child, but I had a lot of love in my family.”

His candid discussion about being sexually abused by a babysitter around the age of eight is also a clue for anyone to understand the sadistic nature of his relationship to sex and power and the way that shaped his brand of funk. Jenkins’s approach allows James’s honesty and frankness in discussing these experiences in rare interviews to guide the conversation. James speaks about enjoying the sexual experience, citing

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the woman’s age and his visceral enjoyment. This all came to an end when his mother returned home early, caught the woman in the act, and then beat her up on the spot. There’s a book to be written about this moment in the film by someone interested in the music yielded from sexual trauma in the afterlife of slavery and on the silent history of women who sexually abuse children. This, in conversation with the many references to James’s desire for underage women, is messy, to say the least, and Jenkins doesn’t shy away from pointing it out. Rick James is part of a long list of soul men who openly discussed their desire for underage girls—from BB King (“Sweet 16”) to Marvin Gaye (“I Want You”) to R. Kelly (“Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number”)—with Rick’s song “17” among them. The fury suggested in the film’s title is unavoidable and is explained in the film as being an equal force to his sound.

Rick James. Photo by Mark Weiss. Image courtesy of SHOWTIME.

The team of cinematographers for Bitchin’ includes Hans Charles, a professor and filmmaker from the school of Bradford Young and Arthur Jafa, who’s worked with prominent directors from Ava DuVernay to Spike Lee. Charles is also a bass guitarist, which might explain the composition-like quality of how Bitchin’ is filmed. It blends a collage of stories using intentionally seedy animation, and original music in Bitchin’ is scored by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge. Jenkins’s crew captures an amazing display of perfectly placed curse words to describe Rick’s rise to freak fame from the people who knew him best. Most impressive was the range of characters who spoke to Rick’s unique evolution.

Standout voices were Roxanne Shanté, who was the guest rapper in his 1988 song “Loosey’s Rap,” Big Daddy Kane, members of the Stone City Band, Nile Rogers of Chic, and the white Black music journalist David Ritz who cowrote Rick’s biography Glow (and curiously, the biographies and liner notes for at least twenty other Black musicians or groups).

The much-anticipated discussion about Rick James’s tense relationship with a young artist by the name of Prince who toured with him in 1981 could have been more robust considering that the tension was more about their similarities than their differences. Like Rick, Prince was a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer, and producer. They both incorporated rock elements and were among the artists who ushered in the new wave sound. They added a Black punk sensibility to gender exploration in their work, creating new voices (and alter egos!) for themselves through their production of girl groups and women singers. Last but certainly not least, performative cockiness was a key part of their acts.

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Rick James. Photo by Mark Weiss. Image courtesy of SHOWTIME.

RICK JAMES CREATED AND PERFORMED A GENDER AND THEN PRODUCED A SOUNDTRACK FOR IT.

Jenkins understands the importance of the Black geographies and roots of the subject matter he tackles. His stories center place. In Burn Mothaf*cka, Burn! (2017), he used narrative as a tool to address ahistorical conversations about multigenerational state violence in Los Angeles—all while presenting the secret rhythm in rioting as a kind of cultural work. Equally impressive is his handling of the musical mapping of Rick’s music and legacy in Bitchin’. I hadn’t considered the interior lifeworld of Rick James, and not until I learned that Buffalo, New York, was his hometown did I check for the history of Blackness in that small city. The film shows how Buffalo’s proximity to Canada was critical to James’s artistic trajectory. Prior to commercial success, he was a local gig musician in Toronto. After being drafted for the Vietnam War, he went AWOL to Canada and changed his name to Ricky James Johnson to live under the radar of the American government. He spent the 1960s in community and conversation with folk artists like Richie Havens and Joni Mitchell. Rick was also central to several bands—most famously, The Mynah Birds, which Neil Young was invited to join. An exploration of the Caribbean diaspora in Toronto would have been an exciting place to unpack reggae-inflected songs like “Mr. Policeman.” But pinning Rick to folk does the work of demonstrating his range.

Eventually, Rick was deported back to his mama Betty Gladden’s house after being reported to authorities by a disgruntled former band manager.

He spent years there writing and adjusting to home life and taking up the philosophical musings of neighborhood Black nationalists. Found footage of early Black communities in Buffalo helps to support the picture painted by rapper Conway the Machine, who also hails from there. Conway breaks down city demographics and Rick’s status and impact as a local hero representing a new generation of Buffalo rude boys. He’s a credible source that explains Rick as a local legend and an artist.

By the late 1970s and after years of hustling demo tapes, Rick James landed a recording and production contract with Motown Records. He capitalized on the label’s cultural shift that accompanied its move from Detroit to Los Angeles. Rick represented a label that was finding its way in the gray area between the Motor City and Hollywood films. Here James became the official king of freak rock, a prince of the (newly coined) punk-funk genre. This, of course, complicated

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Rick James. Photo by Mark Weiss. Image courtesy of SHOWTIME.

the squeaky-clean image of Motown Records. While he lyrically disclaimed all possibilities of being gay, Rick’s stage show during this era was nothing less than an adventure in Black queer poetics. Rock journalists hate to admit to, and often actively downplay, the proximity between late 1970s funk, rock, and disco.

But Rick James’s genre-blending draws on a four-tothe-floor dance music tradition among others, which is to say that punk-funk was a queering of Motown and Black musical masculinity.

Rick James created and performed a gender and then produced a soundtrack for it, and Bitchin’ gives you the context you need. He inspired those who loved his music to live in and question the world between his leather thigh-high boots and his proclivity for dangerous emotions. Those signature braids, which he required the entire band to wear once they got signed, became a trademark after Rick met a Maasai woman on a flight, and she showed him a book of braiding patterns from Kenya. He fell in love with her designs and patterns and asked her to braid his hair. In Little Richard fashion and to the chagrin of their respective musicians, Rick added glitter to his braids and poured glitter on the heads of everyone in the band.

The small slot reserved in the film for Teena Marie and the Mary Jane Girls left me wanting more. Teena Marie, also a staff writer for Motown, was produced

by Rick James, but it’s important to note that she was

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not discovered and developed by Rick James. Rick was attracted to her sound, her production, and her skills as a writer. Following the duo’s professional and romantic breakup, Teena Marie went on to produce thirteen solo studio albums. She was a peer to Rick James, not a protégé. Their collaboration “Fire and Desire” from Rick’s Street Songs album (1981) is one of the most essential songs in the quiet storm radio format and genre. It was also the last song they performed together during a BET Awards show in 2004. Rick, visibly winded and worn from his high-risk life, passed later that same year. The Mary Jane Girls, like Prince’s Vanity 6, disappeared into obscurity after two albums, though songs like “All Night Long” and “Nasty Girl” are Black cookout and dance floor classics. Rick James also produced the Temptations’ “Standing on the Top” in 1982 and co-produced “Ebony Eyes” with Smokey Robinson in 1983.

with Norwood Fisher of Fishbone, who describes funk and the world that Rick created around it as being “Black excellence and nigga shit, the worst made beautiful.” Rick’s career is a time capsule that we peek into and must deal with everything that surfaces, from the thousands of people who were disappeared under Reagan’s regime to all the families who struggled as loved ones battled addiction. I consider myself a survivor of the 1980s, and most clear to me, as I watched the impact of the AIDS epidemic and the “war on drugs” on my family and community, is that there is a library of memories in my parents’ record collection. There you’ll find Little Richard, Sly and the Family Stone, Prince, and Rick James. Bitchin’ reminds us that albums carry those who are missing and their stories.

Bitchin’ isn’t a cautionary tale about sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. If anything, it shows how during specific eras, cocaine and other substances were partly responsible for creating much of the music we love.

But the period where Rick “busted out” of his industry cell was in the 1980s. The place of entry to the Rick James story for many is the 1980s, and for those who saw the power of sampling with Hammer’s use of “Super Freak” for “U Can’t Touch This,” the entry point is the 1990s. Importantly, Bitchin’ surveys how the music industry and specifically the rise of video culture blocked the visual representation of Black music. Both Rick James and Little Richard called out MTV for the racist practices that were common in the industry at that time. In The Life and Times of Little Richard, his 1983 authorized biography, Little Richard said of MTV, “The videos are ninety percent white groups . . . mediocre at best. Even a star like Michael Jackson has trouble getting airplay unless he teams up with Paul McCartney.” And when Rick James presented his music videos to MTV in the 1980s, they rejected them, claiming they did not fit the format intended for the network’s viewers. His offense grew into the strategic public shaming of the new video channel, which ironically, as pointed to in the film, opened the space for Michael Jackson, who was notably less edgy, to break MTV’s racial barrier.

