Seen (Issue 002, Spring 2021)

Issue 002.

Spring 2021.

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Cover/interior images: T (2019) film stills. Courtesy of Keisha Rae Witherspoon.

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

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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.

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Spring 2021 • Issue 002

Dessane Lopez Cassell Guest Editor Caroline Washington Art Director Nehad Khader Managing Editor Leo Brooks Design Associate Imran Siddiquee Communications Director

Editorial Advisory Board Adam Piron COUSIN Akiba Solomon The Marshall Project Elizabeth Méndez Berry One World/Random House Gina Duncan Sundance Institute Greg Tate

Jasmine Weber Essays Editor Kavita Rajanna Interviews & Essays Editor Yasmine Espert Profiles & Reviews Editor Sydney Alicia Rodriguez Program Associate

Jeff Chang Race Forward John L. Jackson, Jr. Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania Louis Massiah Scribe Video Center Roya Rastegar

Shauna Swartz Copyeditor

Sally Singer

Maori Karmael Holmes Founding Editor

Tarana Burke ‘me too.’ International Zaheer Ali

Typefaces Compagnon by Juliette Duhé, Léa Pradine, Valentin Papon, Sébastien Riollier, and Chloé Lozano Synt Turbo Italic by Kaj Lehmann Tiempos by Kris Sowersby

Contents 10 Letter from the Editor 12 Conversations

with Contributors

118 Unseen

T

Introduction and script

by Keisha Rae Witherspoon

158 Tower:

An Annotated Score

by Jlin

198 Studio Visit

Rikkí Wright

234 Contributor Bios

54 Front and Center The bold, intimate gaze of Isabel Sandoval

by Luce Capco Lincoln

90 I’m Not Here

For You

Joiri Minaya's “tropical” interventions

by Dessane Lopez Cassell

214 The Banana Packer

Is Edible and the Gas Masks Are Kinky

The materialist politics of fetish and humor in Thirza Cuthand’s DIY videoworks

by Razan Al-Salah

14 M/othering for Liberation:

a Declaration of Independence

by Jemma Desai

34 Traviarcado Part II:

“I Want the Whole World.”

The rise of queer Black storytelling in Brazilian film

by Heitor Augusto

78 Bittersweet

On Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy

by D'Lo

84 The Politics of the Gaze

by Janaína Oliveira

164 Archival Impulse:

the Desire of the Narrator

El Impulso Archivístico: el Deseo del Narrador

by Tzutzumatzin Soto

172 Seedy Space Ports

and Colony Planets

Asian conical hats in cinematic dystopias

by Astria Suparak

186 Within the Circle

Madeline Anderson’s cinematic assemblages

by Terri Francis

228 The Wind in Her Voice A tribute to Cicely Tyson

by Beandrea July

42 Disappearing

into the Work

A conversation with Coral Messam

by Maori Karmael Holmes

70 Summer of Soul:

Reclaiming The Harlem Cultural Festival An interview with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson

by Karas Lamb

102 A Fusion of Forms

Curators Erin Christovale and Meg Onli discuss their forthcoming retrospective of Ulysses Jenkins

151 The Language

of Cinema

An interview with Stefani Saintonge

by Lendl Tellington

28 Renting the

American Dream A review of Minari

by Lakshmi Padmanabhan

62 Marronage,

De Profundis

A review of Liborio by way of the Dominican Deep South

by Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo

110 To Live As You Die

A review of Judas and the Black Messiah

by Rachell Morillo

192 Tides of Change

A review of Writing with Fire

by Imran Siddiquee

222 It’s like Gold

A review of Parole de Nègres

by Claire Tancons

206 Mixing, Layering and

Making Worlds

A conversation with Nora Mendis

by Farrah Rahaman

Issue 002

Letter from the Editor

“This is for us.”

These words, spoken by the artist Barby Asante as part of her ongoing performance project Declaration of Independence, reference the work of centering narratives of liberation—narratives both personal and collective that refute and move beyond the oppressive stories we’ve long been told.

As each piece in this issue exemplifies, this work of carving out space is both transformative and integral to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities around the world. It is often quiet, slow, and spiritual—and perhaps most importantly, it is ongoing. As Jemma Desai writes in her stirring essay on mothering, mourning, and the crucial gestures of Asante and numerous other artists, “This is the work I dedicate myself to.” Jemma’s sentiment expresses the essence of our mission with Seen, a journal of film and visual culture that extends BlackStar’s mission, on and off screens, to the page.

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With this second issue, we continue to mull the question of what it means to be seen—truly understood and recognized— and to see and bear witness amid this age of upheaval. The twenty-four artists, curators, writers, and brilliant coconspirators who have joined us each contribute their own unique missive towards this collective effort: from Astria Suparak’s incisive treatise and visual essay on science fiction’s denial of futurity through its appropriation of Asian material culture, to Dixa Ramírez’s meditation on Black self-subsistence and refusal in the Dominican Deep South in Liborio, to Razan Al-Salah’s immersive dive into the sharp wit and humor of Thirza Cuthand’s thoroughly queer and anticolonial films. Likewise, from Terri Francis’s essay on the exacting cinema of Madeleine Anderson, to Erin Christovale and Meg Onli’s conversation about the radical gestures of Ulysses Jenkins, to Luce Capco Lincoln’s exploration of the

intimate cinema of Isabel Sandoval, and Janaína Oliveira’s essay on the challenges (and rewards) of championing Black film in Brazil, the texts in this issue attest to both the importance and possibilities of carving out space—physically, intellectually, and cinematically.

For our cover, we center the work of filmmaker Keisha Rae Witherspoon, whose stunning short film T knocks the wind out of you, only to fill you back up with the love and resilience you thought had long been depleted. At its core, T is a story of how to hold grief and joy simultaneously. It is a balm for the whiplash that has perhaps always defined the experience of living under white supremacy, but that feels particularly palpable now. We’re honored to be able to reproduce the film’s script within these pages, alongside a poignant introduction written by Keisha herself.

energy and vision radiate off of every page of this issue. Thank you to Leo Brooks and Imran Siddiquee, whose quiet yet game-changing ideas have likewise deeply impacted the look and feel of these stories, both online and in print.

To our brilliant and discerning editors Jasmine Weber, Kavita Rajanna, Yasmine Espert, and Shauna Swartz, tremendous thanks for your expertise and generative feedback. Each piece is stronger and all the more resonant for it.

It has been both an honor and a pleasure to shepherd this collective offering. I hope you’ll continue to join us and stay awhile with this exercise in imagining otherwise.

“After all,” as Keisha writes, “what is art if it isn’t a spell?”

This issue, assembled amid a period of both cautious optimism and brutal assaults on our communities and collective wellbeing, has been guided by that same spirit of love and resilience that permeates T—something that could only be made possible by BlackStar’s CEO and founder Maori Karmael Holmes, and Nehad Khader, festival director and managing editor of Seen. Thank you for the invitation to be part of this work, both on Seen and when you first asked me to join the festival’s programming team four years ago. Your trust and wisdom have been invaluable.

Heartfelt thanks (and frankly, awe) are also owed to our art director Caroline Washington, a force whose singular

—Dessane Lopez Cassell Guest Editor Brooklyn, April 2021

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Conversations with Contributors

What does it mean to you to be seen?

Beandrea July

My friend Jessica has a five-year-old, Eli, who wants her to watch him do every single thing: play with his blocks, eat snacks, dig up sand. If Mom doesn’t see me do it, am I really doing it? Sure, we grow up and develop the ability to see ourselves too (hopefully . . .), but we’re also still wired for the reassurance that can come from being seen by a loving other. We can’t be whole without it.

Claire Tancons

To be seen is to be able to afford not to see others seeing you.

D’Lo

As someone who is queer and Tamil, I think when I’ve felt most “seen” is when I’ve been allowed to just be. It’s a feeling that includes my desires to be seen as joyous godliness and be blessed upon, and excludes

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being “tolerated.” I think I’ve only felt fully seen by other queer folks of color, and what divine bliss it is to be in that safety and celebration. Cheers!

Farrah Rahaman

To be seen means to be in the fold, to be in that ensemblic space that permits and protects, that relinquishes a small measure of opacity for a vulnerable, caring kind of relationality. It passes through but abundantly exceeds optics. To evoke Glissant’s poetics, it is to consent to not being a single being.

Karas Lamb

Being seen is a matter of being heard. Lending my words and voice to the communities I value the most is empowering to me. I know that my voice and perspective can create visibility for others. I think that that is the best way for me to be seen.

Lakshmi Padmanabhan

This is a hard question to answer because who doesn’t want to be seen and truly understood and respected for one’s complex heterogeneity, for the worlds we all contain? And yet, the need for visibility is so often tied to a desire for legibility, or a kind of political trap, or a mode of erasing our differences from each other. Frankly, I’m happiest when I get to do the seeing.

Lendl Tellington

Being seen is a moment when one’s quirks, mannerisms, and traditions are captured with visceral insight.

Luce Capco Lincoln

To be seen, at best, means solidarity. Being seen means that we are using all our senses to listen to each other, to educate ourselves, and therefore willing to take risks for each other to survive, thrive, and be free.

Rachell Morillo

body, your mind, your heart. To be seen can wound you. The homonym “scene” says it all too about visibility as a space of performance. It’s outward facing. I guess it’s clear I am a private person and I prefer the cave-dwelling life of the writing writer just tucked away someplace where nobody is looking at me! It’s rest to be unseen. I love the Jamaican use of “seen” as an affirmation. Truly beautiful.

Tzutzumatzin Soto

For me, being seen transforms my reality. Through the words that configure my thinking and are shared with others, and interpreted together, it has created a common space for dialogue.

A world returns to me, but different from the one I had imagined. Sometimes I even forget the form I am supposed to have, a figuration of another me. In fact, the willingness to be seen is also a call to speak out, to take a position in the world, inquiring from the shadows to the community created with the public conversation and vice versa, from the dark and crude public place to ask for the beauty of the basic action of thinking.

Being seen is having my full self—my values and potential—reflected back with admiration and respect. It is a moment of deep recognition of kinship that is present even in the quickest of nods.

Terri Francis

Spotlight. Whether you want it or not. A tightrope. Being seen can be affirming, for sure, but it can also be a place of vulnerability and of risk—to your

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All images reassembled from a collage by Jemma Desai 2020. Photos by Jemma Desai.

m/othering for liberation:

a declaration of independence

by Jemma Desai

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­— Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering”

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It is early December 2020, and I am sitting in front of a circular firepit in my friend Amal Khalaf’s garden, burning a printed copy of my research on institutional racism in the arts, “This Work Isn’t for Us.” As the flames take hold, I add thousands of words of correspondence to the blaze: emails to those I worked for and with, and some to friends and loved ones. These missives were attempts to transfer into words things that had been left unarticulated and stored in my body. In the fire are stories about the breadth of things that can be broken—from institutional systems to the dearest friendships—when we live under what bell hooks calls “imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy.”

Through the burning I release the weight of my past intention to speak toward a place that could not receive my words, or share the burden of things I could no longer carry alone. As the pages catch light, I see hope turn into grief.

The round firepit reminds me of the circuitous nature of the conversations my writing sometimes trapped me in—circular discussions about racism in institutions and commissioning rooms, on panels, through policy papers, and even in more intimate relationships. In these endless, repetitive loops, even the most tender words become blunt instruments—read as demands rather than truths to be examined and held carefully.

As Amal and I watch the flames lick the pages, she tells me the firepit belongs to the artist Barby Asante, whose practice includes group healing work for Black people and people of color. Amal tells me that just weeks before, Barby had led a ritual cleanse with a group in the same firepit we are now sitting around. As she speaks I become aware of the way these new flames are mingling ash into the memory of previous rituals: layers of individual experiences of hope and grief turned into a collective act of healing.

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As the paper burns, Amal adds frankincense to cleanse. She shows me which pieces are burning faster and which ones slower. We don’t talk about diversity, representation, oppression, or domination. Instead, we talk about magic and transmutation through astrological cycles of awakenings, transformation, and rebirth. She helps me find meaning in the words again, locating their purpose in something deeper I had to learn, rather than the massive weight of something I had to explain. She sees the things in the work that I can’t see, draws a circle around them.

As I walk home that night with the smell of the burn in my hair and on my clothes and the bright circle of the firepit imprinted in my eyes, I think about the spiritual dimensions of repetition and the rituals of learning. I think about the spirals and connections that had formed into “This Work Isn’t for Us,” turning exhausting, isolating circularity into new circles of belonging.

000 It is late December 2020. I am waiting at my screen for a performance to begin.

Barby Asante’s Declaration of Independence is an ongoing, iterative performance that mimics conference halls used to negotiate and produce treaties of independence, coalitions, trade deals, manifestos, and policies. For each version of the series, a group of women of color comes together to share stories and experiences. They offer narratives relating to the legacies of slavery and colonialism laid out in Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1992 poem “As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence.”

Barby works with the presenters to craft these shared stories into individual “declarations of independence,” which each participant recites as part of a collective performance. Before COVID-19, these

declarations were variously woven together in video installations, live performances, or sound pieces. During the Zoom iteration, we imagine the warmth of the bodies speaking, sharing, and connecting. They are not holding hands in a circle as they might in person, but Barby still draws one with her words:

This is our circle Our Circle A cleansing of our communities A ritual to re-establish the social, cultural, and political order A communal and societal purification This is for us We do this for us To protect and purify ourselves We evoke this declaration as a symbolic shield against outside dangers that threaten us Today we witness each other Care for each other Speak to each other Listen to each other Protect each other Defend each other For us the circle provides space for fresh possibilities, connections, collaboration, and understanding.

1. Thora Siemsen, “On working with archives: an interview with writer Saidiya Hartman,” The Creative Independent, February 3, 2021, http:// www.thecreativeindependent.com/people/ saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives.

Barby creates this intangible circle for us to bear witness to the ways that histories of settler-colonial logic and imperial domination continue to limit our freedom. It is a collectively built monument of joint arms and stories. It bears witness to what Saidiya Hartman has called the “temporal entanglement” of these histories of enslavement, in which time collapses and past, present, and future are experienced collectively and simultaneously.1 By making space for collective care and articulation, the performance is a resistance against the ways these histories threaten to tear us apart. It is a way of honoring our lineages and reconnecting with the power of ritual, the first thing to be taken from our ancestors when they left or were taken from their motherlands.

In one portion, a contributor says: “We gather here as the speaker, the writer, the hearer, the listener, the breath, and the word. Wrapped in tender flesh. Tender flesh. Tender with questions. Tender with doubt.” I think about the tenderness underpinning “This Work Isn’t for Us,” a personal exploration of the racist, colonial underpinnings of diversity policy in the arts in the United Kingdom. It is the result of questions made from my flesh, as birthing my daughter into her mixed heritage awakened an urgency to make sense of how the political intertwined with the relational in my life. The research circulated in the righteous fire and rage of 2020, but at its heart are quieter acts of dialogue, writing, and listening driven by intimacy and vulnerability—dialogue with the institution, with myself, with others, and with myself through others. Through these conversations, I have learned that our relationships with each other are the frontline in our struggle to practice freedom.

In the written part of “This Work Isn’t for Us,” I demarcate these subjects with different colors of text, some interrupting each other to show their discordance and some easily flowing into one another, listening with and to one another, toward something new.

These dialogues have sometimes overlapped, settling new truths in my body; others circulate through words or recordings, many more live in the air that they were spoken in. Through the circulation of these exchanges, I have learned the metamorphic potential of the circle and the transformative potential of dialogue and repetition, that it is ritualistic toward liberation rather than institutionalized toward domination.

000 It is the summer of 2020, and I am recording a talk with writer and friend Zarina Muhammad (one-half of the British art criticism duo The White Pube). We are speaking about our roles as writers, curators, and artists. How do we make visible what Zarina calls the “sticky intersections” of caste, class, sexuality, and religious and regional specificities when we are always in “earshot of whiteness”? How do we make work that can cut through our relationships with whiteness and not just work that speaks to it—or worse, for it?

I think about the spiritual practices of repetition: the acts of subjective softening and ritual that have been discarded, hidden, or hardened to the point of being broken to survive in the legacies of colonial systems. We think out loud about the practice of friendship. In creative industries that tie consumption to our social interactions, how can our public dialogues serve as liberatory acts of loving witness rather than oppressive spectacles of faux solidarity? At times, Zarina talks about “soft thoughts”: thoughts in motion, not fully formed or hardened into arguments.

We mold these soft thoughts together in the space of our conversation.

As I listen back to our conversation and try to express our feelings and thoughts in this text, I think again about this “softness” as a testament to the tender flesh that wrote the words. We discuss our writing practices as ritualized articulation. We repeat each other and ourselves—not to replicate, but as an act of witness. This witnessing creates a feeling of

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My conversation with Zarina makes me think of the confines of the written word in criticism— about the linearity of argument, the ways it can only hold relative time and cannot always evoke the more spiritual shifts of what Zarina names the “chronic backdrop and motivation” of the ancestral. Zarina and I enact a performance of embodied criticality through this public dialogue, but we are wary of it too. This wariness is about belonging in transactional industries: when we draw circles of articulation around our stories and subjectivities in our work to demarcate our processes of belonging, who do we write for? Who does our writing belong to?

2. Aditi Jaganathan, “Brown Feminist Connectivity,” in Tongues, ed. Rehana Zaman (London: PSS, 2019).

3. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Poetry Project, April 24, 2015.

000 A few weeks later, I record a conversation with my friend Aditi Jaganathan, an educator, writer, and activist. We speak about radical pedagogy as a practice of belonging with. Reading from her essay “Brown Feminist Connectivity,” Aditi talks about the possibilities (and failures) of “Unfinished conversations.

Interrupted conversations. Emergent conversations.”2 Such exchanges allow us to join hands with the intellectual gifts of Black feminism, which provide so many of us with language to liberate ourselves and draw circles of attention around histories of anti-Blackness and failures of our dreams toward unity.

Aditi likens conversations like ours to a “jam”— an improvisation, the dance of what Fred Moten has called “figuring it out.”3 In these spaces, where we hold conversations toward solidarity, no one exchange is the same, but patterns might be repeated and improvised, intuitively and rhythmically, to create something new. These are challenging conversations of (un)learning that require us to think things out loud, air “soft” vulnerabilities, and pull “hard” defenses

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down. In these dialogic spaces, meaning is created from not just what we say, but also how we feel and what we feel. “It’s like that song by Mahavishnu Orchestra, ‘You Know, You Know,’” Aditi says. “If you know, you know; if you feel, you feel.”

Aditi’s description of gathering such courage to learn and teach makes me think of the ways that birthing my daughter filled me with questions about the possibilities of mothering. I tell Aditi about Cynthia Dewi Oka’s framing of motherhood as revolutionary praxis,4 which builds on Dana Erekat’s idea that moving beyond biological function to the social practice of mothering is “an act of defiance in the midst of colonization.” We talk about the transformative creative potential on this frontline, but there are profound and irrevocable losses.

4. Cynthia Dewi Oka, “Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis,” in Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams, eds., Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (Oakland: PM Press, 2016).

unfinishedness, but perhaps it is an ongoingness that blurs beginnings and endings, every piece written flowing into the other like an unending circle.

“What if your mother doesn’t answer the questions that you yearn for her to answer?” Aditi asks. She wonders, tentatively, if her pedagogy rooted in relational intimacy and kinship—a weaving of intellectual constellations and subjective dialogue—is a form of mothering herself into her own genealogy. Aditi’s words make me think about the radical potential of reciprocal witness and knowledge exchange.

In the arts and media, we talk about nepotism, hiring practices, and resource allocations that replicate imperialism, keeping power in the hands of the few and the old, with conditional access afforded to only a select few others. In circular conversations about racist institutions, our demands seem limited by dreams of domination as we say, “We need our own institutions,” “We need to take back our shit,” or “We need more of us in positions of power.”

If we rooted our search for power in acts of witnessing and dialogue, what form would it take? How would we feel different?

000 These questions also came to mind as summer turned into autumn and I prepared for the final recorded dialogue of “This Work Isn’t for Us” with my friend, filmmaker, curator, and DJ Rabz Lansiquot. In advance of our public conversation, I watched their film These Walls (2016), an assemblage of archival footage from the digitized VHS library of 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning in Brixton, South London.

Rabz, whose mother is Barby Asante, is connected to the venue through Barby’s work there as an educator, artist, and executive board member. Originally called Roots Community, 198 is located on Railton Road, a street associated with the 1981 and 1985 uprisings in the neighborhood, as well as figures such as C. L. R. James and Olive Morris. Founded by locals, it began as a West Indian social club where dominoes were played, jazz filled the air, meals were shared, and people came together for good times. In 1988, the gallery was added to exhibit artworks by Black, Asian, and other minoritized artists. Its curatorial policy was, and is, rooted in a practice of international and intergenerational solidarity, embodied by an early project to fundraise and commission a memorial to 116 children who were murdered by the Afrikaner police force in Soweto, South Africa, during uprisings in 1976. The space continues to demonstrate its ongoing commitments to engage young people through art education.

Over the course of our friendship, many of my conversations with Rabz have started with our experiences in hostile workplaces but have ended with discussions about mothering: me sharing my questions about raising my daughter, and Rabz telling me about the pricelessness of access to their mother’s world and their artistic practice rooted in community.

In our recorded conversation, Rabz expands on how that impacted their artistic and curatorial practice, liberating them to discard the “colonial hangover” in ideas of “pioneering” practices and “exceptionalism” to instead bear witness to legacies of abundance.

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These Walls is one of the first films Rabz made after studying documentary filmmaking.

In their selection of archival footage, I see a witnessing as well as a documentation of practices of freedom within a cultural space.

In one scene, a group of local schoolchildren tumble into the building, frenzied at the chance to handle an artwork, their delighted screams and laughs bouncing off the walls of the gallery.

As I watch them occupy the space, refusing to be occupied by it, I see the film as a portal to Rabz’s curatorial and filmmaking praxis that has helped me reframe my own: this, too, is a practice of occupying space gentrified by spectacle and practicing freedom in places that were built to be hostile to it.

000 A few months later, after the burn and after I witness Declaration of Independence, I finally write to Barby and tell her for the first time about the ways that her work has intertwined with mine, despite us having never previously spoken: “In a way, your mothering of Rabz lives in ‘This Work Isn’t for Us,’ and your performance mothered me at the end of last year when I was in a really dark place at the end of the work.”

it? That practice has a long lineage; it’s been happening for a long time, it’s not a new thing.

In my work as a healer, as you are giving, you are receiving—it’s a circular thing,” she tells me.

As Barby continues, I wonder if the energy work is as simple as presence: to bear witness to things that have been lost. “I think what has been so important for me about Declaration is that it comes from wanting to capture that, think about the relationship between my grandmother, my mum, and myself, and how that constitutes itself through the practice of storytelling that comes from women who needed to find a way to tell stories,” she says.

I hear Barby, and she hears me. I circle back to the end of “This Work Isn’t for Us,” to its conclusion. To words I had written but not yet witnessed. I understand for the first time that even if it had begun as a circular plea to be heard, through these other circles, it has become something else.

She and I talk about loss: about gaps and silences left when our parents leave places, because the violence of removal so often limits their capacity to give and receive love through articulation.

How to find the words for these losses? As we talk about those casualties, we also talk about the anti-racist statements released throughout the summer—declarations of care rooted in accrual and transaction rather than dialogic energy work. “Empathy is used as a commodity, but what about the ethics of it, the practice of

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My Declaration of Independence: Radical hope, radical reimaginings, radical friendships have been forged through this piece. But these forgings cannot be read, bought, sold, consulted on. They are not a product, to be exchanged.

This has been more than gathering information, more than writing a history. More than collecting testimony.

It has been a spiritual revolution, an internal awakening.

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The energies of this awakening and the many others that led to it must be gathered, nurtured outside the gaze of whiteness, away from its structures of benevolence, its structures of mediations, its newly built structures of guilt and performative allyship.

This is the work I dedicate myself to.

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Minari (2020). Photo by Josh Ethan Johnson. Image courtesy of A24.

by Lakshmi Padmanabhan 28

When my plane from Chennai touched down at Newark airport, I was greeted by some of my mother’s childhood friends whom I’d never met, after a long flight to a country I’d never seen. Looking out of the car in the evening light, as they drove me to their home in a Jersey suburb, I listened to their American English accents mixed with the more familiar Malayalam and Tamil words of the world I had just left behind. We drove down a mostly empty stretch of highway, which eventually gave way to a cul-de-sac dotted with houses set at discreet distances from each other, separated by their lush green lawns. After a lifetime lived in cramped apartments drowning in city noise, the eerie quiet of the dead-end street seemed like the edge of a world, populated by no one but us. The memory of experiencing this well-kept suburb of New Jersey as a wild and empty place is now tinged with the embarrassment of recognizing my naivete, but at that moment I needed it to survive the inarticulate terror of having left behind everything I’d ever known for the hope of something slightly better.

Minari (2020). Photo by Melissa Lukenbaugh. Image courtesy of A24.

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2. Willa Sibert Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,” The Nation 117 (September 5, 1923): 236-38.

1. Lee Issac Chung, “Artist: Lee Isaac Chung,” Image, https://imagejournal.org/artist/leeisaac-chung/.

Isaac Lee Chung’s new film, Minari (2020), dragged these hazy memories of arrival and the attendant fears of unbelonging out of me as I watched the Yi family navigate their own entry into the shell game of middle-class America.

Within its first few minutes, the feature evokes the ambivalence of new beginnings as Monica Yi (Yeri Han) drives her children, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho), in their car.

The trio follows close behind Monica’s husband, Jacob (Steven Yeun), who guides his truck toward their new life in rural Arkansas. Jacob’s truck bears a logo that reads, “Cather Rentals,” perhaps in reference to the American novelist, Willa Cather, whose narratives of pastoral life on the Great Plains have provided some inspiration for this

Minari (2020). Photo by Josh Ethan Johnson. Image courtesy of A24.

America.” Jacob begins the film echoing Cather’s dream of a “cosmopolitan” rural heartland in the United States, a hopeful vision of prosperity fueled by immigrant labor.2 However, the reality for the Yis is that this dream is a rental, one that doesn’t fit the shape of their collective needs.

In Jacob’s view, Koreans will soon be moving to Arkansas, and he will be there to greet them with homegrown Korean vegetables for sale. Monica’s dreams about their future are less explicitly stated, but they certainly didn’t include what she’s faced with when they arrive at their destination: a shabby mobile home propped up by cinderblocks.

While Jacob can only see a potential garden of Eden when he looks out at the empty field that they’ve poured their savings into, Monica faces the derelict shelter with exasperation that turns into simmering anger. As the narrative progresses, these fissures between Jacob’s and Monica’s realities continue to grow into heavy silences and gestures of thwarted intimacy, erupting in nightly fights that circle the drain of their rapidly emptying bank account. Yet the jagged edges of these emotional conflicts appear a little softer in the cozy home they manage to build together, and the earth-shattering tragedy they endure at the end appears to dissipate a little as they fall asleep on the living room floor in the aftermath.

Minari, Chung’s fifth feature, draws inspiration from his own childhood in rural Arkansas, and he is careful to build a world that is peppered

But to think of this as a warm, fuzzy ride is only possible if you haven't film.1 For Jacob, who has spent a decade working in chicken factories in California, their new beginning holds the possibility of middle-class comforts, including a plot of land to call his own— hence the move to this unidentified bit of land in the Ozarks, which he describes as the “best dirt in

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with closely observed details of life in a Korean immigrant household without the didacticism of trying to make it a representative story. It is, of course, hard to draw any generalizations about Korean life in rural Arkansas from this film because there isn’t such community to be

6. See Jane Hu’s response to this line of criticism in “The Specificity of ‘Minari,’” The Ringer, February 21, 2021, https://www.theringer.com/ movies/2021/2/17/22286185/minari-review-asianamerican-representation.

found for the Yis. Yet they are indelibly marked by the specificity of national origins, because much of the dialogue is in Korean. This fact had already led to some controversy before the film’s release, because it was only allowed to compete in the Best Foreign Language Film category at this year’s Golden Globes (which it won). The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is a notoriously secretive collective,3 with a small, scandalridden membership,4 many of whom appear to be quite out of touch with contemporary media journalism. So it is unsurprising that they hold some very myopic views about “American” cinema and that Minari, with its bilingual script and mostly Asian and Asian American cast, is only legible to them as a “foreign film.” But that whole

5. Glenn Whipp, “Review: After an exhausting 2020, the gentle ‘Minari’ is the movie we need right now,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/ story/2020-12-10/minari-review-steven-yeun.

4. Josh Rottenberg and Stacy Perman, “Who really gives out the Golden Globes? A tiny group full of quirky characters — and no Black members,” New York Times, February 21, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/ business/story/2021-02-21/hfpa-golden-globes-2021-who-are-the-members.

3. Caity Weaver, “Wait — Who Runs the Hollywood Foreign Press Association?,” New York Times, January 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes. com/2019/01/10/style/hfpa-golden-globes.html.

Minari (2020). Photo by Melissa Lukenbaugh. Image courtesy of A24.