Prince’s videos on MTV further inflamed Rick’s rage against the machine.

BITCHIN' REMINDS US THAT ALBUMS CARRY THOSE WHO ARE MISSING AND THEIR STORIES.

Rick James epitomizes the sound and fury of the crack era, and yes, his public decline is part of the film.

What he represents is best captured in an interview

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Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), dir. Haile Gerima. Film still courtesy of Mypheduh Films Inc.

A REVIEW OF HARVEST: 3,000 YEARS

Meret larashu. Eshi ageritwas, lema tehun?

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by ruth gebreyesus

The first gunfire erupted in Tigray last November. It started around midnight, and by morning Ethiopia was at war. In my lifetime, small as that is, Tigray’s arid highlands have swallowed an eternity’s worth of blood and bullets. By December, tens of thousands had fled on foot from the region across the border to find safety. If the land itself could up and leave, maybe it would flee to Sudan too.

What is true of the current Ethiopian civil war is true of the wars my parents and their parents lived through: war is fought and fueled by working people. Their bodies and their harvests. Poor bodies, rich harvests.

A century from now, maybe even in three thousand years, those of us inside the perpetually disputed borders of Ethiopia are unlikely to sort through who fired the first shot. We won’t settle who lost the most men, who ate the most dust, who should wield power and how.

I think about my grandmother during wars a lot. I think about how often she’s crossed the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea in war and in peace. She buried three children, a husband, and her own cancer before she died. I think about her life, her dreams, her wars. If the poorest of us in Ethiopia are farmers-turnedsoldiers come war, then the poorest women are always at war, battling the wicked intersections of their identities. Even in times of peace, the marginalized are always fighting.

Haile Gerima filmed Mirt Sost Shi Amit (Harvest: 3,000 Years) in 1976, two years deep into a civil war that began with the overthrow of the Ethiopian empire. Before that war, there were many others, including the one my paternal grandfather fought in against a creeping invasion by Italy in the 1940s. His wife, my grandmother, was a farmer, as was he. I’ve always assumed he became a soldier because he happened to be a farmer during a war. I never met him, but if I had I might’ve asked if he fought by will or by circumstance.

This current war holds the remnants of unsettled grudges and power struggles older than anyone who’s dying in its wake. Knowing that makes me uncharmed by sweeping calls for unity—or worse, harmony. They are naive always. They can also be sinister when unaccompanied by

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Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), dir. Haile Gerima. Film still courtesy of Mypheduh Films Inc.

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sincere efforts to reckon with the harm already done.

Unity without reckoning is in fact just more abuse.

For the people in Ethiopia, for myself, I wish in an expression my mother often uses: Ye libatchen’s eyn yikfetilin. For our heart’s eye to be open.

Maybe Gerima had the same wish when he returned to his home country in 1976 after living in the United States for ten years. Mirt’s writing and directorial choices are stunningly clear-eyed about the violence of class as a national building block. In Mirt, the exploits of local elites take center stage, a rare narrative considering that Ethiopia is mythologized for fighting off European colonization for its kingdom of Black freedom. There might be an impulse to spare local evils to vilify the already vile project of colonization. But Gerima doesn’t fall for it. Instead he contextualizes Ethiopia’s own internal repressive powers inside the globalized racial hierarchy that subjugates the nation. It’s all at play and it’s all worth telling.

I obsess over those two truths of my country that are relevant across the African continent. First is our own capacity for evil. Then there’s our integration into a racist, capitalist system. Both so violently and continuously derail us from sorting through our own values before sowing them.

Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), dir. Haile Gerima. Film still courtesy of Mypheduh Films Inc.

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Amidst my heartbreak about Ethiopia, I sought out Mirt. The full-length version had eluded me; its limited circulation was a trademark of Gerima’s work. It took me three weeks and several pleading emails to secure a copy. After I saw it, I wanted to show it to everyone I love. My cousins. My friends.

My mother. My aunts. Mirt was made on the heels of the late ’60s student movement in Addis Abeba. They witnessed the refrain “Meret Larashu (Land to the Tiller)!” I’m afraid to remind them that their friends, along with any hopes for reform, were disappeared by the dictatorship that followed.

Rasun fetro new ende yehé deha? (Do the poor impoverish themselves?)

Mirt unfurls like a fable across the political and physical landscape of mountainous Gondar, a town then small and at the dusk of feudalism. Feudalism in Ethiopia, last overseen by Haile Selassie’s empire, is an unbreakable curse to the working poor, who tend the land only to watch their harvests slip into the hands of the elite, generation after generation. For the elite, the landowners and their cronies, feudalism requires delusion and deadly force to maintain.

Gerima moves us deliberately through those polarities—his camera is a curious and patient observer evoking those same qualities in us. In Mirt, class politics begin at dawn. Maybe it’s better to say that they never end, as they follow each character’s days into their dreams. We land in Gondar in the morning and follow the divergent routines of two families.

The first, a unit of five across three generations, starts with a hurried prayer before a day’s work on land they care for but isn’t theirs to claim. The feudal lord walks leisurely from his perched house to church while his barefooted servant follows behind, carrying a large bible and larger faith that one day his master’s old shoes will fall on his feet. Gerima lingers long enough on the juxtapositions to let details sting.

The camera holds on to Kentu, a loyal servant to an impenitently cruel master.

We see his feet, bare and almost always in motion. His frame, itself bare save for bones and an economy of muscles, is dressed in discarded clothes. His boss, almost always seated in carriages and in chairs, seems to wear every nice thing he owns at once.

Kentu’s achingly sincere reverence for his master is also on display. What are we to do with our discomfort at his subservience? If we pity him, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing we’re morally and intellectually above being limited by the conditions of our lives. How else do we behave under milder tyrannies but adapt and make fragile treaties with our enemies? To pity Kentu might be the first impulse, but Gerima’s camera, his story, doesn’t encourage that. Over the course of Mirt’s chapters, it’d be a surprise if we do not simmer with rage at the oppressive forces that hold Kentu hostage. After all, do the poor impoverish themselves?

Early on in the film, Kentu’s master sends him to ward off Kebebe, a man whose heart’s eye seems wide open to the inequities that organize life in Ethiopia. Kebebe casually leans into the fence marking the feudal lord’s prized land and accuses the seated man of laziness.

Kebebe also charged the wealthy man with stealing Kebebe’s land using tricks that the Italians taught him. Kebebe is unsparing in his censure, and soon enough the master commands Kentu to go fight him off. It’s almost too perfect an articulation of war at a personal scale—Kentu is sent off to fight a man closer to his own social condition to protect wealth that eludes him. He is fed the scraps of his own harvest.

Kebebe connects the poles, the elites and the subjugated. But he’s a bridge on fire. We arrive to him a wise man who has irrevocably awakened to the truth and tragedy of life; Kebebe can’t help but tell it to the world. He carries his begena around, a tall lyre, an instrument on which the educated, the religious, and the wealthy philosophize. He dresses his begena in a workman’s shirt. Can the instrument also carry the song of the poor? Those songs I associate more with the washint, a wooden flute, a confession box of sorts. Both instruments sing songs that intertwine between Mirt’s dialogue, but there’s something about the washint that pokes at my heart. It masks the details of our secrets, then it projects their most tender essences. I’m convinced every broken-hearted washint sings the same song.

Ene set behonim, al’leqim. (Though I’m a girl, I won’t give up.)

Finally, the truly damned, in this film and in Ethiopia, are the women. Beletech is the youngest child of the family who tills and tends the land for the master in Mirt. As the feudal lord cultivates insults and insolence for the folks who work his land, Beletech fetches water, carries fresh milk to his

house, makes charcoal out of cow dung, and watches his cattle. She dreams night and day of a different life.

Dreams that may be too punishing for her mother and grandmother. They listen to one of her dreams, a parable they interpret in awe as they prepare dinner.

Even more than Beletech’s father or Kentu or Kebebe, the women have the least to hold as their own. Not even their bodies. Maybe their dreams offer them respite. Something wholly their own to preside over.