Chung—and the Yis—already know this about life in America. And the film reminds us of this lived reality when the Yis arrive at a church service about halfway through the film. A series of vignettes reveal racially fraught exchanges with the locals: David makes friends with one of the white boys, whose first words to him are, “Why is your face so flat?” Meanwhile, Anne patiently responds to a young white girl spewing racist gibberish who hopes to inadvertently utter a word of Korean. These moments are distinctly unremarkable, framed mostly in medium-wide shots using a long-focus lens that evoke a politely distanced observational aesthetic, in lieu of the conventional close-ups and quick cuts often used to depict interpersonal conflict.

Chung deploys this careful visual grammar to capture many of the daily horrors that bubble and blister throughout the film.

Early reviews of Minari have called it “gentle,”5 praising it for narrating a universal story.6 Perhaps this is because of the film’s soft lighting, subtle edits, and cinéma vérité approach to confrontation—or maybe its real warmth between characters, even when they’re in the middle of intense fights. But to think of this as a warm, fuzzy ride is only possible if you haven’t watched his first feature, the brutal yet subdued Munyurangabo (2007), set in Rwanda soon after

watched his first feature, the brutal yet subdued Munyurangabo (2007). debate has once again drawn attention to a banal yet violent truth: that language is a boundary of racial difference and national belonging.

the genocide. In that film, Chung worked with nonprofessional local actors and a loosely fictional script to tell the story of a tense friendship between two boys, one Hutu (Munyurangabo, played by

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Minari (2020). Photo by Melissa Lukenbaugh. Image courtesy of A24.

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7. Peter Kim George, “Minari Isn’t Really About the American Dream. It’s About US Empire,” Hyperallergic, February 11, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/621441/minarireview-steven-yeun/.

Jeff Rutagengwa) and another Tutsi (Sangwa, played by Eric Ndorunkundiye), as they travel together to the villages they left behind, one seeking to avenge the death of his father and the other to reunite with his family. Along the way, they have to deal with the communal tensions that simmer beneath the surface of their relationships with each other and their families.

Munyurangabo is notably the first narrative feature shot entirely in Kinyarwanda, a Minari (2020). Film still courtesy of A24. language that Chung doesn’t speak. Perhaps this fact will help dispel any United States military interventionism in easy judgements about Chung as a filmmaker East Asia are apparent even in Minari’s committed to telling “universal” stories from his rural Arkansas town.7 This is most explicit in the character of Paul (Will Patton), a own Asian American experience. white Korean war veteran whose friendly but strange overtures turn into an Despite being set worlds away, Minari brings a enduring relationship with Jacob as they similar sentiment of life in the ongoing aftermath work together on the farm, where the two of unspoken trauma to the characters of Jacob bond while tending to the vegetables in and Monica, who have left all they know behind the garden. to shelter in a tiny trailer and try to start again.

While they remain tight-lipped about what they Interspersed between some big events— had to endure to immigrate to the United States, the arrival of Monica’s mother, Soonja the peripheral references to the Korean War and

finds himself yelling that his penis is called a “ding dong,” correcting Soonja’s broken English as she teases him about his bed-wetting. The problems of translation here are as internal to the family dynamic as they are between the film and a nonKorean-speaking audience.

The problems of translation here are as internal to the family dynamic as they are between the film and a nonKorean-speaking audience.

With the introduction of Soonja, these newly emerging routines are thrown into disarray.

Soonja arrives with bags full of delicious foods and medicine for her family. She also plants the eponymous minari, a variety of Korean watercress, in the wilderness that borders Jacob’s precious plot of neatly farmed land without his knowledge.

The metaphor of uprooted weeds surviving in the wilds of a foreign land is made explicit as we see the minari flourish without any oversight, in sharp contrast to Jacob’s increasing troubles with his farm produce, which has now cost him his savings and the family’s entire water supply.

While Monica is understandably grateful to have her mother’s help at home, and is even moved to tears over the fresh gochugaru she’s brought for them, the kids are less impressed. David quickly decides that Soonja “smells like Korea” and refuses to accept a grandmother who can’t bake cookies. She becomes a source of ongoing frustration for him, since he is forced to share his room with her, eat the strange concoctions that she prepares for him, and run around doing her chores. These would remain minor family fights if they didn’t also explode into broader national, linguistic, and generational differences. In one scene, at once adorable and uncomfortable, David

The narrative careens toward catastrophe in the final minutes of the film, with a tragic accident involving Soonja. Within the bounds of the story, this accident is just one more unfortunate event arising from a series of choices that the family, and specifically Jacob, make. But this event also highlights what’s left out of the frame: the real lack of public infrastructure that turns a minor domestic incident into a life-threatening event. In this sense, Minari is a very American story, one of a government that has subjected its poorest and most needy to absolute systemic abandonment, and sold that sense of isolation as the mark of true individual freedom.

9. Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Double Meaning of the American Dream,” The Atlantic, February 19, 2021, https://www. theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/minari-lee-isaacchung-visual-melancholia-american-dream/618064/.

8. See Summer Kim Lee on these scenes of quotidian gendered labor in Minari: “Greener Pastures,” Artforum, February 11, 2021, https://www.artforum. com/film/summer-kim-leeon-isaac-lee-chung-sminari-2021-84988.

(Youn Yuh-jung), from Korea, and their rare visits to the church, the bank, and the doctor—the film follows much of the mundane domestic labor, factory work, and farming that take up Monica and Jacob’s time.8 Scenes of Anne doing chores and burning trash alone in the field, and David’s childish secrets and games, give us brief glimpses into their worlds without much editorial commentary.

These juxtaposed generational storylines don’t neatly summarize Jacob and Monica’s immigrant narrative or David and Anne’s second-generation angst. Rather, we are given brief insights into the little emotional islands that each of these characters live on, despite sharing a home.

Fantasies of a blank slate and a fresh start often paper over unspoken tragedies.

For the Yis, their immigrant dreams of American pastoral life are haunted by the difficulties of the life they left behind in Korea. Their new home is located on land dispossessed from its Indigenous inhabitants, and now available for sale because the previous owner died by suicide.

These are some of the histories of violence and tragedy that hold up the fantasy of a new beginning on which Jacob has staked everything. The American dream, as Anne Anlin Cheng writes,9 is a pyramid scheme, one that requires a high level of personal investment even when you don’t really buy it.

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Above and left: À beira do planeta mainha soprou a gente (To the Planet's Edge Mama's Breath Sent Us) (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmakers Bruna Barros and Bruna Castro.

The Rise of Queer Black Storytelling in Brazilian Film

by Heitor Augusto

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It is 2010. Black Brazilians are navigating the film industry in their so-called motherland, yet they remain their own islands.

There is an unspoken apartheid. For the most part we are lone bodies in white-dominated settings, despite the fact that people who look like us constitute most of the population. Film festivals, which have the potential to be a space for sponsoring an array of representations of the lives that make up society, remain largely pale: our experiences are either rendered invisible or morphed into violent representations. We are thirsty.

When you look at a film screen, it’s deserted—or rather filled with blinding whiteness. You look past the screen and find only A felicidade delas (Their Happiness) (2019). Film still white hands holding courtesy of filmmaker Carol Rodrigues. cameras, white voices screaming “action” and “cut,” white fingers placed on mousepads that cut and paste images and sounds, white silhouettes determining what will remain as history and what will be forgotten. And yet you feel you have a history and a past that has been hidden from you. You know there are others like you, people who want to reclaim film as a legitimate space to inhabit. But whiteness rewards only those whose Blackness is perceived as nonthreatening, isolating them within white walls and discouraging mutual identification with the scarce bodies like theirs.

Now cut to ten years later. We’re not alone, and survival strategies have been developed, deployed, and shared. We have interlocutors and people who serve as our mirrors. The films we were looking for have begun to be made. Now we can talk about them and develop a circuit where they are at the center, as we continue to discover new things to crave.

This is the shift in the landscape of Brazilian cinema that I and other researchers, scholars, programmers, producers, artists, and other professionals have been witnessing. A central part of this advancement are queer stories told by Black

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In this second installment, I shine a light on two films featuring affectionate relationships between Black women, A felicidade delas (Their Happiness;

1. Due to its setup based on tax exemptions to private colleges, Programa Universidade para Todos (University for All Program) has always been at the center of heated debates. However, it isn’t unusual to be in a room where you’ll find multiple Black professionals who benefited from this policy—myself included. This is also the case for writer and researcher Marcell Carrasco, who reflected on the program’s effects on his academic trajectory in an essay, “Excavations and Recollections around Zózimo Bulbul’s Abolition,” for Cinelimite (https://www. cinelimite.com/post/excavations-and-recollectionsaround-zozimo-bulbuls-abolition).

filmmakers. In my previous essay for volume one of Seen, “Traviarcado! Queer Intersections in Contemporary Black Brazilian Cinema,” I delved into unapologetic representations of LGBTQ+ lives, particularly in two films: Perifericu (2019) and Bonde (2019). Queerness was historically seen as an exclusively white identity in Brazilian cinema, and its public embrace has allowed Black filmmakers to express the entirety of their multiple identities, relieving the pressure of having to compartmentalize representations.

of political, economic, and cultural factors throughout the last two decades. Arguably the most substantial event was the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president in 2002. An embodiment of contradictions, his tenure as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010 combined fairly conservative financial arrangements that benefited banks and big corporations with progressive policies aimed at fighting structural inequalities.

His policies

You know that there are others like you, people who want to reclaim film as a legitimate space to inhabit.

2019) and À beira do planeta mainha soprou a gente (To the Planet’s Edge Mama’s Breath Sent Us; 2020). Each offers a response to the guiding question of my research: how did we get here?

included the expansion of the network of free federal universities, a tuition-free program called ProUni,1 and affirmative action systems for Black Brazilians and Indigenous descendants in public universities.

Many of the reasons behind the metamorphosis of cinema in the country include a combination

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6. One shining example is Rebu—A egolombra de uma sapatão quase arrependida (Rebu, an Egotrip of a Barely Repented Dyke) (2019). Director Mayara Santana debuted the work as a microdocumentary series on Instagram (@rebu.doc). Only later was it picked up as a short film by festivals.

5. Perifericu (2019) and Bonde (2019), two films analyzed in my previous piece in volume one of Seen, have received financial support from São Paulo’s VAI, or Valorização das Iniciativas Culturais (Appreciation of Cultural Initiatives), a fund exclusively for artists based in remote areas of the city.

grants targeting other portions of society disenfranchised by this financial complex.5

Short-term classes and workshops held at NGOs, cultural institutions, and festivals have also had a sizeable impact in expanding access to resources.

Complementing this intricate net is the arrival of cheaper technological devices such as smartphones, microphones, and free editing software, as well as the expansion of access to broadband internet and 4G technology. Internet culture has allowed for huge increases in independent production outside of established venues like film festivals. Starting with YouTube in the late 2000s, moving images have become more accessible than ever with Instagram, Vine, and most recently, TikTok.6

A felicidade delas (Their Happiness) (2019). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Carol Rodrigues.

A second marker crucial to understanding the transformation of Brazilian cinema is the emergence of national grants benefitting Black artists. Now discontinued, the Curta Afirmativo and Longa Afirmativo grants subsidized the production of short and feature films by Black filmmakers, and held three editions, or calls, between 2012 and 2016.4 Since 2016 there has also been a steady growth in the number of grants that sponsor some form of affirmative action for marginalized groups including women, those with disabilities, and Black, Indigenous, and trans people. Complementing this intricate net of production funds are the

4. Even though these funds didn’t pay special attention to queer creators, filmmakers from that community were awarded, including Carol Rodrigues, who is later referred to in this essay. Rodrigues’s first film, A boneca e o silêncio (The Doll and the Silence), was among the twentynine projects awarded by the Edital Curta Afirmativo in 2012.

3. This has occurred particularly at public universities, which are free for all students and tend to be the best regarded in Brazil.

2. Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araujo Pereira, “A Defesa Das Cotas Como Estratégia Política Do Movimento Negro Contemporâneo,” Estudos Históricos 6, no. 37 (2006): 143-166, http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/ojs/index.php/ reh/article/view/2249/1388. A thorough investigation in Portuguese of the role played by Black activism in influencing the national discourse.

Affirmative action, which in Brazil we refer to as cotas raciais or “racial quotas,” has a storyline of its own that predates Lula’s presidency by decades.2 As the racial and cultural backgrounds of university students slowly changed, a deeper transformational process was unfolding. The significant increase in people of color in college pushed universities to rethink their own existences, as new cohorts of students have continued to challenge what is taught, how it’s taught, and who teaches it.3

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8. Lesbians have been reclaiming sapatão and sapatona, Brazilian Portuguese variations of “dyke,” as a term carrying new meanings and a way to assert their identity as political beings that defy the voyeuristic male gaze.

7. In recent years, such invisibility has been firmly combated by programmers, researchers, and graduate students. I’m particularly fond of the work of Mariana Souza, who has made lesbian lives in cinema her primary object of investigation as a lecturer, researcher, and curator, devoting her attention to what she calls “practices of visibility.” I also admire film programmer and scholar Carol Almeida, a white woman whose investigations encompass queer women of color.

Seen/unseen

Within this changing landscape, queer Black cinema has flourished and reenergized Brazilian cinema, particularly in the short film format. Here, my predilection toward two shorts by and about Black lesbians stems from an interest in countering invisibility. Even within the realm of LGBTQ+ representation, we tend to focus on the experiences of cisgender gay men while rendering lesbian cinema invisible.7 I spoke to three filmmakers at the epicenter of this cultural shift in cinematic representation: Carol Rodrigues, the writer and director of three films including Their Happiness, and Bruna Barros and Bruna Castro, who have collaborated on Amor de Orí (Orí’s Love; 2017) and To the Planet’s Edge Mama’s Breath Sent Us.

À beira do planeta mainha soprou a gente (To the Planet's Edge Mama's Breath Sent Us) (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmakers Bruna Barros and Bruna Castro.

These changes have allowed professionals from Rodrigues’s generation to explore territories previously unavailable to Black creators, while creating an environment where the voices from younger generations like Barros’s and Castro’s are appreciated and seen as worthy.

Their Happiness, which centers a passionate chance encounter at a feminist demonstration, leads to an unloading of pleasure that quite literally takes over the city. As Rodrigues explains, “I grew up watching stories in which I was told that if you have amor sapatão,8 it’s going to end badly.

One couldn’t experience peacefulness.

So the title of my film is an open celebration of a lesbian Black story with a happy ending.”

I grew up watching stories in which I was told that if you have amor sapatão, it’s going to end badly. One couldn’t experience peacefulness.