Between Gerima’s creative decisions and my own cautions, I couldn’t name a hero in this film. Mirt focuses in on Kebebe, the town fool whose foolishness is a condition of political minority. He is a moral compass and arguably the protagonist. But I know better than hanging my hopes on men, and I mean men as opposed to other genders, who seem so awake to institutional powers that subjugate those like them while practicing their own version of subjugation at smaller, personal scales. In one scene, Kebebe belittles Beletech’s brother, intolerant of his youth. His grating impatience for the young man serves as a reminder of his own tendencies for hierarchy.

I keep returning to Beletech. Maybe she’s a hero, though her story felt like a tributary to Kebebe’s river in Mirt. But her world, her worries, her dreams, her battles—they are central to whatever hope of freedom exists for Ethiopia.

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on Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour

by Leila Weefur 146

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Previous page: Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2019, ten-screen installation, 35mm film and 4k digital, color, 7.1 surround sound. 28 min, 46 sec. Installation view, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco (October 14, 2020 – April 24, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Metro Pictures, New York; Victoria Miro, London/Venice. Photo: Henrik Kam Photography.

Above: Isaac Julien. Serenade (Lessons of the Hour), 2019. Photograph on matt archival paper face mounted on aluminum. 100 x 113 cm. 39 3/8 x 44 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist.

THE WHOLE SOUL OF MAN IS A SORT OF PICTURE GALLERY, A GRAND PANORAMA, IN WHICH ALL THE GREAT FACTS OF THE UNIVERSE, Through language, image, and sound, the masters of cinema have become some of the greatest sculptors

IN TRACING THINGS of time. Ezra Pound, the great twentieth-century American poet, spoke of an image as “that which OF TIME AND THINGS OF ETERNITY, presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Though this was primarily ARE PAINTED. attributed to imagism and the poetics of language, 1

cinema and the poetics of moving image emphasize this truth. To shape time in cinema is to use the visual image as material for which to build a story—just as the poet uses word and the musician uses sound, the cinematographer combines the corners of reality to shape an experience in twenty-four frames per second.

Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour (2019), a spatial cinematic narrative presented across ten channels, draws a map that not only embodies “an instant of time” but—in language, image, and sound—shapes a temporal experience of the life of Frederick Douglass, who shaped time for descendants of the enslaved, in perpetuity, through his own mastery of language and poetics. It is in spatializing the moving image where the exercise of mapping time becomes a sensorial experience, further emphasizing the poetry in image and language. Think of the ways we experience cinema. In its most accessible formats, many of us watch on our personal devices, which facilitates the most practical viewing, but when we substitute access for experience, we lose the opportunity for immersive cinema. The most full-bodied experience most of the world has with film exists in the movie theater, but in a multichannel installation like Lessons of the Hour, image and sound can swallow us whole.

When cinema expands beyond the traditional twodimensional formats and into architecture, space becomes immaterial, and the ability to measure the passing of time dissolves in the hands of the filmmaker.

Julien and his visual practice are situated at the very center of this cinematic swallow. However, where a movie theater requires a stagnant, seated stare, an installation facilitates movement. Where traditional viewing calls for singularity, the visual surfaces in Julien’s multichannel installations Playtime (2014), A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), and Lessons of the Hour create a narrative multiplicity that invites the body to travel and begs the eye to navigate this visual map of time.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ''PICTURES AND PROGRESS,'' 1861

Lessons of the Hour masters the presentation of time in its ability to create a nonlinear historical narrative and unfold it across the architecture of a single room.

The instant the first of the ten screens is illuminated, you feel the simultaneity of time—the past, present, and future are all present as we follow the footsteps, the poetry, and the voice of Douglass.

Greeted by the idyllic, we locate Douglass, portrayed by actor Ray Fearon, in a heavy maroon overcoat, ambling through an unmarked forest. We hear his footsteps before his complete figure is revealed, introducing the rhythm; the tempo makes present all of the surrounding elements that escort you through time. It is the subtle details in the sound where Lessons of the Hour ignites a host of sensorial responses. In this forest, Douglass passes a monumental tree with thick brambling branches colored with autumn leaves, an image that might conjure a feeling of nostalgia through memories of weather and smell, but the sound is enough to make muscles tighten. What we hear sounds like the tension of a thick, weighted rope pulling the girth of a tree branch, a sound that might conjure an image of a lynching. Pictured, though, is a pensive Douglass trailing through the tall grass.

We are confronted with the simultaneous instances of time—seeing him while hearing our way through a dark past and the shadow of a lynching. It is this scene that leads you into ten simultaneous iterations of a single moment and of many moments to follow.

1. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/58900/ a-few-donts-by-an-imagiste.

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Present in the decupled narrative are the many manifestations of language, as material and as a haptic experience, invisibly grafted onto the Black body.

This is manifested in his speech and the language of the land upon which Douglass walks, a pastoral landscape speaking in rhythm with his step, the rustle of trees, and the grass beneath his feet. It is manifested in the materiality and brilliant colors of the clothing worn by Douglass and his counterparts, underscored by the beat of a sewing machine. The train transporting him from one land to the next on his journey to freedom accentuates this language of movement with a percussive Isaac Julien. J. P. Ball Salon, 1867 (Lessons of the Hour), 2019. Framed photograph on gloss inkjet paper cadence. Movement as a language and mounted on aluminum. 57 x 76 cm. 22 1/2 x 29 7/8 in. Courtesy of the artist. percussive instrument originated from within the Black body and, as a sonic element in Lessons of the Hour, underscores the image as a historical cornerstone. Song and elocution are deeply embedded in this story. Various melodies are sung by secondary characters along the journey, adding layers of vocality to the time map of Douglass’s life as an orator. His speeches stretch across time and geographies, having never shied away from naming the influence of Shakespearean lyric; his poetical genius grows out of Black histories existing before him, before the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and casts itself into historical infinitude.

COLONIZATION IS NO SOLUTION OF THE RACE PROBLEM. IT IS AN EVASION. IT IS NOT REPENTING OF WRONG BUT PUTTING OUT OF SIGHT THE PEOPLE UPON WHOM WRONG HAS BEEN INFLICTED. ITS REITERATION AND AGITATION ONLY SERVE TO FAN THE FLAME OF POPULAR PREJUDICE AND ENCOURAGE THE HOPE THAT IN SOME WAY OR OTHER, IN TIME OR IN ETERNITY, THOSE WHO HATE THE NEGRO WILL GET RID OF HIM. IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE COULD ENDURE THE NEGRO’S PRESENCE WHILE A SLAVE, THEY CERTAINLY CAN AND OUGHT TO ENDURE HIS PRESENCE AS A FREE MAN. IF THEY COULD TOLERATE HIM WHEN HE WAS A HEATHEN, THEY MIGHT BEAR WITH HIM WHEN HE IS A CHRISTIAN, A GENTLEMAN, AND A SCHOLAR. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ''LESSONS OF THE HOUR,'' 1894

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Lessons of the Hour takes a delicate thread, sewing together the great performances of Douglass’s lifelong call to protect and defend the United States Constitution and its amendments. Across ten screens is a continuum of declamation, one of America’s great historical voices addressing a transnational audience; each screen is a portrait of a moment in

alternating perspectives. One audience is visible onscreen sitting opposite the podium where Douglass stands clad in a royal blue wool coat, delivering his legendary “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech. From another vantage, his back is to us and his blue coat overwhelms the room, casting the faces in the gallery with a splash of blue light. And at last, we see the many faces of this audience, some outfitted for the late-1800s and others awkwardly resembling the people viewing the exhibit—the fourth wall has been refracted. This audience, in real time at Julien’s installation, is sitting atop cushions or laying across the plush red carpet placed almost as if it were extending from beneath Douglass’s feet. This scene expanded the cinematic world of Douglass into the architecture of the gallery at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, blending the boundaries of time.

THE FACT IS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THIS PLATFORM AND THE SLAVE PLANTATION, FROM WHICH I ESCAPED, IS CONSIDERABLE—AND THE DIFFICULTIES TO BE OVERCOME IN GETTING FROM THE LATTER TO THE FORMER, ARE BY NO MEANS SLIGHT. THAT I AM HERE TODAY IS, TO ME, A MATTER OF ASTONISHMENT AS WELL AS OF GRATITUDE. YOU WILL NOT, THEREFORE, BE SURPRISED, IF IN WHAT I HAVE TO SAY I EVINCE NO ELABORATE PREPARATION, NOR GRACE MY SPEECH WITH ANY HIGHSOUNDING EXORDIUM. WITH LITTLE EXPERIENCE AND WITH LESS LEARNING, I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO THROW MY THOUGHTS HASTILY AND IMPERFECTLY TOGETHER; AND TRUSTING TO YOUR PATIENT AND GENEROUS INDULGENCE, I WILL PROCEED TO LAY THEM BEFORE YOU.

This is poetic cinema, created when time becomes a cinematic elastic material and the distilled elements of filmmaking—spatial, textual, visual, sonic— orchestrate the manipulation of time. Watching Lessons of the Hour is like holding a map of time, one that traces historical experiences from American slavery to the present. Even in its spatial grandiosity and luscious piano composition, the narrative feels close, so close we can lose sense of our own physical presence. Our sense of reality dissolves into the cinematic swallow and relinquishes real time to the shape of cinema time.

There is a way that the true impossibility of knowing time fuels a human impulse to shape time through philosophical and creative attempts to give time a face, a name, and perhaps even a soul. Julien shapes an

Isaac Julien. The North Star (Lessons of the Hour), 2019. Framed photograph on gloss inkjet paper mounted on aluminum. 160 x 213.29 cm. 63 x 84 in. Courtesy the artist.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ''WHAT TO THE SLAVE IS THE FOURTH OF JULY?,'' 1852

elastic temporal reality around the historical poetics of Frederick Douglass, and once all the screens fade to black, you’re catapulted back into the present. Our present, which now sits at the center of this unfolded historical map, doesn’t seem too far away from Douglass’s present. In the silence, there’s an echo of questions that linger in the punctuation of his words.

What to the slave is the Fourth of July? What was it then? What is it now?

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Isaac Julien. Lessons of the Hour (Lessons of the Hour), 2019. Framed photograph on matt archival paper, mounted on aluminum. 160 x 213.29 cm. 63 x 84 in. Courtesy of the artist.

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ZONEZ v. 3. Photo by Yaemi Matias. Still courtesy of Suzi Analogue.

ZONEZ v. 4. Photo by Dana Lauren Goldstein. Still courtesy of Suzi Analogue.

BY SUZI ANALOGUE

ZONEZ v. 4. Photo by Helen Peña. Still courtesy of Suzi Analogue.

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From 2016 to 2019, I created an audiovisual collection named ZONEZ. This fourvolume series features video art made from my everyday surroundings and is scored to instrumental beats I’ve composed. These audio-visual mood boards are a preservational matrix assembled within a dazed world, where the axis of systemic oppressions routinely mutes young, not-rich Black femme voices.

The term ZONEZ itself is a reflection of sorts: a word spelled to reflect the beginning Z as the ending Z, with ONE standing alone between it all—between progress that feels like change is near and history that signals this change is necessary. I likened myself to that ONE when conceptualizing this series living in the middle of a horrible election, a great recession, and constant injustices against my bloodline. Up against the weight of this world, I lost all desire to be filmed for other people’s work anymore. I didn’t want to read lines of script and rehearse anything. When I recorded myself for ZONEZ, it was so I could be witnessed existing in the world, not simply surveilled by others.

Through these recordings that make up ZONEZ, my Black femme rawness is on display, showing that I exist in a world that tries to destroy my spirit, my identity. ZONEZ grants permission to view me gloriously out of the box, against any expectations that I should suffer and smile while carrying the weight of the world on my back as

a Black femme. ZONEZ captures moments of surreality, inspired by my real-life awakenings. I have the autonomy to film myself living as freely as possible anywhere—I can eat flowers, or I can float free in the ocean, or I can dry my tears using the air from speakers, or I can dance within the glow of art that stirs my soul. I can film myself as I am.

We, as Black femmes, are systematically excluded from access to our rawest selves. I knew this in my twenties when I searched for moving images of Black femme existence without the posturing of Hollywood-inspired implications.

A decade later, mainstream media’s presentations of Black femmes haven’t changed much. My friends and I consume these harmful messages, and it often leaves us wondering if we should aspire to the media characterizations or create our own types of personhood. Did our desire to see ourselves as we truly are draw us to the strong Black femme characters on reality TV? Even when we see characterizations of Black femmes in film and television saving the world that mistreats us, we are not

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allowed to show our feelings. We do not see who we are in reality, free of Hollywood’s skewed versions of us. I felt this disconnect with mass media’s version of me souldeep. This disconnection led me to create ZONEZ and my images of Black femme rawness.

My introduction to cinéma vérité opened up the possibility of film depicting Black femmes existing as we are. This was a European cinema movement popularized by white males, but I was inspired to recontextualize it through my own means with ZONEZ. This style of filmmaking is designed to uncover truths by acknowledging that the camera is actually there, differing from the filmmaking style we were raised watching, presented with the notion that there is no camera at all, just a narrative unfolding.

But whose narrative? Who shared it, and what was their gain in sharing?

When considering who would shoot ZONEZ, I wanted people who shared my perspective, who rarely saw themselves reflected in media, and wanted to shoot in cinéma vérité. I

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followed the concept of cinéma vérité when hiring and didn’t require professional filmmaking background for ZONEZ’s camera operators and directors. How could I insist on “professional experience” given the inequalities femmes face in technical media industries? Collaborating with visual storytellers outside the film world opened portals of possibility for all of us and encouraged a spirit of discovery when filming ZONEZ.

ZONEZ was shot in the wild in New York City and Miami without a budget. The visuals from these shoots resulted in the twenty-one videos used in volumes 2, 3, and 4 of ZONEZ. To date, these volumes, along with the audio-only volume 1, make up the audio-visual series.

All the ZONEZ videos were set to the frequencies of beats, tones, and rhythms flowing through my mind, edited into thirty-second clip form.

ZONEZ v. 4. Photo by Yaemi Matias. Still courtesy of Suzi Analogue.

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ZONEZ V. 2: THE SPEAKERS PUSH AIR & MY TEARS DRY 1

1. https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x5rqvs.

When I wrapped the music for ZONEZ v. 2, my niece, Adia Brinson, was just out of high school. She used to share with me that she wanted to shoot music videos.

Being an auntie is an important part of my identity, so I saw this as a sign from the universe and invited Adia to shoot the inaugural ZONEZ visuals as director. Who better to share my vision than a Black femme I knew from birth, one who just needed an entry point into filmmaking?

ZONEZ v. 3. Photo by Yaemi Matias. Still courtesy of Suzi Analogue.

ZONEZ V. 3: THE WORLD UNWINDS BUT THE SOUND HOLDS ME TIGHT 2

For an entire weekend, we traversed the corners of New York City with a MiniDV camera shooting these improvised ZONEZ “moods.” The treatments for each ZONEZ visual were prompted by what was at hand and what I could do to convey my lived experience as a Black femme standing in between it all.

Inspiration came from flowers at the bodega, a basement-level Chinese takeout restaurant, picking up gold braiding hair from the beauty supply store, or renting roller skates from a tourist trap on the beach. The prompts for these treatments were simple—for example, “a Black woman enjoys eating ice cream while standing outside the Lincoln Jazz Center”—but shared the everyday moments of joy in the lives of Black femmes.

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2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cmymMO34y8&list=PLhRJqiwYu5ffWeP1M4QSS-U_u6zObaib_.

Natalia Arias edited ZONEZ. She is an artist of Belizean and Cuban descent who was an intern for my Never Normal Records label. With Adia and Natalia on board, the seed was sown: making ZONEZ would prioritize uplifting the experience of Black and Brown femmes through its creation and visuals.

A cold winter followed ZONEZ v. 2 After instructing a beat-making workshop in Kampala, Uganda, a yearning for warmer climates led me to Miami. Relocating there set a new stage for the ZONEZ visuals. Through guerilla filmmaking, I established a sense of space for myself in new surroundings.

Following the blueprint of ZONEZ v. 2, I collaborated with Yaemi Matias, formerly known as Souldreamin, who was an emerging visual storyteller. While shooting ZONEZ in Miami, we maneuvered through public beaches, architectural landmarks such as Herzog and de Meuron’s 1111 building, and even dived deep to find an old-school Cadillac owned by a family friend to use for the visuals of “Game/ Change” on this volume. We shot the car scene

on a hot day. We traveled so far to get to the car that we nearly missed the sun. That shoot was just visuals of four femmes in a parked seagreen Cadillac classic convertible, as the owner looked on a bit perplexed.

the European Union, Africa, and Asia. It was the first time shooting film-based concepts for many of the creators I worked with on ZONEZ. Several have since gone on to study film and create short films. I do not take sole credit that so many of my collaborators are now pursuing filmmaking “professionally,” but I know the ZONEZ experience propelled us all forward in our practices.