The characters’ encounter leads to a big bang of sorts: dams break, streets flood. “Water is both

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life and death. Lust is life and death. I had this image of an orgasm that transmutes into water, the characters’ bodies taking the shape of water that tears walls down, hauling people, dust, dreams, and cravings,” Rodrigues says. As the protagonists take shelter from the police after the demonstration is dispersed, we feel as if they’re sharing a secret under the public’s eyes as runaways.

Rodrigues had quite clear intentions in this storytelling: “[Black lesbians] are pushed to existing only in the margins. But in my film, I wanted to state that we don’t need to be behind closed doors or in the dark. We aren’t obliged to [accept] the imposition of norms. We can recreate them within our own rules and dynamics, reinventing gestures and relationships.”

I shared with Barros and Castro how their use of a first-person narration made me feel as if such

À beira do planeta mainha soprou a gente (To the Planet's Edge Mama's Breath Sent Us) (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmakers Bruna Barros and Bruna Castro.

Meanwhile, To the Planet’s Edge Mama’s Breath Sent Us is a slice-of-life documentary about the relationship between the two directors and their mothers. Similar to Rodrigues, the directors of To the Planet’s Edge Mama’s Breath Sent Us share a craving for nontoxic Black lesbian representation, a desire for viewers to be left with a feeling of love. “It comes from our wish to ground love for people like us, even in spaces where it has yet to

flourish. We believe that the violence lurking [in] our imagination limits the way we can envision our own narratives,” Barros explains. Barros and Castro’s film is also a story between daughters and mothers and the specific challenges presented in these relationships for queer women. “Mama” in the film’s title refers to Yemoja, the Yoruba deity that oversees the waters. As the directors note, this works as a metaphor for how we negotiate our identities with the people we love, such as our parents. As water flows, one is engaged in a game of give-and-take. “We as characters and as people want to be loved. It requires us letting ourselves love, unconditionally, even when things aren’t going the way we want [them] to, for ourselves and for them, our moms,” Barros says.

Both of these films share an atmosphere of tenderness and intimacy. The boundaries between private and public are blurred as the couples in both films take over the streets and various places, reclaiming them as their own. Such feeling is represented by a defining line spoken by one of the characters in Barros and Castro’s film: “I want the whole world.”

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a personal story was in fact everyone’s story. “I find it interesting to think of it as [a] film about everyone because our stories are frequently seen as ‘specific’ or ‘particular’ but never as universal.

The role of the universal being seems to always be reserved for a different type of person,” Barros says, echoing what scholar Grada Kilomba theorizes in her groundbreaking book Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism. “One of the driving forces to me was to create a film grounded in sharing an intimacy,” Castro observes.

I asked the pair, both in their mid-twenties, about their experience with the country’s transformation as they came of age, and how it might have changed their trajectories. “I wouldn’t say it’s less poisoning,” Barros says of the current climate.

“But [it’s] certainly less at ease with attacking us in public, because we are prepared to strike back and don’t feel ashamed of being who we are. I feel there’s no way we’re giving up our pride—we’re not turning back. But unfortunately, it doesn’t mean safety and fulfillment to us, because hate, violence, and their institutional arms remain in effect.”

I was also interested in hearing their perspectives on the interactions between different generations of queer Black Brazilians and what we, who are a bit older, could learn from the younger generation.

“We must practice listening while engaging in mutual dialogue. In our conversations we must be aware that we grew up in different contexts, and such understanding can help us expand our perspectives about our own history,” Barros reflects.

As for Carol Rodrigues, I asked how she felt witnessing the rise in queer Black Brazilian film compared to its previously desolate role. She lit up in her reply, explaining: “I’m so happy to be a contemporary to my young peers. . . . We’ve expanded how we envision what it is to be human and have taken it to a different level. We nurture our dreams and nourish from them, harvesting energy from the future. The accomplishments of the younger generations nourish me.”

Water has been found in the desert. It tastes good.

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Coral Messam. Photo by Adama Jalloh.

Interview by Maori Karmael Holmes Photography by Adama Jalloh Styling by Samson Soboye 43

Coral Messam has always felt the calling to move.

Lisa Palmer, “Small Axe: what Steve McQueen got right and wrong about lovers rock.” The Conversation, 2020, https://theconversation.com/ small-axe-what-steve-mcqueen-got-right-and-wrongabout-lovers-rock-151068.

Growing up in Wolverhampton, an industrial coal town in the English Midlands, her Jamaican-born father, a cobbler and factory worker, would play reggae records on weekends. Messam would be transfixed in their grooves.

Messam’s career in the arts has been broad. She initially wanted to be a fashion designer but then embarked upon a career in dance. Messam studied at the University of Leeds and then with dancer L’Antoinette Stines and drummer Emmanuel Nii Okai Tagoe, among others. She later apprenticed with the Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble. Messam also spent time as an actor and is trained in wellness practices—specifically yoga, massage, breathwork, and nutrition.

Messam has constructed a career as a performer, choreographer, and movement director (a title new to me and one with which I’m now a bit obsessed). Perhaps this initial training in visual arts has lent itself to her unique capacity to use bodies and movement to construct tableaux.

In Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, her work as choreographer and movement director (which included intimacy coordination) contributes to not only one of the best films of 2020, but quite possibly a dance sequence never seen before in a narrative feature. The skanking and wining of the performers in the dimly lit room of the reggae blues party, an underground sanctuary space common of the period in London,1 is the predominant and affecting performance of the film. One can’t negate the impact of peering in on such intimacy, especially during a time of worldwide lockdown, when the majority of folks haven’t been to a party, let alone a house party, in over a year. It’s completely breathtaking.

A perpetual tinkerer, in her work Messam is less concerned with objects and more with making worlds. In 2020, she also worked as movement director on Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, arguably one of the best series of the last decade. She has several projects coming up, including a return to theater. We conducted our interview via conference call in late February 2021, with Messam at home in London.

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Coral Messam. Photo by Adama Jalloh.

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Maori Karmael Holmes: What did you want to do as a child and how did you imagine what your future would look like?

Coral Messam: Like most kids, I didn’t have any inhibitions. I was one of those kids that didn’t like clothes, and whenever I heard music, I would just dance in front of the TV. Although I didn’t have the words then, I now realize I was having a spiritual experience. My dad would put on records on a Sunday afternoon—a mixture of different types of music, but mainly reggae because of where I come from. During the summer, music would be blasting out of my house—artists like Dennis Brown, Bob Marley, and Peter Tosh. I would be in the garden listening and hearing the bass.

This had an effect on my subconscious, and while I didn’t want to be a dancer per se, I thought that naturally everyone dances. At that point, I wanted to be a fashion designer because my mom was a seamstress. My mother would make the clothes that I designed, and kids in school would ask who made my jacket. I planned on fashion until college; I hadn’t yet learned that dance could be a career.

MKH: Did you see yourself as an artist, or did you feel that as the child of immigrants, you were pushed to choose a solid career path?

CM: I was really lucky. My dad was a country man and came from a trade but told me that I should do what makes me happy. So anything I did, I always felt I had the support of my mom and my dad and not the pressure to be a doctor, nurse, or lawyer.

They supported my dreams.

MKH: What was the journey from being a dancer to becoming a movement director?

MKH: Would you explain the difference between a movement director and a choreographer?

CM: The difference is that a choreographer is creating dance sequences set to music. A movement director’s responsibilities are the physical—looking at the physicality of an actor, looking at characterization, and looking at the atmosphere. It goes a bit deeper underneath the skin. For instance, if you have a character from the 1920s, you have to look at the structures of how you can build the character. What are the different ways of approaching them? What methodologies will be used? The role has much more range. You have to adapt and problem-solve. Sometimes this means doing far more than what we are paid to do—I look after the bodies of dancers and actors; I act as a physiotherapist. But now I’m solely here to create art. I can create a safe space, but my job is also to create the physical world and bring the script to life.

MKH: As a movement director, what does the process of preparing for a project look like?

CM: Each project is different, but what I generally do, whether it’s a period piece or a contemporary modern piece, is meet with the director and ask what they want. I do my research and try to disappear into the piece. I’ll turn to the library, books, the internet, and interviews. I also love going to galleries. If it’s a period piece, I want to

I do my research and try to disappear into the piece.

CM: I started as a dancer then acted for a while.

I had a multifaceted background in terms of performance and wanted to bridge the two. This moved me into directing around 2009. Shortly after, I became a dance assistant for a show at the National Theater, Death and the King’s Horseman.

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The play was to incorporate dance. This shifted my mindset about roles, and I received my master’s degree a few years later because I wanted to understand this practice more. It remains important for me to be fluid.

go to a gallery that has work from that time period and context. I gather some of that physical world into my being. I’m also a massive fan of mood boards, particularly for TV and film. I think they are fundamental, because the medium is visual. I will collect images and cut stories and pictures of

memories, and that’s a piece of my process. Lastly, I’ll physicalize what the world is. So if I’m looking at a Nigerian wedding dance, I will physically do the dance—fit it into my skin to understand what that means. What does it mean to the body to move in a particular way?

MKH: In that vein, can you talk about the emerging field of intimacy coordination?

CM: Someone asked me whether what we were doing was intimate, and I realized I had been performing and cultivating intimacy as a movement director. I’ve been navigating bodies and their interplay when they’re in a volatile or vulnerable state without necessarily knowing the guidelines. That is where intimacy direction came from. You have to understand bodies, an awareness that builds over time, and protect and create a safe space for people. You can’t assume that they’re going to be OK in the room, especially when looking at things such as kissing or being nude. When you’re a yes person as an artist and teacher, there is an importance in teaching yourself and your actors how to say no and finding the power in that. That can allow you to enjoy the experience of acting in an intimate space, knowing that someone has your back and your body is protected. This enables us to be able to do the work without being vulnerable in a way that is detrimental.

However, my connection to Michaela Coel stems from a show I conceived and directed called Run It Back (2018). It celebrated Black British rave culture and music. In the piece, I was asking questions about how we tackle the N-word in music and the misogyny and homophobia of certain dance styles and genres. She came to the final show and asked me afterwards if I would choreograph for a show of hers. A year passed, and she got in touch with me, and that’s how that relationship began.

As for Steve McQueen, I had been watching him since Hunger in 2008, and at that time, I told myself I had to work with this man. My friend Hazel Holder, who is a voice dialect coach on Small Axe, told me I had to get involved. At this time, I got an email from BBC Productions asking me to meet Steve McQueen, and I called my agent

You have to understand bodies, an awareness that builds over time, and protect and create a safe space for people.

My previous experience with and love for burlesque also taught me about bodily freedom.

When I taught burlesque dance classes to women, I took pride in creating a space where they could feel good in their bodies and be kind to themselves.

So this evolution makes sense.

MKH: You’ve worked on two of the best projects released in 2020, Lovers Rock from the Small Axe anthology and I May Destroy You. What was it like to work on these two projects and have your work on display in these different ways?

CM: For I May Destroy You, I was the movement director. I coordinated the physical dance pieces.

to get this sorted. I was nervous because it was crazy to me that I would be sitting down with him.

But he felt like my big brother. I gained even more respect for him because he didn’t ask about my credentials; he already knew them. He asked me about my childhood and its relation to music. I talked to him about my family and my upbringing.

I remember my siblings going to these parties and the music my father would play. I wanted to be a part of this project. It was a chance to reawaken the era and indulge and delve into this time. I looked at documentaries and spoke to people as a part of my research. I asked my friends and family what this time felt like for them. Translating the movement and dance style was a privilege—to be a part of this fabric and to be able to help tell this story.

In working with these young actors, I realized they don’t dance like this. Dance has moved on to a dance style where we don’t understand the intimacy, intricacy, and skill that we see in

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All photos: Coral Messam. Photo by Adama Jalloh.

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Lovers Rock. It is a skill to quiet the mind, to let you connect with another human being. I’m sure you remember when you hear the dub play, you hear the crackling of the music, and then it starts.

That is an experience in itself. They don’t have that. So I tried to bring them back to a time where they could slow down, appreciate the music, and appreciate dancing with another body in a very intimate, respectful, and sometimes dignified way. I played both the observer and academic but also delved into the spiritual side.

MKH: Can you talk to me about the skanking scene?

CM: With that scene, we had a prior rehearsal.

However, on the day we were to shoot, we were told we would immediately do the scene. But I knew I couldn’t ask the artists and supporting actors to go in cold; we had to make it into a spiritual space. So I cleared out the catering area and put a speaker in there, and asked for the actors to feel the music and get into the reverb and the dub. I wanted them to get into the world that Steve McQueen wanted, to let loose and lose their inhibitions in a way we don’t ordinarily see Black bodies do. We needed to physicalize those bodies being free. And what happened in that room went beyond what was taught; what happened in that room was literally beyond us. It was ancestral. I remember watching the screen thinking, What is going on?

When the actor takes off his top, I realize that probably didn’t happen in dances, but the actor went to a space that Steve and I could not control. They took it somewhere else. It was spiritual and very humbling at the same time. As we wrapped, I cried. I was blown away.

how for Denzel Washington in Malcolm X (1992) or Halle Berry in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), the ancestors show up on set.

CM: And that’s the love and where it comes in.

MKH: What is your dream project?

CM: At this moment, I would love for Steve McQueen to produce Run It Back and make it into a film. I would say, Come, Steve McQueen, come co-produce this—please God, make this happen.

I know he’s very interested in Black British rave culture.

MKH: What are you working on next?

CM: I’m working on a short film called For Love, but everything has been postponed due to lockdown. After that, I am working on another project I cannot say that’s coming up in April or May. Then I’ve got to put on a theater production called Paradise. That’s going to be opening at The National in July. I definitely plan on more TV and film projects. One project is a period piece that is supposed to be happening sometime in May. And then I’m going to bring Run It Back to the theater in August.

What happened in that room was

MKH: In the history of filmmaking and photography, there is space where the spirit and the camera interact. Certain Indigenous people do not want to be captured on film. You hear about

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MKH: Do you see yourself continuing to alternate between film, television, and theater projects forever?

CM: I think so. I’m very interested in the TV and film medium. I was transitioning into that area anyway. I’d been moved by a lot of other influences. There’s contemporary artists and musicians that I’m obsessed with. I’m a massive fan of Melina Matsoukas and the way she shoots; her eye is phenomenal. I love Lena Waithe’s writing. I adore Solange and how she’s mixing dance forms with art and film. I’m into Burna Boy, not [only] because of his music but because of its ethos. I love how he talks about his culture in a very proud way. I’m really interested in Kerby Jean-Raymond. I’m really feeling how he uses his art. I love the meaning behind his label and what he stands for. I’m so moved by that and so satisfied

by where he’s going and his work. I’m excited to see Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). I’m just starting to get to know Shaka King’s work, but I’m really interested in this pool of directors.