ZONEZ v. 4 was my most ambitious volume of ZONEZ; it was filmed entirely during short breaks in Miami from touring my music.

This volume also had the highest number of directors—true to the ZONEZ process, they were all new to filmmaking. This femmeidentifying lineup of directors all came from Miami’s creative communities; it included Helen Peña, Kristabel Delgado, Dana Goldstein, and once again, Matias. We shot in parking lots, dressing rooms, art exhibits, and each other’s homes, creating sets with found objects.

We used our imagination when shooting in public spaces to make them feel private. One of the highlights was a re-creation of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Kitchen Table Series. I was excited to shoot this scene from the day I moved into my Miami home and noted the resemblance of my dining area to the one in Weems’s photos. I loved this series since seeing it at the Guggenheim. Her photo has such acute composition, and it was a challenge to convey as a moving image.

Shooting ZONEZ’s cinéma vérité visuals, in a guerilla style, on the go with no formal sets, relied on a high level of patience. In parking lots or on the streets, we were prepared for interruptions or abrupt stops.

With no assistants, we carried everything in big bags, resting them where we could, defining our own filming locations as we went along. We deal with street harassment daily as femmes, so we prayed to be left unbothered at each shooting location. Each moment and space we shot in was filled with our own agency, and our visuals record this energy and claiming of space. It reminds us, We did that.

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdz2YhhTJPo&list=PLhRJqiwYu5fdoBL7AyNltvyztApFtEH2k.

ZONEZ V. 4: LOVE ME LOUDER

There’s a phrase in hip hop that goes, “They industry; we in the streets.” We know there’s so much more behind the curtain of media hype than the corporate systems in control. We were in the streets creating a video collection to share the experience of empowered femme identities—mind, body, and soul. It was powerful to have this opportunity, to be honest about how we, the Black and Brown femme-identifying creators of ZONEZ, choose to engage with our cameras, our communities, and our visions of femme rawness. ZONEZ is a reflection of the community that knitted it together.

ZONEZ v. 4. Photo by Dana Lauren Goldstein. Still courtesy of Suzi Analogue.

ZONEZ continues to live on past these audiovisual mood boards—the moving images from ZONEZ v. 4 were composed into a live show for my last ZONEZ World Tour in North America,

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Unseen

Left and pages 166-167: Pamilerin Ayodeji (Juwon) in Lizard (2020), dir. Akinola Davies Jr © British Broadcasting Corporation and Potboiler Productions Ltd. 2020.

Pages 168-169: Osayi Uzamere (Robbery Leader) in Lizard (2020), dir. Akinola Davies Jr © British Broadcasting Corporation and Potboiler Productions Ltd. 2020.

Pages 170-171: Pamilerin Ayodeji (Juwon) and Halimat Olanrewaju (Dele) in Lizard (2020), dir. Akinola Davies Jr © British Broadcasting Corporation and Potboiler Productions Ltd. 2020.

Lizard

Akinola Davies Jr

First, there were a few firsts in the process of this script coming together. For a long time I hadn’t considered myself capable of writing a script. No one talks like me. No one thinks like me. I can’t write dialogue. Etc. There is a certain attraction to a challenge that I’m the last to admit to myself I’m undertaking. How do I write this in a capacity that suits the way I problem-solve? How do I make this problem fun and, most importantly, sustainable for myself?

Something about sitting at a screen and punching words out has never had a huge appeal. Even as I type now I’ve had numerous breaks and keep checking the word count! Makes sense: I’m a visual learner. There is a tendency to make things into a game or find a system that keeps me engaged.

In the case of writing Lizard, it was to narrate the story to myself in voice notes. Lizard being my first narrative short, I realized I had to be really in love with the story and be able to tell it to others face to face and view their engagement.

This went on for a few months. What I hadn’t realized is that I was crystallizing the details, I was honing the tension. The first attempt was the best and ultimately what was sent to the commissioners at the BBC. “This is the first time we’ve ever commissioned a film off the strength of a voice note.”

The only catch was I had to write it down.

Back to square one.

The first screenplay I’d ever read by someone I knew belonged to my brother, so it made sense to ask my brother to write together in what became our first writing collaboration.

We took a few days in seclusion on the banks of the Volta river in the middle of Ghana and set about our task. All I remember about that trip was an epic thunderstorm, our initial sibling argument, the struggle to conserve our mobile data, and lots of swimming. I don’t mention the first in order

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to sound like an auteur of any sort; it’s more of a combination of feeling comfortable enough to share and collaborate in a capacity that made the most sense. That made the process feel empowering. It equated to the story telling itself and us filling in the blanks.

The rest was a lot of back and forth with the development team, ironing out intentions. It was mainly me saying no to a lot of things as politely as I can. However, the more I defended my story, the more I came to understand and trust the development team’s suggestions. That process manifested the script that you will read, the shooting script.

It’s a little more streamlined than the original version, but there aren’t any huge structural changes. I would say what’s missing is the patter of dialogue and a scene with an usher, which we cut on the day of shooting due to time constraints (time constraints being three hundred hot and hungry extras waiting to shoot a church scene). The only other change was that having seen the brilliance of Pamilerin Ayodeji, who played our protagonist, the gender of our lead was changed from a young boy to a young girl.

My biggest takeaway is that a film is only as good as those who have bought into the process. If they aid you in the voice you want to put forward and help magnify your blind spots, then I’d say the process is totally worth it. Once a plan is in motion I don’t like to deviate away from it. The only changes to the script are minute details. There is a lot of space for all involved to contribute to its nurture. The film Lizard for me still feels almost exactly like that first voice note I did.

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LIZARD Written by Akinola Davies Jr & Wale Davies Runtime: 15 minutes Based on a true story

INT. SHANTY TOWN APARTMENT, LAGOS 1998 - DAWN An old derelict house in a shanty town somewhere in the vast Lagos metropolis.

Inside is dark and unfurnished. There’s a framed faded sacred heart picture of Jesus on the moisture-stained wall.

The only outside light is obstructed by thin, dirty curtains. A noisy standing fan, missing its front grill, provides the only ventilation.

A group of men in their late 20s / early 30s are gathered in a prayer circle. Their faces are etched with hard and tired features.

A charismatic MAN WITH HAZEL EYES leads the group.

GROUP OF MEN (IN UNISON) Our father who art in heaven.

Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.

Forever and ever. Amen They continue almost immediately with The Grace GROUP OF MEN (IN UNISON) The grace of our lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the sweet fellowship of the holy spirit, rest and abide with us now and forever more. Amen They embrace each other in the circle as they pray. *The audio of the last portion of their prayers plays out over the visuals up until classroom laughter.* GROUP OF MEN (CONT’D) Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us, all the days of our lives and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever and ever. Amen.

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There is an 8 month old BABY GIRL on the bed, looking up at them screaming and teary.

The MAN WITH THE HAZEL EYES picks up the baby to pacify her tears.

Members of the commune, women and children, embrace the men as they gather their gear hurriedly and prepare to leave.

INT. CORRIDOR SHANTY TOWN APARTMENT. LAGOS. CONTINUOUS The men file out of the building with bulky plastic “Ghana must go” bags and funnel into a yellow and black striped Danfo (Lagos transit minivan) INT/EXT. VAN. LAGOS. The men load the bags into the van. The van door shuts.

And we cut to our TITLE: LIZARD INT. SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASSROOM. SAME DAY. Laughter ensues much to the annoyance of MR PETERS (late 30s).

Mr Peters grabs JUWON (8) firmly by the hand and leads her out of the classroom.

EXT. SUNDAY SCHOOL CLASSROOM - CONTINUOUS MR PETERS Oya kneel down and raise up your hands, If I hear one more sound from you..

Mr Peters reruns to the classroom. Juwon watches through the doorway as he attempts to restore order. But her view is abruptly obstructed as classroom door is slammed shut.

The distant sound of the sermon from the main church plays over a speaker in the distance.

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A rustling sound. Juwon spots a small AGAMA LIZARD. They lock eyes for a beat staring each other down.

It is as if the creature is communicating with Juwon. The lizard NODS repeatedly before scurrying off.

Juwon gets up, dusts herself off and follows the lizard.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING - CONTINUOUS Juwon follows the lizard around the church premises until she loses sight of it. Along the walls are adorned with huge advertorial evangelical posters.

These bear audacious titles detailing spiritual retreats, deliverance crusades, prophetic pronouncements and financial breakthrough vigils from previous years at Heavens Gate Ministries.