MKH: There is an unfortunate movement that takes issue with Black British actors “taking” roles from Black American actors—Judas and the Black Messiah and Queen and Slim (2019) come to mind.

For the broader public to raise this issue feels challenging. I believe it comes from a scarcity model and a xenophobic place. Can you share your opinions on this?

CM: When I heard Lena and Melina talk about the process of making Queen and Slim, they talked about how that is a mistake. That if we start dividing into “us and them,” then we are separating ourselves. I know Daniel Kaluuya said the other day, when the question came up, he felt Black British actors should listen. We are in this together. I don’t come from the mentality of us taking away from each other. My experience in my dance journey through Jamaica, Cuba, and the US showed me we are a part of the same fabric. We have similar experiences. So no, I’m not going to have that divisive mentality because look at the way hip hop has brought change and influence from America to the UK. We have to look at the

care is selfish. I love looking after me. I am a massive fan of flowers and candles. I also like to work out, and I have started getting my headphones out and going to the park during lockdown. I vibe out and find solace with the trees. I pretend no one’s watching and find refuge in nature. But I am longing for a beach holiday. I am an island girl, of course. And my family, friends, and laughter are my medicine. I could laugh for days if I could make a living from it. Laughter is where I find my joy—also long baths and stretching. I let my spine be on the floor and let the Earth take me and support me.

I also try to remember to take off the veil of strength as a Black woman. Sometimes you have to say, “I can’t be there for you now because I can’t be there for myself. And I have to set these boundaries, because there’s only one me.”

Additional transcript editing provided by Hope Steinman-Iacullo.

literally beyond us. It was ancestral. bigger picture and be very careful with labels because then we start to dissect ourselves and our power.

MKH: How do you find refuge from our culture of overworking?

CM: I’m really good at that now. I know how important it is, especially for Black women and women of color, to get rid of the notion that self-

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Coral Messam. Photo by Adama Jalloh.

The Bold, Intimate Gaze of Isabel Sandoval

Isabel Sandoval as Olivia in Lingua Franca (2019). Film still courtesy of ARRAY.

by Luce Capco Lincoln

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Lingua Franca behind the scenes. Production shot courtesy of Isabel Sandoval.

1. Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989).

“Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.”1 It doesn’t escape me that Isabel Sandoval’s response to the question of what motivates her filmmaking is layered with symbols from both of these histories of the Philippines.

When Sandoval was four, her mother took her to see her first movie. The film was a slapstick Filipino comedy popular in the 1980s, starring the comedian Dolphy and his son Vandolph. Cinerama, the huge theater where it was screened, is a relic of the post-war American influence, located on Cebu City’s Colon Street, a thoroughfare built by Spanish colonizers in the 1500s. Even with this colonial

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history, Sandoval admits that she was mesmerized by the giant images on the screen. As the stories came to life, they planted the seeds of her lifelong passion.

When Sandoval starts talking about the process of filmmaking, she lights up, spouting off encyclopedic knowledge of work that inspires her. She often references films across all genres, from contemporary blockbusters to international film classics. It’s obvious that her dream is to be remembered like the directors she loves: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yasujirō Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa. They wield a mastery of narrative storytelling and imagery to bring audiences, as Sandoval puts it, to a “specific emotional destination.” But what seems to be Sandoval’s true intent is to create a vehicle that allows viewers, especially trans women of color, to see their truths and realities affirmed.

Sandoval started making films long before the 2019 Venice Film Festival, where she became the first trans director to premiere a feature film.

She made her first feature, Señorita (2011), on a shoestring budget in the Philippines, which was then followed by her second feature, Apparition (2012). Both films received notable attention from international festivals, but it’s her most recent feature, Lingua Franca (2019), that is getting her noticed by the US and international film industries. The film tells the story of Olivia, an undocumented trans Filipina woman who is employed as a domestic worker for a Russian immigrant named Olga. Olivia falls into a romance with Alex, Olga’s grandson, while grappling with her fear of being detained and deported by the anti-immigrant Trump administration.

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Last summer, Ava DuVernay’s distribution company, ARRAY, picked up the film for theatrical release and streaming on Netflix. When I ask Sandoval about the significance of making a film based in the US instead of the Philippines, she emphasizes that it gave her the freedom to make a “lyrical, sensual, delicate drama” that was a testament to her uncompromising storytelling.

Because there is a market in the US for arthouse films, it was more possible and financially sustainable for Sandoval to execute her creative vision. That meant Sandoval could choose not to pander to a broader cisgender audience.

This approach, she says, allowed the film to get noticed: “In my experience with Lingua Franca and the ‘risky’ and potentially alienating creative choices that I made, those idiosyncratic choices are what actually made the film stand out as being an original and singular work of art.”

Indeed, Sandoval’s signature filmic style comes to life in Lingua Franca. The narrative is intentionally sparse in dialogue, and Sandoval finds her aesthetic voice through ambitious cinematography. Long takes track Alex’s movement through the slaughterhouse where he works. When Olivia and Alex drive home after witnessing ICE agents arresting Filipino workers, Sandoval employs a shallow depth of field and close-ups to focus on their faces and emotions; they are lit by Brooklyn’s streetlights. The formal elements and visually melodic scenes combine in a series of small but poignant emotional events: the

When Sandoval starts talking about the process of filmmaking she lights up, spouting off encyclopedic knowledge of work that inspires her.

Top and bottom: Isabel Sandoval as Olivia in Lingua Franca (2019).

Film still courtesy of ARRAY.

Sandoval had a public conversation with DuVernay, moderated by Penny Martin, at the February 2021 premiere of her short ShangriLa, a film commissioned by the fashion house Miu Miu for their Women’s Tales series. Sandoval acknowledged that it was DuVernay who convinced her that she could claim the title of auteur. DuVernay pointed out that the hesitancy on the part of women filmmakers to claim this title is often structural: “The terrain of that word

seems to be climbed by men. A woman who is writing, producing, directing, editing, and even starring in her work and designed every aspect of the film process truly can take the mantle of auteurship.”2 There is no doubt that the filmic style and the themes that Sandoval establishes in Lingua Franca are the foundation of what we will see from her in the future, including her forthcoming feature, Tropical Gothic. Talking with Martin and DuVernay, she revealed what is at the heart of her work: “Cinema in general privileges the male gaze, when it comes to sexual desire, and I rarely see the female gaze—let alone the trans female gaze—depicted on-screen,” and more importantly, “without any guilt or shame.”

2.Miu Miu Women’s Tales #21 Isabel Sandoval and Ava DuVernay In Conversation with Penny Martin, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gbcQOD50Iw.

intimacy between lovers, the fear of incarceration that comes with being undocumented, and the awkward silences between two people who have different access to power, privilege, and ease in the US.

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Isabel Sandoval as Olivia and Eamon Farren as Alex in Lingua Franca (2019). Film still courtesy of ARRAY.

I am one with the stars and the moon and the sun and the whole universe. I am

58 Isabel Sandoval as Olivia in Lingua Franca (2019).

Film still courtesy of ARRAY.

Isabel Sandoval as Olivia in Lingua Franca (2019).

Film still courtesy of ARRAY.

magnificent, invincible, sublime. I will love who I want to and I will be loved right back.

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Isabel Sandoval as Olivia and Lynn Cohen as Olga in Lingua Franca (2019). Film still courtesy of ARRAY.

Aparisyon (Apparition) (2012). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Isabel Sandoval.

Señorita (2011). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Isabel Sandoval.

The trans female gaze is front and center in Lingua Franca. This is perhaps clearest in the beginning of the film, when Olivia and Alex are still new to each other. As Alex reads a love letter that his grandfather wrote, the camera moves closer to him, eventually lingering on a close-up of his lips.

Triggered by these words, Olivia starts to have a sexual fantasy that the camera captures. Alex’s hands, followed by the camera, begin to navigate Olivia’s body. The voice-over then shifts to Olivia reading, but in her first language, Visayan. The sequence closes, with Olivia fully in control of both her desire and pleasure. As a trans director, Sandoval is making a fierce statement that we are not objectifying Olivia in this scene. She is drawing a sharp contrast between how we have

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been conditioned to perceive undocumented trans women and how we should perceive them: as makers of their own reality, powerful and fully in charge of their agency. At the end of the scene, Olivia, played by Sandoval, looks directly back at the camera, delivering this message as she demonstrates exactly what a trans female gaze looks like.

In Shangri-la, she continues this work with a powerful combination of beautiful visuals and narrative risks that bring to the forefront the trans Filipina experience. As in Lingua Franca, Sandoval writes, edits, directs, and stars in the film. However, unlike with Lingua Franca, she has created a narrative about living as a woman

of trans experience without feeling the need to explain it to the audience. Sandoval plays a Filipina farmworker during the Great Depression in California who falls in love with a white farmhand, Samuel (Matthew Fifer).

The film begins with a shot hovering above, first of a man surrounded by darkness and then of a woman who lies on top of him. They are superimposed—a layered portrait of one. The next shot cuts to a confessional box, where we hear a detailed account of the main character’s desires for her lover. The film draws us in with close-ups of the characters in the church, and then halfway through the fantasy, the story leaves the interior space. The cinematography opens up to exterior wide shots of the characters watching the fireworks on the shore. Meanwhile, voiceover describes how the protagonist finds her power in her dreams. All of sudden, she timetravels, forwards and backwards chronologically, discovering “alternative skins and parallel lives.”

The main character finds a transcendental reality in which she can be in the world without an identity. She declares at the end: “I am one with the stars and the moon and the sun and the whole universe. I am magnificent, invincible, sublime.

I will love who I want to and I will be loved right back.” She is free to not be in relationship to anyone else. Sandoval enters an endless universe of possibilities, even if the last shot finds her alone on the shore where she once lay with Samuel.

This short film gave the director an opportunity to test some of the ideas for her next feature, Tropical Gothic, which will transport viewers back to Colon Street. Delving into the Philippines in the sixteenth century, it is set under the grip of Spanish colonialism. The narrative likewise features a strong woman lead. This time a native Filipina priestess pretends to be possessed by the spirit of her Spanish master’s dead bride in order to avenge the theft of her property and farmland. The allegory, however, concerns the US and Hollywood. Sandoval admits: “In the present day, it’s really America that is exerting its cultural hegemony, especially Hollywood, over the world culture. It’s the one that continues to invade countries—in the Middle East, in the developing world.” With her new success in the US film industry, this next film will be produced and released by a major Hollywood production

Cinema in general privileges the male gaze, when it comes to sexual desire, and I rarely see the female gaze—let alone the trans female gaze— depicted on-screen without any guilt or shame.

company. The irony is clear to Sandoval. As we end our conversation, she chuckles to herself and adds, “I am using the resources of Hollywood to make a film that critiques it.”

Like her characters, Isabel Sandoval continues to push back, take control, and be the maker of her own reality. When asked what advice she has for young trans immigrant filmmakers, she says: “Never let anyone tell you that your voice and your story isn’t valid and that you have to dumb it down and filter it to reach a broader audience.

Stick to your gut instinct and just go out there and tell your story.”

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Liborio (2021). Photo by Oscar Durán.

by Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo 62

2. The terms “Black” and “Indigenous” are capitalized in this essay as consonant with the standards of this publication. However, the capitalization does not really fit the context about and from which I write, which is not US-centered. I write about “Blackness” and “Indigeneity” as not merely identity categories—ones that do not travel neatly outside of the US—but as structures of modernity writ large. Moreover, the capitalization is a political stance towards representation vis a vis other identity groups, but I do not find representation comforting, and my impulse and political inclination is toward evading sociological capture through illegibility.

1. I would like to thank Anne Eller, Ren Ellis Neyra, and the editors of this publication for reading earlier drafts of this essay.

Liborio (2021) opens in the bush. A heavy curtain of Caribbean rain falls over thick tropical foliage.1 A Black man (Vicente Santos) pulls on a braying donkey—heard and not seen—before he arrives at a cave where he remains for some time before disappearing, literally, from the screen.2 The man is Olivorio Mateo, known also as Papá Liborio, who was an Afro-Dominican spiritual healer. For over a decade, Liborio attracted a following of impoverished and marginalized AfroDominicans eager to receive medicinal and spiritual care.

When the island-occupying US Marines ordered his assassination, with the support of local Dominican elites, they presumed that it would be the end of his

Liborio (2021). Photo by Oscar Durán.

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Liborio (2021). Photo by Oscar Durán.

Though Liborio intimates this historical context, Sosa makes the surprising choice to focus the film on the commune itself. He states that he wanted to create a film that “preserve[d] collective

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4.Anne Marie-Corvin, “Liborio Director on Preserving Collective Memories and Capturing Religion through the Eyes of Believers,” Variety, February 3, 2021, https://variety.com/2021/film/festivals/ liborio-nino-martinez-sosa-1234899873/.

Directed by Nino Martínez Sosa, the feature-length film portrays Liborio’s historical disappearance and eventual reappearance during the hurricane of 1908 from the perspective of his followers. They had presumed him dead and upon his return believed that he had ascended to heaven only to return with healing powers. Set before Liborio’s 1922 assassination, the film refuses to represent Liborismo as either ethnography or horror, two common portrayals of non-European, specifically Afro-Caribbean religious practices. Instead, the film emphasizes the earth-boundedness that becomes extraordinary for another reason: it binds these Afro-Dominicans to their land. Within this context of a history that knows no border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Liborio sprouted like an unruly tentacle of Black subterfuge that neither national nor imperial histories could tame.3

memories.”4 This profound respect for the memories of Liborio’s followers, and their belief that Liborio was indeed a prophet, grounds the film. It refuses and renders irrelevant any viewer’s potential desire to see “evidence” of Liborio’s powers. Through his followers, we access a belief system that, though revolving around the figure of a single man, is perhaps better understood as a mode of living in the world through Black selfsubsistence. Their desire to simply live in community with other Afro-Dominicans and away from the centers of capitalism and the nation-state constituted, and continues to constitute, a considerable threat to the very foundations of colonialism in the Americas—and, perhaps, the “modern” world itself. Indeed, perpetual alienation from land has defined Blackness in the Americas. The denial of claims to Indigeneity, as well the blocking from property ownership, have relegated Black people throughout the Americas to a

3. My information about Olivorio Mateo and his followers draws from the work of Roberto Cassá, Jan Lundius, Lusitania Martínez, Martha Ellen Davis, Robin (Lauren) Derby, and Irio Leonel Ramírez López, as well as the archives of various Dominican newspapers. I also heard about Liborio in conversations with the maternal side of my family, which has roots in the small village abutting Liborio’s commune.

following. Instead, Liborio’s legacy strengthened, and Liborismo endures to this day.

relationship with land defined by subservience and labor.