The lizard is lost but Juwon takes in every detail as she walks past.

She hears a charismatic voice rally the larger congregation into a frenzied response.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING, CORRIDOR. CONTINUOUS Juwon heads for the bathroom. It stinks! But she needs to pee.

She takes a huge deep breath and runs in pinching her nose.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING, TOILET URINAL. CONTINUOUS The bathroom is in a sorry state. There is a huge plastic drum, filled with water, by the sink as the taps don’t work and the tiled floor is wet with muddy footmarks.

Juwon rushes back in to wash her hands still holding her breath. But there’s no soap. She turns a tap which lets out a tiny trickle of water, she uses the water in the drum to clean her hands.

She can’t hold her breath any longer exits the bathroom, drying hier hands on the back of her dress.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING, CORRIDOR. CONTINUOUS In the corridor, Juwon can hear a bizarre fluttering sound.

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She follows the sound down the corridor until she arrives at a large oak door slightly ajar.

She peers in to see a small bright room full of formally dressed people sectioned into different groups.

One group is counting mounds of unsorted cash whilst another group funnels the cash through electronic money counters.

They are flanked by a third group who neatly stack the copious bounds of currency into organized piles.

Overlooking all the action is a huge framed sacred heart picture of Jesus on the wall behind. Jesus looks particularly peaceful and this contrasts the frantic yet methodical with which the money is counted.

Juwon has never seen so much money! In the corner of the room, Juwon notices the empty woven offering baskets and opened tithe envelopes.

A WOMAN catches her eye and walks towards him. She flashes her a warm smile and shuts the door without saying a word.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING, CORRIDOR. CONTINUOUS Juwon continues down the corridor. She tries to open more doors but they are all locked. Eventually, one opens and she enters.

The room filled with old church memorabilia as far as the eye can see.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING, MERCHANDISE STORE ROOM. CONTINUOUS The merchandise is covered in dust - hats, mugs, books, cds of past sermons, flags and t-shirts from various bible retreats and conventions. All embossed with the Heavens Gate Ministries logo and the pastors face.

She tries on a hat.

At the end of one of the long aisles, she sees two people speaking in hushed tones. She ducks behind a shelf and watches as a young attractive WOMAN playfully denying the advances of a burly older man. This is PASTOR EMEKA.

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She tries to retreat without being noticed but accidentally knocks a bubble head toy off the shelf.

CRASH! The startled couple both look over in her direction but Juwon has already run away.

INT. CHURCH BUILDING, CORRIDOR. CONTINUOUS She runs right through a large double door, shuts it behind her, taking a breathe. Before realizing she is in the main auditorium of the church.

INT. MAIN CHURCH AUDITORIUM. CONTINUOUS Juwon walks in as PASTOR TONY delivers the end of his sermon.

Juwon takes a seat in a row behind the congregation and takes in the scene in front of him.

PASTOR TONY ...And Jesus, was angry at what they had done to his fathers house.

The bible says he went to the temple of God and cast out all those that sold and bought in the temple. Is somebody with me?

The frenzied congregation respond in the affirmative.

PASTOR TONY (CONT'D) I don’t think you are with me. Is somebody with me heavens gate?

The crowd affirm even more voraciously PASTOR TONY (CONT'D) Today you need to reclaim your fathers house, your property from the non-believers. The world belongs to God so everywhere we set our eyes on is our fathers house.

Somebody shout RECLAIM

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Reclaim!

CONGREGATION

PASTOR TONY Shout RECLAIM ( joining in) Reclaim!

JUWON

The congregation get even more riled up. Some members start to jump, some stamp their feet. Somebody in the row ahead of him shouts ‘reclaim’ with excited ferocity, startling him.

In the midst of the shouting Pastor Tony stops prowling the stage, holds his microphone closer, and breaks into song PASTOR TONY Igwe,Igwe (Igbo for King) The choir, on cue, join him and the congregation begin to raise their arms. Juwon is one step behind them as she rises to her feet. Cries of Igwe permeate the room.

PASTOR TONY (CONT'D) Lets welcome the King of Kings into our midst. Lets praise Jesus The room erupts into an ocean of people speaking in tongues and praying vigorously, all entranced by praise and worship. Juwon, with her hands clasped, is reminded of her mission and sees this as her cue to continue on her way.

As she makes her way down the aisle, Juwon soaks up the atmosphere.

The scene plays out in epic slow motion.

Her attention is drawn to the resplendent maroon gowns of the choir as they perform enthusiastically. She observes Pastor Tony centre stage flanked by his wife and his team of pastors. They are all engrossed in this energetic praise and worship session that has worked the auditorium into a frenzy.

And the intensity hits Juwon like a wave.

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Juwon notices the congregation TOP BRASS sitting on the front row. These are the wealthy and successful business men and women and people of status in the community. They have all the trappings of wealth - expensive traditional attire, tailored suits, Rolex watches, intricate jewelry.

As she scans the front row, all lost in their frantic supplications, Juwon notices a familiar face. A formidable woman who appears more calm and composed than the rest with her fists clenched and her eyes tightly squeezed shut.

This is Juwon’s AUNTY TITI. Juwon quickly continues on her way before she has the chance to open her eyes and spot her.

She sails unnoticed, taking it all in, until her path is blocked by a CHURCH USHER who looks at her inquisitively. This snaps Juwon back to reality.

USHER What are you doing here? Are you supposed to be here, during service?

JUWON Errm... my... mummy sent me to the car. Err.. she forgot... her purse Okay. Be quick!

USHER

EXT. CHURCH GROUNDS CARPARK. CONTINUOUS. Juwon makes her way through the parking lot. It’s full of luxury 4x4s and expensive saloon cars. Juwon seems so small in this automotive corridor.

Juwon walks amongst the cars towards the main gate. She hears another rallying cry from Pastor Tony which is met with an even louder cheer.

She stops to look back towards the church. This time there’s a GIANT BLUE AGAMA LIZARD It’s the size of a large car with an orange head and orange tail.

Juwon and the lizard lock eyes for a beat. It’s imposing size strikes a panicked fear into Juwon. The lizard nods at Juwon and lowers its

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head towards her. In her unease at the action Juwon takes to running and is halted by ADAMU the church security guard, in his faded olive khaki uniform.

MAN’S VOICE (O.S.) Wetin you dey find?

JUWON I’m hungry, I want to buy some food. I’ll come back now now ADAMU (shaking his head) Wallahi I no fit allow. If anything happen to you, na my head e go dey JUWON By the grace of God nothing will happen ADAMU At all o, you know say people outside never find God JUWON But we are at church, its just here. What do you mean?

ADAMU Na my job I dey do. Na wetin they tell me. Since last month, dem don talk say nobody fit comot during service. Why you no just wait make church finish? Buy the food for the shop wey dey inside?

JUWON I don’t like that one. Last time I came, I went outside. I even saw you eating there too - the food was nice abi?

ADAMU Wallai you this boy, You too dey ask question. See ehn, everybody

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dey fear make something no happen to their pikin. Me? I know say nothing go happen but shikena, na wetin dey tell me. Me I fit chop there, I be security. Na my work.

You be rich man pikin, you no suppose dey enter street JUWON But i’m not rich and ah ah didn’t you just say you eat there?....nothing happened to you ADAMU (Laughs) Wallahi you get too much wahala (trouble). I no fit allow you go outside today. Na my job JUWON Mr Adamu why don’t you help me go and buy it, please now.

She presents a crisp two hundred Naira note to Adamu and before he has a chance to respond, Juwon quickly adds JUWON (CONT'D) You can even keep the fifty Naira change Adamu ponders for a second. He double checks to ensure nobody is watching. Then he takes the money from Juwon and instructs her to wait.

Adamu heads outside the gate and returns with a hot meat pie in a small white plastic bag and a chilled FANTA bottle.

They are both pleased at their transaction as Adamu hands over the items. Juwon bites into the pie and chugs the Fanta.

ADAMU Oya quick quick, make dem no see you outside and make sure say you return the bottle Juwon makes to return to church.

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(eating) Thank you

JUWON

Suddenly the church doors burst open and the congregation floods into the carpark.

Hot pie in hand, Juwon bumps into her older sister DELE (10) and her cousins LOLA (7) and MORAYO (11). Dele notices Juwon’s bounty DELE Where did you get that?

I bought it

JUWON

Dele stretches out her hand towards the half-eaten meat pie.

DELE Did you use your offering?! I’m going to tell mummy you used your money for meat pie... Give me some... please?