Through the sensorial landscape of several of Liborio’s followers, the viewer learns of the plot against Liborio and the commune. Sound, touch, and sight are entwined throughout the film as the modes of attunement necessary to protect their community. We hear the ominous clop of the horses announcing the proximity of the US Marines and the newly established Dominican National Police. We hear the gunshots in the distance as they attack the commune. We see the characters feel their way through thick mountain brush as they move through the local landscape.

We see sandaled feet and a bowl of plums on which an orange butterfly has settled as we listen to a conversation between two members of the commune. The film frequently stretches our sense of what one might expect of a story such as this: the story of a Black man killed by national and imperial authorities. The film does not take the well-worn routes of tragedy on one end or exploitative violence on the other.

Through Martínez Sosa’s portrayal, Liborio, the man, does not assume the bombastic and outsized characteristics evident in other films (both documentary and fictional) about spiritual leaders. Instead, Liborio is a man bound inextricably to the earth, to the soil, to nature, and to all that lives and has lived, to an extent that his connection to the otherworldly does not seem fanciful. In the eyes of Matilde—played by Karina Valdez with a quiet and steady strength— Liborio transcends the limits of the human priest or pastor. He becomes worthy of her spiritual worship while also being her earthly romantic partner; throughout the film Matilde is called Número Uno to reflect her status as Liborio’s most trusted disciple.

And in spite of the prowess of this cast and the complexity of the roles, the most compelling element of the film is its relationship to the land of the Dominican Sur Profundo, or Deep South.

This region has been coterminous in the national narrative as the region of marronage and, later, as the region of brujos, or witch doctors. The site that

Liborio (2021). Photo by Carlos Rodríguez.

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Liborio (2021). Photo by Jaime Guerra.

Indeed, perpetual alienation from land has

Within this context of a history that knows no border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Liborio sprouted like an unruly tentacle of Black subterfuge that neither national nor imperial histories could tame.

Liborio (2021). Photo by Karla Read.

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Liborio (2021). Photo by Karla Read.

Through his followers, we access a belief system that, though revolving around the figure of a single man, is perhaps better understood as a mode of living in the world through Black self-subsistence.

defined Blackness in the Americas.

Liborio (2021). Photo by Jaime Guerra.

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Liborio (2021). Photo by Carlos Rodríguez.

Liborio had chosen for the commune is proximate to a small stream associated with Saint John the Baptist, “agüita de San Juan Bautista,” where they can “bathe and take out the evil and leave the past behind,” as Liborio tells his followers.

With this life source nearby, as well as the work of tilling the land for self-subsistence, Liborio tells his followers, “We don’t even need money.”

But the land and nature are not only charged with sustaining their physical bodies; the stream of Saint John the Baptist also flows with curative and spiritual powers.

As the film’s other protagonist, the Dominican Sur Profundo’s dramatic greens of the hills, mountains, and valleys root the story of Liborismo in the island’s long history of BlackIndigenous marronage. Moreover, the repetitive reappearance of the cave near the compound not only invoke maroons’ and their descendants’

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strategic usage of nature to both hide from and perceive the enemy, but also connects Liborio and his followers to the spiritual and cultural significance of caves for this island’s Taínos. The hilly topography of this region reminds us that the entire island was named Ayiti, or land of high mountains, by its Indigenous inhabitants. Distant from colonial settlements and inhospitable to (proto)capitalist production, the Dominican Sur Profundo would then host the waves of Black people fleeing slavery, starting in 1502 when the first enslaved Blacks fled into these mountains to join the Indigenous rebel forces. The culture that developed, including its medicinal and spiritual practices, could be defined as a Black Indigenous one, native to and reliant on the specific ecological emplacement on this island and enfolding the myriad cultural practices of the those born in various parts of Africa. Liborio inspires me to remember not only how Blackness has been

5. My forthcoming book, Blackness in the Hills and the Photographic Negative, delves into the unruliness of a Blackness in the Americas that binds itself to the land.

Liborio (2021). Photo by Oscar Durán.

denied land in the Americas, but also of the earthboundedness of a Black Indigeneity in the Caribbean, forged over centuries of colonial violence.5 By focusing on Liborio’s followers, the film portends the endurance of Liborismo, in spite of violent reprisal from the government. In 1962 a Liborista commune near the original site was napalmed by the Dominican military with the support of the CIA. My mother, who was born in the San Juan Valley region, as her ancestors

had been for centuries, recalls seeing followers running down the hill to escape the onslaught of this biological weapon. This event, called the Palma Sola Massacre, has been ghosted from most studies of US imperialism written by nonDominicans. The cosmological order of the commune caused such a threat to colonial and nationalist space-time and common sense that it had to be repeatedly destroyed or demonized.

Nevertheless, Liborismo lives on in the present, and the landscape evoked in Sosa’s film remains an unruly haunt.

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Summer of Soul (2021). Film still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

by Karas Lamb 70

An interview with Ahmir "Questlove” Thompson

The year 1969 was preceded by some of the biggest moments of the Civil Rights Movement—from Loving v.

Virginia to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968 to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. That summer, scores of Black Americans, scarred by the impact of those events, gathered at Harlem’s Mount Morris Park for the Harlem Cultural Festival.

Held on successive Sundays from June 29 to August 25, the series would host an audience of 300,000 and come to be known as “Black Woodstock”—after its more famous counterpart held the same year. Footage of the latter would transform an upstate New York dairy farm into holy ground for American folk and rock.

Meanwhile, footage—and common knowledge—of the Harlem Cultural Festival languished in the basement of producer and filmmaker Hal Tulchin. The festival is now the subject of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize–winning documentary Summer of Soul (. . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021). The festival was the living, breathing, gyrating, and jiving intersection of Black American music, the Civil

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Rights era, and radical Black leftist movements.

The film marks Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature-length directorial debut.

Black music, why wouldn’t you want to give this to a big director? But then there was another part of me that was just burning to see all of the footage.

It is a tour de force that reclaims a watershed moment in Black art and liberation featuring the likes of Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, B. B. King, the Staples Singers, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Hugh Masekela, the 5th Dimension, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and more.

I’m the kind of guy that watches musical documentaries and I’m always talking to the screen, because this particular instrument wasn’t invented in 1965, or that’s the wrong time period— the details are off. I also had the burning question: how was Black erasure so normalized that not one person or network saw fit to give it a blurb or even a mention?

Emerging miraculously after five decades, Summer of Soul liberates one of the most important but little-known moments in Black music that championed Black pride and has the chance—at yet another tipping point in the American struggle for racial equality—to do it all over again. Questlove explains.

Karas Lamb: I’d like to talk first about the genesis of Summer of Soul and why the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival, or “Black Woodstock,” was so important for you to tell.

Questlove: It’s kind of weird the way the producers of the film, David Dinerstein and Robert Fyvolent, contacted me in the summer of 2017 about this mythical festival that allegedly took place fifty years ago. I’m the kind of person, especially the kind of pop art collector, that often meets people that know about the amount of collecting I do—the auctions I go to and the things I acquire. There’s always that one guy that says, “Well, I have this particular Prince piano that you don’t know about in a warehouse stored over . . .” You know, that sort of thing. I thought it was an attempt to flex. Then I thought, Stevie Wonder, Sly, Nina Simone, BB King, and Max Roach? This concert took place and was filmed in Harlem fifty years ago and no one knows about it?

There’s almost nothing about it on the internet.

I thought it was some elaborate story. They said, “No, we have something that we think you’d be interested in seeing.” My whole thing was: pics or it didn’t happen. The next week they sent me clips, and my jaw dropped. Suddenly I went to the opposite extreme of wanting to know: What’s the catch here? Why do you guys want me to do this?

If this document is important to the history of

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So that’s where I entered. I spent one year just absorbing and learning. But you know, my production partner Joseph Patel basically said, “Look, you put records together, you write books— this is the same thing. You have to figure out what your story is. And once we map out what the story is, then we tell that story.” And, thank God, I think we nailed it.

KL: The original Hal Tulchin footage of the 1969 concert series was feared lost for over fifty years.

How did it surface?

Q: Well, this is not to say that footage hasn’t leaked out, but it was never put in the proper context.

I was in Japan in 1996. They have immense love and respect for things that Americans throw away and discard. I happened to be in a soul club, and on the bar movie screen, I saw four minutes of Sly and the Family Stone in concert. I was under the impression that it was a European music festival because up until like 2010, huge festivals were not such a staple in the United States. Before then, there was a Lollapalooza here and a Coachella there. I had no reason to believe that this was something historically significant from the United States. So I saw that bit of footage before, but I knew nothing else.

The festival organizer, Tony Lawrence, and festival producer, Hal Tulchin, thought that “Black Woodstock” would be a no-brainer for TV when they captured it. Lawrence got Maxwell House to pay for it. It was low budget, but it was still enough to capture fifty hours of footage. When Tulchin tried to shop it, he was shocked at the pushback and network disinterest. All they got for their hard

work was one local station in New York (WNEW) that decided to show segments of it on a Sunday, back in late 1969. Basically, nobody saw it. Tulchin tried to change the title of the film because he felt he could resell it as the “answer to Woodstock,” but buyers still weren’t interested. So it sat in his basement for forty-nine years.

Near Tulchin’s death, Dinerstein, who had been trying for ten to fifteen years to buy this footage off of him, finally convinced him to relent.

After he passed away, his wife was going to gut the basement and get rid of everything—their mementos, the old clothes, the trunks, and everything. Something told us we should take one more visit to that basement to see if there’s anything else. Sure enough, everything was in there—the floor plans, the contracts. Who knew you could get Sly and the Family Stone to play a concert at the height of their powers for $4,500 in 1969? The fact that Mahalia Jackson was the highest-paid performer, even above Stevie Wonder, was amazing. All of the details were laid out and helped us find people who were there at the festival.

KL: Is it possible that the obscuring and eventual erasure of the Harlem Cultural Festival’s story was done to suppress a major event in Black arts and culture because of its proximity to Black activist movements?

How was Black erasure so normalized that not one person or network saw fit to give it a blurb or even a mention?

Summer of Soul (2021). Film still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Q: I genuinely believe that when you tell a story of the oppressed and you tell the story of the oppressor, that maybe four times out of five, the oppressor is completely unaware of any long-term damage or any altering of history that’s been going on with the oppressed. I think they honestly, in their hearts, don’t feel as though it’s happening because it’s always done under the guise of “good business.”

It’s easier to sell a concert

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Summer of Soul (2021). Film still courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

that has Joe Cocker and Joan Baez and other white names of the day.

Often people are thinking of Middle America.

When they say Middle America, the person they are referencing doesn’t look like you or me, and we don’t represent the whole idea of what defines [this] America. So I believe that’s even more dangerous—the whole idiom of “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” If it weren’t for the pandemic and this heightened sense of awareness non–people of color have about the long-term damage that’s been going on for a lot of us, I think this movie would be seen differently.

Initially, when cutting it, the first thing we took note of was that the things happening in 1969 are still happening fifty years later. Then it was like: OK, well, do we spell this out for people? The one thing I don’t like about films is when they don’t trust the intelligence of the audience that’s watching it. There was maybe a cut or two where we were thinking of infusing the civil protest of what was happening between 2015 and 2020. At the last minute, it was clear to us that the parallels between the two were obvious, and it would hit home just the same without spelling it out. It’s an empty feeling in the last ten minutes of the film when you realize that what you just saw could have been erased.

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As a musician and as a person who was born in 1971, you know that one concert [Woodstock] defined a generation. It was contextualized as a generation-defining moment in history, and all I kept thinking was, Wow, this could have been that for me. Imagine if I grew up watching the Harlem Cultural Festival and it was held in the same light and given the same glory that its counterpart was given three weeks later. How could that have affected me as a musician? How could that have affected me as an artist? Could this have helped to keep Black consciousness at the forefront of Black music? The burden shouldn’t be on us to always be the example, but I had those questions.

Fortunately, it’s affecting my life now, and I’m glad I’m the one to help bring it forth.

KL: What does it mean to tell the story of the Harlem Cultural Festival at this point in history and to give it a life of its own away from the specter of the famed Woodstock festival?

Q: It was liberating. It allowed me to tell the story I often felt was missing in every documentary about Black art. Often, as Black people, we have concerns about how we’re portrayed in Hollywood in terms of the material potentially making us look bad or unruly or uneducated. But there’s an opposite side of that spectrum. When you watch great events, it’s almost as if it’s a compliment when someone focuses on a Black person’s natural gifts, these God-given talents. It’s quite flattering, but it’s also dismissive—because it implies there’s no science, no intellect behind the art.

What’s even more beautiful is that the real star of this story is the people who are watching the festival and physically communicating how it affects them. We live in a meme and GIF culture right now. So you’ll see clips of people catching the spirit or these sorts of things. It seems humorous and funny, but what I wanted to get across was that for a lot of us in the United States, we just started talking about mental health for Black people in the last five years in a serious way. It was considered crazy to pay someone to talk about your problems.

But, you know, for us, there was a cathartic release, as creators and listeners and observers, that could

be found in the music. There were a lot of avantgarde performances at the festival that might have seemed out of place, but I wanted people to know when you see gospel singers screaming or soul singers holy-ghost shouting, that’s their release.

That’s their way of getting therapy for what they’ve been through. And that was important to show.

KL: You have people who were having this cathartic experience, but they’d also just been through a whole bunch of trauma. Can you talk a bit about the historical significance of the event as an extension of the sociopolitical movements of the time?

Q:That’s the specific reason why this festival was even a thing. Taking the cue from Boston in 1968,

of our leaders are killed, Cointelpro was going strong, they’re killing the Black Panthers off.

Vietnam was still a major concern. There was this hopelessness in the air. So this concert was put on and spread out throughout the summer of 1969 to keep Harlem from burning.

KL: The Harlem Cultural Festival feels like a bit of a linchpin. Where does it stand in the pantheon of other significant Black music festivals, like Wattstax (1972) or Festac (1977)?

Q: That’s hard to say, because even after I finished [Summer of Soul], I had a conversation with Stan Lathan and it hit me when we did Jesse Jackson’s interviews at his office in Chicago. I saw a poster

I wanted people to know when you see gospel singers screaming or soul singers holy-ghost shouting, that’s their release. That’s their way of getting therapy for what they’ve been through. when James Brown happened to be in town on April 4, 1968, the night that Martin Luther King Jr. dies. The mayor wisely begged Brown to keep the concert going and also to let them televise it, so Boston doesn’t erupt in flames. Boston was one of the rare major cities that wasn’t mired in explosions and civil unrest, because James Brown kept them cool during those hours at night when they could have been out riding.