Juwon shakes her head and takes another bite. She exaggerates the taste slightly as she answers JUWON No...go and buy your own DELE I used all my own money for offering Juwon remains unmoved and shrugs.

DELE (CONT'D) Give me some....or I will tell mummy you were walking around during church JUWON I don’t care...tell her

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Juwon continues to eat the meat pie. She is relishing her older sister begging her for food.

But then Dele notices their mother YEMI (40s, attractive, resplendent in her Iro and buya) approaching from behind the oblivious Juwon.

I said please now

DELE

JUWON I said no now ... church is over.

Go and buy your own Yemi is now right behind Juwon. Dele smirks to herself as she sets her sister up...

DELE Ok I will go and buy my own. But mummy would be upset if she knows you were walking around during church Juwon shrugs defiantly and takes another bite from the pie.

YEMI Olajuwon Lawal, what have I told you about walking around during service?

Juwon almost spurts out her Fanta as she hears her voice behind her.

Dele laughs out loud.

YEMI (CONT'D) It is now my own daughter that wants to embarrass me in front of the whole church?

Juwon looks sheepishly at her mother who wipes some crumbs from her mouth.

YEMI (CONT'D) Well done ehn. Better finish that before your aunty sees you! We will speak about this when we get home

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She notices Lola and Morayo loitering behind Dele.

YEMI (CONT'D) Morayo wheres your mother?

MORAYO She over there talking to Pastor Tony.

YEMI Ah. I cant wait oo. I have visitors coming to the house, I need to rush home. Tell her i’ve left Bye Aunty!

LOLA & MORAYO

YEMI Your aunty will bring you home later. Be good Yes mom

JUWON & DELE

She embraces JUWON and DELE and moves off. Over her shoulder, JUWON spots the man from merchandise room, PASTOR EMEKA. Pastor Emeka standing with Juwon’s teacher, MR PETERS, who is pointing at Juwon. Pastor Emeka walks directly towards Juwon, and places a firm hand on her shoulder.

PASTOR EMEKA You, you this girl...

But AUNTY TITI, fresh from the top-brass front row of the congregation, appears in the nick of time.

AUNTY TITI Good afternoon Pastor Emeka. I see you’ve met my nieces PASTOR EMEKA Ah commissioner, this is your niece? Such a fine young girl!

He looks at Aunty Titi as he speaks, then catches Juwons gaze

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PASTOR EMEKA (CONT'D) I pray the holy spirit uses her as a vessel and may God wisen the words that come out of her mouth so she does not use her words to offend God He shakes Juwon’s hand enthusiastically. Aunty Titi is puzzled.

Amen

AUNTY TITI

PASTOR EMEKA Have a blessed week Mummy. Thank you again for everything. I pray we see you this week at the business women’s fellowship Aunty Titi nods. And Pastor Emeka moves off.

AUNTY TITI (under her breath) What was that about!! - (Yoruba) Juwon Shrugs.

AUNTY TITI (CONT'D) Oya all of you, time to go. Kafilat so fun Monday ko mu moto wa si waju. (Yoruba) KAFILAT O tin bo ma (Yoruba) A Toyota minibus pulls up. The driver is a jovial, roundfaced man of 45 dressed in a police uniform. This is MONDAY. Also present is KAFILAT, the maid.

AUNTY TITI Oya Morayo, Dele everybody inside the car The minibus door slides open and they file into the bus. Juwon hands Kafilat the Fanta bottle and points at the kiosk with her eyes.

She takes the bottle and shakes her head.

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INT. MINI BUS, CHURCH GROUNDS, NOON. The Sun, now at its pinnacle, beats down on the mass of cars trying to leave the Church grounds.

The children sit on the back row, jostling for space. Kafilat is sat a row in front of them. Aunty Titi another row ahead. Monday adjusts the rear view mirror - off it hangs a POLICE INSIGNIA. Monday turns up the radio volume and everyone sings along to a popular South African “Umqombothi” song by Yvonne Chaka Chaka.

The car etches forward through scrum towards the exit.

INT. MINI BUS WITH CHILDREN. CONT The kids are singing along gleefully in the mini bus. *The action plays out in slow motion. The sound is CHOPPED and SCREWED and the scene has a disorientating, fragmentary feel* FLASH INSERT: A GUNMAN putting a bandana over his face.

FLASH SOUNDS: Gunshots from automatic weapons. Screams.

INT. MINI BUS WITH CHILDREN Through the mini-bus window, Juwon and the other children witness MASKED MEN moving between the cars jammed around the church entrance as members of the congregation flee back towards the church.

The men roam from car to car. One of them approaches the minibus.

Monday desperately removes the insignia from the rear-view mirror.

INT. MINI BUS WITH CHILDREN The gunman bangs on the side of the minibus door GUNMAN Open this door!! I say open this door AUNTY TITI Leave us alone...leave us alone...there’s children here

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Juwon watches Aunty Titi trying to appeal to the gunman. It’s not working. He completely ignores her and fires into the sky.

It terrifies Juwon and the sound rings in her ears. *For the rest of the scene, the sound is muffled and distant* AUNTY TITI (CONT'D) Lola, Morayo ... everybody keep your head down!

The gunman is trying to get into the car. He stalks around the van, banging on the sides and pulling the door handles.

Aunty Titi’s eyes follow the gunman closely. She tries to hide her handbag under her seat but he notices her movements. The gunman breaks the window. Glass goes everywhere.

INT. MINI VAN, CHURCH GATES. CONTINUOUS GUNMAN Your bag - give me that bag!! Off that watch!! Wetin you dey look...Abi you dey craze?

The gunman cocks his gun and places the nozzle on Aunty Titi’s temple.

Kafilat makes the children look away.

But Juwon keeps her head up and locks eyes with the gunman.

We recognize him as the HAZEL EYED MAN who was leading the prayers at the beginning of the film.

For a moment, they hold each other’s gaze and, just like that Agama lizard, the gunman nods his head.

Snapping out of his trance, the man grabs Aunty Titi’s bag from her and runs... The gunmen disappear as quickly as they came.

EXT. CHURCH GATES. CONTINUOUS. The sound snaps back to normal. It’s a chaotic scene. People from the church rush to the cars to check everybody is ok.

CHURCH MEMBER Ah madam are you ok? Is everyone ok?

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Aunty Titi checks all of the children for injuries from the broken glass.

Juwon watches emotionless as Kafilat embraces Lola who is in tears.

Aunty Titi, looks at Monday in disdain. She reaches under the seat where she tried to hide her bag and pulls out a gun in a holster.

AUNTY TITI (In Yoruba) Kalifat, go inside and find Aunty Patience CHURCH MEMBER Ah madam we should just thank God that they didn’t take anybody's life o.

ANOTHER CHURCH MEMBER Praise God. Jehovah Jireh The crowd concur. But Aunty Titi doesn’t share their optimism. She glares at Monday the driver AUNTY TITI Monday, why didn’t you bring out your gun? What kind of officer are you? (Yoruba) MONDAY Ah mummy, if they know say we be police they for shoot us o.(Yoruba) Aunty Titi hisses something under her breath. Her friend PATIENCE (40s) makes it through the crowd with Kalifat.

PATIENCE Ah Titi, Is everyone ok? (sees window) Blood of Jesus!!! Shey they didn’t injure anybody? (Yoruba) AUNTY TITI We are all fine, Patience I need you to take the children (yoruba) PATIENCE Praise the lord. He is a merciful

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God. Of course, where are you going? (Yoruba) Patience absorbs the full request and looks at Titi puzzled PATIENCE (CONT'D) Where are you going? (yoruba) Monday looks at Aunty Titi through the rear view mirror and shakes his head in resignation as he knows what comes next.

AUNTY TITI Oya kids, Kafilat go and enter Aunty Patience car.

The girls, sensing something ominous, appeal to her Mummy, no!

GIRLS

AUNTY TITI Oya everyone come down, come down.

Monday, give me the keys, lets go!

Lola cries and pleads for her not leave them. Aunty Titi picks up Lola and wipes the tears from her face. Dele pulls Juwon closer to her.

AUNTY TITI (CONT'D) Omolola, please don’t be upset (Yoruba) listen to me my dear, Mummy is going to work. I will meet you at home.

Aunty Titi enters the driver side as Monday scoots over, she starts the engine. The van screeches off.

There is a frightened confusion amongst the children as they are herded away by Kalifat.