At this point, with the Kennedy brothers assassinated, with King gone, with Medgar Evers, all the civil rights leaders under threat—1968 was a turning point. The questions were: Who are we?

What are we? What do we want? There’s people on one side following the civil rights edict of turning the other cheek, but there’s a younger element that’s more interested in freedom right now. It’s almost as if 1969 just happened to be the most important postmodern paradigm shift in Black culture post– Jim Crow era—in terms of how we dressed, how we looked, how we related, what we listened to, how we self-soothed. So much was happening in 1969.

It felt like everybody was asking what’s next. All

on his wall and realized there’s one major concert festival we don’t know about. It was directed by a then 22-year-old Lathan and it was called Save the Children. This was in Chicago and done in the same mode as the Harlem Cultural Festival, with Motown acts—the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight and the Pips. I think Sammy Davis Jr. came.

It was organized by Lathan and Clarence Avant for Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH to encourage political action. Something is happening with that [footage] as well.

From a technical standpoint, yes, this is the first recorded modern Black festival of its kind, although it’s not the first Black festival. In terms of its political overtones, it is the linchpin, which is why I definitely felt it was uber-important to make sure this comes out of the gate correctly, so I am able to tell other stories.

KL: Do you know whether the concert series directly inspired or influenced any iconic musical releases in subsequent years? What fruit did the moment bear artistically?

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Q: As far as the creation is concerned, there’s a longer cut of the Stevie Wonder interview that stands out. Left to my own devices, this could easily have been a six-hour film or a five-part film.

There’s a point where Chris Rock says, “It would be very easy for Stevie Wonder just to rely on the ’60s hits and coast through life.” But the fact that Stevie Wonder uses that particular time period to push further artistically, and in his activism to push further in performance with technology and the type of music he was playing, is important.

During that period, it was just unheard of.

Stevie Wonder using a wah-wah pedal or the fact that Sly and the Family Stone didn’t wear suits— that’s crazy. The fact that Sly rebelled against this whole idea that you have to wear a suit to be presentable for Middle American audiences was huge. And the protest songs. It was unheard of for you to openly criticize the government or the police—to challenge the white, patriarchal establishment. So the fact that the Staples Singers were easing away from gospel into protest music was a very 1969 thing to do.

Also, with Nina Simone, the poem that she did was from the Last Poets. That year alone, it was just unheard of to be vocal, to have an opinion, to dress the way you want to. It was unheard of to look wild and crazy, because we had spent all of the time beforehand sort of doing this “I come in peace, I’m not harmful” routine. Motown sent all their artists to charm school. You know, cross your legs, drink your tea this way, say this very politely.

It was basically how to not scare white people.

And I think by 1969, all of that went out the door.

So yeah, the most important takeaway is that the Harlem Cultural Festival was the culmination of the first year that we were allowed to be unapologetically Black—no minstrel overtones, no buffoonery, no gentle, nonthreatening stance.

Finally, this was us.

KL: Summer of Soul won the 2021 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. What have the Harlem Cultural Festival and the production of the film meant to you as a Black musician?

Q: It meant a lot to me just as a musician. I was elated to see a lot of those local music-union house

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musicians were playing a lot of this stuff, sight unseen, which was the order of the day back in the ’60s. You traveled to a city and you met the band that the promoter provided for you and pray to God that they sound just as good as the band that was in West Virginia the night before or better than the band that was in Texas. The idea of you having a self-contained band wasn’t a thing until the ’70s.

So I was shocked that the band was able to catch on so quickly. I’m also amazed at the pristine level of the sound. I’m in a band that travels with this $300,000 sound rig. Meanwhile, this festival was done with sixteen microphones and it sounded pristine. We nearly left the sound alone in postproduction. It took very little sweetening to make it sound better.

The musicianship of it all and the bands’ ability to keep the crowd engaged was impressive. Probably the greatest example is Sly and the Family Stone.

It still took a second for the audience to warm up to them. They were so radical. It was unheard of to see a racially mixed band. No one had ever seen a female trumpet player play before. Then the crazy outfits they had on and just their whole energy.

Just to see the look on the audience’s faces—from complete shock to confusion to totally having them in the palm of their hands—is a sight to see.

KL: What kinds of stories has Summer of Soul inspired you to tell next? Is this the beginning of a documentary canon that brings modern Black musical history to life in a way that has not happened yet?

Q: Absolutely. I announced the Sly and the Family Stone documentary already, so that’s officially on the record. There are three or four more under the hood. I definitely see this as my lane. With this next project that we’re bringing forth, I really want to examine the mind-state of Black artists.

Once you take the humanization element away from Black people, it becomes very easy for a lot of people to filter us through as if we don’t have feelings or if we don’t have opinions or lives or anything else that matters.

If there is anything that post-2020 pandemic life really gives you, it has brought people to a place where there’s no denying that we all have

The Harlem Cultural Festival was the culmination of the first year that we were allowed to be unapologetically Black.

these vices of selfsoothing that we go to when we don’t deal with the pain and the surface underneath that pain. And so these next films I’m about to tackle are about figures that history has pegged as troubled artists.

We’re so quick to revel in the fuckery of reality show culture, because misery loves company.

This is where I think I can at least change the conversation and make people see the trauma and the pain that an artist has to go through. It’s not just about shutting up and singing your song or “Shut up and dribble your ball” or whatever people like to dismiss us with.

KL: Do you think it’s important for Black musicians to tell the stories of Black music, to be the ones at the forefront of preservation?

Q: With me you get an inside baseball advantage that you wouldn’t get with someone else. That’s the thing that’s kept me from totally running away from the task of producing in this way. At the end of the day, you’re telling the story, but even then, you’re going to tell a story from a musician’s perspective that someone else would 100% miss, and that resonated with me.

That’s why I went in wanting to make a film that would impress me, the moviegoer. Not from this defensive place where I have to make sure that all of the references to the songs are in lockstep with the time period when they came out. No, I just wanted to get all sides of the story from a musician’s standpoint and tell that story. There is definitely the danger of revisionist storytelling— especially as far as what does and doesn’t get told about the music.

Q: There was so much to tell that I had to leave a lot out. We had to dabble, and there’s some things I had to completely take out. I was amazed at the staggering amount of stories of police brutality that I heard from every artist there. Everyone had a story. Stevie Wonder has a story. Mavis Staples told me four stories. At one point it was just too much. If we had added even one of those stories, it would instantly have added an extra thirty minutes to the film.

The other thing is the humor element. I lightly touched upon the comedy at that show but had to take out a lot of elements. George Kirby, who was the comedian of his day, Moms Mabley— there were so many comedians at the festival that I couldn’t find an opening to get in and get out as far as how we dealt with comedy and humor in that time period.

Those are two things I regret that we had to leave on the cutting room floor, but there was so much more. Maybe one day we’ll get the opportunity to do an expanded version and show you guys the other things.

KL: What do you want people to know about the film or the effort to bring Summer of Soul to life that has not been covered?

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BITTERSWEET On Deepa Mehta's Funny Boy

by D’Lo

1.

When my sister friend and fellow actor Nimmi Harasgama told me she was auditioning for the role of Arjie’s mother in the adaptation of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (published in 1994), I was thrilled. I couldn’t believe the book I cherished was going to be made into a film, and not only that but a film that was going to be seen, because Deepa Mehta was going to direct it. Fire (1996), written and directed by Mehta, was the first South Asian lesbian movie I saw. Watching it made me realize there were other Brown gays in the world, even if they were movie characters. And way more importantly, it was the beginning of my mega crush on icon Shabana Azmi; I’ve always had a thing for aunties.

One of the most important books of my life was being made into a movie—know what a big deal that was? Let me fix up some Ceylonese tea for you. In the mid-1990s, I was a young stud/boi/in-the-life/gay-type Brown masc kid—we used “gay” as a catchall, much like “queer” is used today—kickin’ it with a crew of QTBIPOC folks from college in LA and the NYC arts community.

I read gay-ass poetry from the greats: Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other queer/feminist writers of color.

One day a friend of a friend asked if I had read Funny Boy, partly because I was Sri Lankan, but mostly because I was so damn gay my sweat tasted like

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Reading Funny Boy, I realized I was not the only Tamil Sri Lankan queer I knew anymore.

2.

Funny Boy was the first book by a South Asian author I held in my hands, and that it was penned

All Tamils know too well how little attention has been paid to the acts of genocide against our people, as we’re still in limbo waiting for disappeared relatives and justice. This film will raise awareness of a war that many don’t know existed, ongoing violations against a besieged population, and the lives that have been forever changed.

I wrote and shared this with Mehta and her team when asked to provide not feedback but reflections and responses as part of a pre-screening process.

While I didn’t lie, I lied in what I didn’t write.

3.

Like all good civil war stories, Sri Lanka’s started with the British. It’s page fortyseven in the colonizer’s playbook where we learn that preventing colonized people from revolting against you is best done through pitting them against each other. Anti-Tamil pogroms started before independence and kicked into high gear once independence was won in 1948.

For over thirty years, the resulting war took the lives of 200,000 people, the majority of them Tamils. Though it “ended” in 2009, over 100,000 Tamil people have been “disappeared” by the government, and many remain in militarized detainee camps.2 We lack resources to address the psychological trauma of our people, and until very recently, Sri Lanka’s Rajapakse regime has snuck by the UN like a little kid, saying “I didn’t do it” in response to allegations of human rights violations,3

2. UN Report, “Sri Lanka on alarming path towards recurrence of grave human rights violations,” January 27, 2021, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/ DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26695.

Jeezus Beezus,1 I almost couldn’t absorb how Selvadurai—who is both Tamil and Singhalese— wrote so beautifully, because he was writing about growing up in Sri Lanka, being “Tamil,” “gay,” about the “war,” and did I say “gay”?!

This book resonated with every South Asian I know who read it. And every immigrant. And every gay kid who was dealing with their “secret.”

by a Tamil queer writer made my head spin. As a transgender Ilangkai Tamil-American, I never thought I’d see the day that a film on this book would get made—queerness is still taboo in many Tamil communities. Arjie’s storyline, intertwined with his amma’s, drew me in, anchoring the film in difficult questions of identity and belonging.

Shout out to the incredibly talented actress Nimmi Harasgama who infused her character, Amma to Arjie, with such complexity and nuance.

1. Prior to this moment, I only read poetry or books assigned at school, though I repeatedly read Ramona Quimby books.

Skittles. I thought they were suggesting I read a bigoted Singhalese author. But they said it was about a Tamil gay. I thought they were ignorant. Hello?! When I told my amma, “I’m gay,” she said, “How? There are no gays in Sri Lanka.”

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4. “Sri Lanka: Fulfil the demands of the families of the disappeared,” Amnesty International, February 14, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ news/2020/02/sldisappearedfeb142020/.

3. On March 23, 2021, the UN Resolution on Human Rights in Sri Lanka adopted Resolution 46/1, which “establishes a powerful new accountability process to collect, analyze, and preserve evidence of international crimes committed in Sri Lanka for use in future prosecutions.” The resolution was strongly opposed by the Sri Lankan government, and activists have reported increased threats and harassment from the government in recent months. See: “Sri Lanka: Landmark UN Resolution Promotes Justice,” Human Rights Watch, March 25, 2021, https://www. hrw.org/news/2021/03/25/sri-lanka-landmark-un-resolution-promotes-justice#.

including violence, torture.4

abductions, sexual massacres, and

As a teenager, I was schooled and mentored by feminists of color and communists, but I was first politicized through my appa, when I was a child. I grew up with an evolving awareness that we Tamils weren’t wanted on the island, just as much as white folks didn’t want us in America, just as the world doesn’t want queer people to exist.

Even with the immense privilege granted by my family’s prewar migration, and of being American-born, it matters to me to be in deep and loving conversation and organizing spaces with my communities of Tamils, queer and otherwise, on the island and in the diaspora—just as I try to do with my BIPOC and queer communities. Like many in the diaspora, I am a politicized Ilangkai Tamil.

And yet, if I were given the opportunity to direct this film, I still wouldn’t assume that good intentions and filmmaking knowledge would be enough to make something that Tamil folks could be proud of, that they could own and claim as theirs in a world where there is little to claim for Ilangkai Tamils. I’d know that I’d need to do the work of listening and learning, especially because queer Tamil stories are rare.

4.

The film opens the same way the book does, with the memorable game of “bride-bride” between the siblings and cousins as young children. I loved it— it was sweet—but the misspoken Tamil and bad accents were jarring to get through. As I watched, I thought, It’s OK, D. We can’t always expect to see ourselves represented correctly. At least it’s Tamil they’re speaking. With my own receptive bilingualism in play, I was disappointed that

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barely any of the Tamil registered as a Colombo or even Jaffna Tamil dialect.

Throughout the film, seeing Nimmi on screen filled me with so much joy. Not only was she bravely representing us, but she was doing a damn good job at it! Nimmi is one of the most versatile actors I know, and the depth she went to in this role of Amma was enchanting to watch as a fellow actor. I was puffed up with pride. It was really Amma’s character arc I was most invested in because of her inner conflict, her wanting to love her son more than she wants to judge him, wanting to stand up for Jegan more than she wants to keep up with the expectations of being a high-society woman. All the while she knows that her Tamil-ness, and her son’s queerness, keeps her on a thin rope in Sri Lankan society.

Watching her contend with her position as a mother and Tamil woman was what made the film gel for me. I can only imagine what magic Nimmi would’ve been able to do if the omitted parts of the book made it into the film.

Still, the scenes leading to the re-enactment of Black July were painful, and I started crying unexpectedly. These are the stories of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, the organized targeting of Tamil people and property—looting their homes, chasing them in the streets and on trains, setting Tamils on fire. Even if one didn’t personally experience this, this devastation is engraved in all Ilangkai Tamils’ minds and hearts because of the sheer amount of stories we have heard, and the trauma that is still unhealed. I applaud the film for not shying away from these events.

When the credits rolled, I was surprised to see that the main characters were played by actors

who were not Ilangkai Tamil; in fact the

After the movie, I was finished. I felt a range of emotions. I was happy a film was finally highlighting the violent and destructive Singhalese nationalism that Tamil people have had to endure and fight against. I felt joy that my talented friend Nimmi did incredibly well, and this role could help her career.

But what do I tell folks? This movie made me feel erased.

5.

I’m writing this now because I am learning how to center my own complicated and complex emotions and thoughts, how to avoid letting fear take over and silence me.

majority were played by Singhalese actors. While I have heard Mehta boast that 50% of the side and background actors were Tamil, Nimmi—who is Singhalese and Tamil—was the only Ilangkai Tamil playing one of the main characters.