INT. PEUGEOT 505, CHURCH GATES. CONTINUOUS. The children, including Juwon, all clamber into the back of Aunty Patience’s red Peugeot 505.

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They are piled into the back with two other children. Patience looks back at the morose bunch in the car and suddenly begins to sing as they depart.

Her high energy is in stark opposition to that of the kids as she sings out the words to a popular praise worship song PATIENCE Oh lord my God, how excellent is your name, in all the earth how excellent is your name... Come on children, sing along!

Juwon, sat on her sisters lap, feels a squeeze on her hand from Dele.

The sisters look out the window at the Goliath Heavens Gate Ministries building. None of the children join in as Aunty Patience continues to fill the car with her song.

MUSIC: No white god by Oscar world peace begins to play.

The End.

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ARTHUR

JAFA

Studio Visit Photos by Pavielle Garcia

1. WHERE IS YOUR STUDIO LOCATED, AND HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN THIS SPACE?

West Adams district in Los Angeles. Four years in this space. In the past year I expanded to a second studio on the same block.

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2. HOW DID YOU FIND IT?

A friend knew I was looking for studio space and

saw the “for rent” sign.

3. WHERE IN THE STUDIO DO YOU LIKE TO WORK MOST?

At my desk.

4. WHAT IS YOUR SCHEDULE IN THE STUDIO? Erratic.

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5. DO YOU HAVE A UNIFORM WHILE WORKING? I do, but it really depends on who you ask.

6. WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON? Multiple projects: two feature projects in development,

several solo art shows in production . . . possibly a record album.

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7. IF YOU HAD TO DESCRIBE YOUR IDEAL CREATIVE SPACE IN THREE WORDS, WHAT THREE WORDS WOULD YOU CHOOSE?

Off the cuff.

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8. DO YOU FEEL THAT LIVING AND WORKING IN THIS CITY, IN THIS PLACE, HAS CHANGED YOUR PRACTICE IN ANY SIGNIFICANT WAYS?

By virtue of this being the first and only real studio space I ever had, it definitely has changed my practice significantly.

9. WHAT’S A HOBBY OR ONE THING YOU REALLY ENJOY

DOING RIGHT NOW OUTSIDE OF THE STUDIO? Sleeping.

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10. WHAT’S THE FIRST STEP IN YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS? WHERE DO YOU BEGIN?

Opening my eyes.

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What does it mean to you to be seen?

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Abby Sun Being seen describes a process of making meaning. It can translate into a simplistic label that collapses person and thing, such as when looking at a photograph: “This is Abby.” It can also, when being seen with generosity and care and with community within Seen, hold safe for us our ability to make our own urgency and determination!

Amir George To be seen is to be acknowledged, at least for a moment.

Cassie da Costa To be seen is to be heard.

Jeff Chang The chance to live pono (in right relationship) with each other.

Jonathan Ali I couldn’t be more thrilled to have my writing appear in Seen. As the journal of BlackStar, one of the most vital film festivals for the screening of work by Black and Global South filmmakers at the cutting edge, it fulfills a key function at a time when spaces for thoughtful writing about cinema in general and these forms of cinema in particular are dwindling. Long may we all be seen! ruth gebreyesus It means I’m in good company. It means I didn’t have to do too much contextualizing, too much explaining, too much fawning. It means I’ve hopefully done the best and hardest part of writing—the work itself.

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Contributor Bios Abby Sun is an artist, film programmer, and writer with a particular interest in the media infrastructures and cultural artifacts of moving image exhibition. She is the editor of Immerse, the publication of the MIT Open Documentary Lab; curator of the DocYard, a biweekly screening series at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the program director of Line of Sight, a suite of artist development activities with Sentient.Art.Film.

Akinola Davies Jr is a BAFTA-nominated and Sundance award–winning filmmaker, visual artist, and music curator whose work spans nations to explore themes of community, race, spirituality, identity, and gender, telling stories that bridge the gap between traditional and millennial communities. His first narrative short film, Lizard, premiered at the 2020 BFI London Film Festival and was selected for the Raindance Film Festival.

Akinola was selected for the Berlinale Talents 2020 Collective and was named one of Screen Daily’s “Stars of Tomorrow” alongside Emma Corrin, Paul Mescal, and others. Most recently, Akinola won the Sundance Short Film Grand Jury Prize for Lizard, and the short is now nominated for a 2021 BAFTA for Best British Short Film.

Amir George is an award-winning filmmaker based in Chicago. George is a film programmer at True/False Film Fest and Chicago International Film Festival, and the cofounder of the touring film series Black Radical Imagination. As an artist, George creates spiritual stories, juxtaposing sound and image into an experience of nonlinear perception. George’s films have screened at institutions and film festivals including Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Anthology Film Archives, Glasgow School of Art, MoMA PS1, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, and Camden International Film Festival.

Cassie da Costa is a writer, editor, and film critic. Her work can be found in Film Comment, Another Gaze, The Daily Beast, Artforum, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

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Jeff Chang is the author of the forthcoming Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, as well as We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, Who We Be: a Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America, and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and co-author with Dave “Davey D” Cook of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a Hip-Hop History (Young Adult Edition).

Jessica Lynne is a writer, art critic, and cofounder of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.

Jonathan Ali is director of programming for Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami. He has been a film programmer and writer for almost fifteen years and has held programming roles at festivals including Sheffield Doc/Fest,Tribeca Film Festival,Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. Originally from Trinidad, he lives in London.

Kojo Abudu is a critic, curator, scholar, and researcher based between London, Lagos, and New York. His writings and curatorial projects, often informed by de/post-colonial theory, queer theory, and Black studies, focus on spatial, conceptual, photographic, and moving-image contemporary art practices from the Global South, particularly Africa and its diaspora.

Leila Weefur (he/they/she) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, California. Through video and installation, their interdisciplinary practice examines the performativity intrinsic to systems of belonging. The work brings together concepts of sensorial memory, abject Blackness, hypersurveillance, and the erotic. Weefur is a recipient of the Walter and Elise Haas Creative Work Fund and the MSP California Black Voices Project. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including The Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, SFMOMA, Museum of the African Diaspora, and Smack Mellon. Weefur is a lecturer at Stanford University.

Lynnée Denise is an artist, scholar, writer, and DJ whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories

of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise coined the phrase “DJ scholarship” to reposition the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian, and information specialist of music with critical value. Lynnée Denise lives and works in Amsterdam and London.

Nuotama Bodomo is a Ghanaian filmmaker of Dagaaba origin. Her short films Boneshaker (2013) and Afronauts (2014) both premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, while Everybody Dies! (2016) premiered at SXSW as part of Collective:Unconscious.

Nuotama also served as staff writer and director on the Peabody Award–winning first season of Random Acts of Flyness (HBO) and cofounded the New Negress Film Society. Her work is currently streaming on Netflix and the Criterion Channel.

Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator.

He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020) and the editor or co-editor of Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger (2012), a multilingual volume about film in Tangier and Tangier on film; The Africans (2016), a book on racial dynamics in Morocco; and La Septième Porte (2020),Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema. He currently lives in New York and teaches at the Cooper Union.

curated film programs for Carthage Film Festival and Palestine Cinema Days, as well as industry platforms to foster artistic communities and critical thinking.

A French-born Tunisian, she is currently based in Tunis and works as a consultant accompanying artists, collectives, and cultural institutions throughout the development of artistic projects.

Suzi Analogue is a prolific producer, songwriter, composer, member of the Recording Academy/ Grammys, and creator of Never Normal Records based in Miami. She is energetically pioneering the new wave of women producers in electronic music and beyond. She has gained worldwide recognition for her own diverse electronic productions, and her music has found homes on Billboard charts; New York Fashion Week runways; networks like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and Boiler Room; and worldwide radio including BBC. Her music process includes electronic experimentation with cuttingedge music technology and synthesizers. Her global performances have been witnessed worldwide, spanning continents including Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Suzi’s work is shaping culture.

Philana Payton is an assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Her research centers Black women performers and Black cinema history using theories in Black studies, performance, and women’s and gender studies. ruth gebreyesus is a writer and producer based in the Bay Area. Her work centering cultural products and their movement across physical and digital margins has appeared in the Guardian, SSENSE, The Fader, and Rhizome among other places. She’s currently working on a documentary project about food consumption and production. She also serves as a co-curator of Black Life, a multidisciplinary film and art series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Samia Labidi is an independent film programmer and curator whose practice evolved towards research and cross-disciplinary cultural production. She has

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