Thankfully, after more pushback against the questionable spoken Tamil, Mehta went on to “dub” the movie to improve the pronunciation and spoken Tamil, as well as the English with a Colombo accent, though reportedly the dubbing process had its issues.5 The version that went to Netflix is the dubbed version, and while it is an improvement, I believe the movie was recut to accommodate the dub.

5. Sharanya Manivannan, “‘Funny Boy’ and the Indian Tamil Gaze on Ilankai Tamils,” Medium, Nov 15, 2020, https://medium.com/@sharanya.manivannan/ funny-boy-and-the-indian-tamil-gaze-on-ilankai-tamils-2bf1f18e66a4.

Once the trailer was released, with its inaccurate Colombo and Jaffna English accents and Tamil, the backlash from mostly Tamil communities started. The Tamil dialect issue was brought to Mehta before the movie’s Netflix release in December 2020. I heard through friends that Mehta initially pushed back on this critique—she’d had a dialect coach involved. But dialect coaching is not a short process; it takes months, and sometimes years, to master.

But aside from the Tamil dialect issues, and amid the backdrop of so many Tamil

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awaiting this felt thoroughly

movie’s puzzled:

why were Tamils erased from a movie that was supposed to have spotlighted u s , only to be replaced by mostly

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Indians, or Singhalese actors—the very communities who have caused so much harm to us throughout the war?

7. Jackson Weaver, “Why representation in Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy has some in the Tamil community upset,” CBC News, November 17, 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/ news/entertainment/funny-boy-tamilrepresentation-1.5804302.

eagerly I still

6. Anindita Ghose, “‘No point casting someone politically correct who can’t act’: Deepa Mehta,” Mint Lounge, May 12, 2020, https://lifestyle.livemint. com/how-to-lounge/movies-tv/-nopoint-casting-someone-politicallycorrect-who-can-t-act-deepamehta-111607155728343.html.

people release,

I have heard Mehta make both plausible statements and questionable excuses about how this film was made. In one article, she is quoted saying, “There is no point casting someone politically correct who can’t I’ve also act.”6 heard her say that it was more important for her that Arjie was played by a gay person than a Tamil person.

Selvadurai has concurred.7 In various interviews, Mehta shared that she tried to cast a Tamil actor for the role, but the actors she found either had schedule c o n f l i c t s or weren’t comfortable playing a gay person. I know many gay Ilangkai Tamil actors who never even heard about a casting call for Funny Boy. The net could’ve been thrown out wider.

6.

I know that women-of-color directors are rare. I also know that films are hard to get produced, and that once you’re shooting, it is a race against the clock. I do believe that Mehta really thought she was doing the best thing for Tamil people—taking her standing as a Canada-backed filmmaker to do another Canadian artist justice by having his beloved book turned into a film. She probably knew that no one else would be bold enough to even touch a book about Sri Lanka, and that she should because she could.

I want this filmmaking story to become an example for filmmakers, especially filmmakers of color: representation matters, from the actors playing each role, to the way they speak their lines. I’m not saying that our art needs to be a direct response to injustice, but we should aim to not create more injustice.

I have respect for the artist she is, but I wonder how her process for casting and dialect direction in Funny Boy is any different from that of a white director who thinks their good intentions are all that is needed to make a meaningful film. I know she’s had her struggles, as the majority of BIPOC artists in the industry have, but I have a deeper desire for all of us film directors and creators to do better by the communities we are being called to represent, and the stories and nuances therein they’re seeking to shed light on.

Can we humbly be in dialogue around these painful subjects—where there is vulnerability from all sides, and space for us all to be moving forward? It is only through these relationships that our art gets stronger and our communities grow stronger.

Had I been the director, I would’ve cultivated raw talent over a weathered actor, so the character would be played by someone from that marginalized group. And just as I would never cast a cis person to play a trans role, I would also never cast an Israeli to play a Palestinian.

I would have engaged in community story circles way earlier, like we do in community-based theater, like we do in writers’ rooms with trusted collaborators. I would’ve made sure that while Selvadurai and his book were uplifted, we were also doing right by a larger community of Tamil people and queer people who could’ve, should’ve, been able to be prouder of this film adaptation.

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Politics of the Gaze, 2020. Screenshot courtesy of Janaína Oliveira.

by Janaína Oliveira 84

1. Girish Shambu, “For a New Cinephilia,” Film Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2019): 32-34.

In debates about film curatorship, it is common to return to the Latin origin of the word, curare, to reaffirm the purpose of the curator’s work: curating as caring or looking after; curating as zeal.

The role of this profession in cinema is relatively contemporary, as are the debates and formulations by film scholars or programmers on the subject.

These conversations are not born out of traditional film culture, which sees curatorship as a practice legitimized by traditional cinephilia (that is to say, the European film culture that arose during the second half of the twentieth century, developed around the centrality of the idea of authorship), but instead out of conversations among those who historically were marginalized by hegemonic cinema.1

Only in recent years has the field attempted to demystify the erudition required to be a film curator and produce reflections that openly consider curatorial activities as indisputable exercises of power. Yet even when considering curatorial activity as a gesture of care, and thus combatting these dynamics, it is necessary to ask whom this work benefits. In the history of film festivals, curatorial choices often represent trauma much more than care, particularly for nonhegemonic filmmakers and audiences who are mainly not of European descent or male.

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Until recently, mainstream Brazilian cinema and its big festivals had long maintained the racism and discrimination that unfortunately mark Brazilian society. My activities as a curator stem from a deep dissatisfaction with the negative, or absent, repertoire of images featuring Black populations on screens. These sentiments are echoed by most of my Black curatorial colleagues with whom I have spoken through Politics of the Gaze, a series of conversations held over the last two years, dedicated to exploring curatorial practices among Black curators from different parts of Brazil and around the world. The series happens during the annual Encontro de Cinema Negro Zózimo Bulbul: Brasil, África, e Caribe (Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival: Brazil, Africa, and the Caribbean).

Created in 2007 by Zózimo Bulbul, then already considered the pioneer of Black cinema in Brazil, the festival became the most important exhibition for Black films in Latin America.2 The Encontro was born in Bulbul’s late seventies as a platform for African and African-descended films. It was

people in the country had come to expect.

My career trajectory was born out of my desire to contribute to ending this invisibility in the field through collaboration, undeniably inspired by Bulbul’s initiatives. Thus, curating is a twofold activity for me. Firstly, it is a form of intervention, as I join Bulbul in his aspiration to make exhibition spaces less exclusive so that films from different places, perspectives, and positionalities can be seen, appreciated, and discussed. Simultaneously, it is an attempt to move beyond the trauma and healing lexicon and think of curating as a gesture of offering.5 This is literal in the sense that everyone can take what they want from the experience being proposed by the curatorial project, because its main gesture is to create opportunities for access and fruition. This is presented in each film session, in each debate, and each training activity that may be part of the program, emphasizing the relational possibilities and the dialogues presented on each occasion.

5. Formulating my curatorial practice as an offering was an image that came to me after listening to Cauleen Smith in an audio recording for the show Radical Acts of Care, curated by Greg de Cuir Jr. in 2020 for the Media City Film Festival.

This sentiment rings especially true regarding cinema in Brazil—the place where I was born, and where I live and work today.

An example of these dynamics are the editions of the Encontro that I have programmed since 2018.

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also founded to ensure that Black Brazilian films had a place to be seen, reflected upon, and embraced by local audiences. After Bulbul died in 2013, the festival was curated by filmmaker Joelzito Araújo. In 2017, Araújo invited me to share this role with him, a position I have held since then.3 The continuing of Bulbul’s legacy of curatorship is defined by gestures of embracing.4 He carved a path for curatorial processes in Brazil, particularly for them to stop being synonymous with invisibility or misrepresentation, which Black

Following the approach proposed by Bulbul, the festival remains the main national platform for Black films; in the most recent edition, seventy Afro-Brazilian films were shown (sixty-three shorts and seven feature films) in just ten days.6 It is always a challenge to organize the festival in a way that sufficiently probes the panorama of contemporary Black film production, always bearing in mind the country’s continental extension as well as the multiplicity of cinematic genres that are now being explored by the filmmakers. This ensures that the films can be experienced as art objects, rather than presumptuous reflections of what is assumed to be Black life or of what traditionally is expected of “a Black film.” My intention as a curator has increasingly been to progress the field of

6. In total, 120 films were programmed in 2020. Among the international ones, there were eleven feature films and thirty-nine short and medium-length films.

4. An example of this perspective is the absence of awards or any competition. According to Bulbul, “Black people should not compete with each other.”

3. I worked with Joelzito Araújo in 2017 and 2018, and filmmaker Carmen Luz in 2019 and 2020. Anthropologist and curator Ana Paula Alves Ribeiro became my partner in this endeavor.

2. See the article I wrote for the dossier on New Brazilian Cinema for Film Quarterly magazine to learn more about Bulbul’s pioneering spirit and its relevance to contemporary Black cinema production: Janaína Oliveira, “With the Alma No Olho: Notes on Contemporary Black Cinema,” Film Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2020): 32-38.

My activities as a curator stem from a deep dissatisfaction with the negative, or absent,

7. Along the lines proposed by Michael Boyce Gillespie and his idea that Black film represents a vast abundance instead of closed hermeneutics, in Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

programming through discussions that foster reflection and expand aesthetic paths beyond the axes of representation and representativeness.7

When Bulbul created the Encontro, there were a minimal number of Black Brazilian films. Since then, as a result of decades of struggle by Movimento Negro (the Brazilian Black movements), and educational global policies between 2003 and 2016—when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff served as presidents—a generation of young filmmakers has emerged. And with them, an interested public seeking out the growing repertoire concerning cinema of the African continent and its diaspora has developed. Thus, my practice is traversed by the desire to interact with these two expanding spheres: filmmakers and the public.

To develop this relationship, the curator introduces academic and educational means in an attempt to strengthen and expand the Black cinema movement throughout the nation.8 My understanding of this movement is constructed by its potentialities and weaknesses. I also navigate the curatorial process in relation to the experiences that I have developed working on

aforementioned talk series, Politics of the Gaze: Dialogues about Curation and Decolonization.

The sessions were conceived to be formative immersions, to exchange experiences about practices and trajectories. As I always say in my presentation of the series, decolonizing curatorship involves demystifying the practice, if that is possible at all. That’s why the first thing I ask

10. The experimental cinema programs had hosted Christopher Harris, Kevin Jerome Everson, Terence Nance, and Naima Ramos-Chapman as guests. Cauleen Smith also had films shown in the 2018 and 2019 programs.

exhibitions and festivals abroad. Likewise, I’m convinced that any real change toward a more equitable film industry (from production to reception) can only be made by mobilizing new cinematic references and by the presence of people with noncanonical approaches to talking about them. The Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival has been imbued with this spirit through sessions that gradually become permanent parts of the regular program, such as a space dedicated to film criticism;9 experimental cinema sessions and master classes;10 and panels about archives and Black audiovisual memory in Africa and the diaspora. The most recent example is the

9. This discussion on Black and critical cinema was the first to occur in a systematic way in Brazil during a panel with Claire Diao, Heitor Augusto, and Juliano Gomes in 2018. In the subsequent two editions of the Encontro, we started to hold workshops given by Kênia Freitas, a film critic, curator, and one of the greatest Afrofuturism tourism experts in the country.

8. I developed this idea more deeply in Oliveira, “With the Alma No Olho,” 32-38.

repertoire of images featuring Black populations on screens. the guests is to explain how and why they started programming films. As simple as it appears to be, this gesture is always mentioned as fundamental when we receive feedback from the audience. As there is practically no training for film curation in Brazil, the series offers a rare space for exchanges and for the audience to get closer to the craft.

The first edition of Politics of the Gaze happened in 2019 at the Rio

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Decolonizing curatorship involves demystifying the practice.

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14. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2015). “Spaces of agency exists for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relation of power learns experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to the document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations – one learns to look in a certain way in order to resist,” hooks writes.

these festivals, the Negritude Infinita, compiles Black cinematic programs Cinema Negro No Brasil,” CASAMATA, http://www.acasamata.com/conectar/ Kênia Freitas, “How the Machine Works: Brazil’s Black Cinema Series,” Film 54-60.

13. “Associação Dos Profissionais Do Audiovisual Negro,” APAN, http://www.apan.com.br.

One of the most important results of the Politics of the Gaze series, besides being a source of inspiration for young generations of Black Brazilian film curators, is its ability to put forward debates about programming at other, often hegemonic film festivals. Through its fourteen years of existence, the Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival continues to honor its founder’s vision

11. Quilombo is a Bantu word used in Brazil to define maroon communities.

In 2020, with the Encontro taking place exclusively online, I and the other festival administrators found that the best option to have more productive interactions was to host discussions with each programmer instead of panels or roundtables.

The choice was due to the challenge of creating nonexhaustive engagement strategies in the online format while simultaneously conducting deeper conversations, each of which are difficult to achieve in more collective formats. Amir George, Ashley Clark, Chioma Onyenwe, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Maori Karmael Holmes, Tatiana Carvalho da Costa, and Tessa Boerman participated in that edition.

of being both a place of resistance (a quilombo of cinema, as Bulbul used to say)11 and of vanguard, where we collaborate to change the national cinema landscape. Now there are at least eighteen Black film festivals in Brazil, all with Black curators helming their programs.12 A great part of those initiatives emerged from conversations and meetings that happened during the Bulbul festival’s previous editions. Not only were film festivals generated there, but also broader initiatives related to the film industry in Brazil—for instance, the foundation of the first and only national Association of Black Film Professionals in 2016. By the end of 2020, it had 643 members and ninety associated film companies.13 The Encontro relieves film professionals’ needs to create in the cinema what bell hooks calls “spaces of agency.”14 12. A map created by one of in Brazil: “Mapa Difusão Do mapadocinemanegro. See also Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2020):

Art Museum, with the participation of Alia Ayman, Carmen Luz, Cornelius Moore, Greg de Cuir Jr., Heitor Augusto, Jon-Sesrie Goff, Kênia Freitas, Liliana Angulo, Mansour Sora Wade, Rhea Combs, and Séverine Catelion. For three consecutive mornings, the invited curators discussed the central questions in their practices and their perceptions about the challenges of choosing and programming films. This was a collective exercise on the politics of the gaze, of thinking about the possibilities of decolonizing these processes.

I like to think of the offerings presented by my own curatorial practices as invitations to engage in epistemological displacements. By this, I

Politics of the Gaze, 2019. Left to right: Liliana Angulo (Colombia), Carmen Luz (Brazil), Jon Goff (USA), Greg de Cuir Jr (USA), Raquel Souza (Brazil, translator), Rhea Combs (USA), Kênia Freitas (Brazil), Heitor Augusto (Brazil), Janaína Oliveira (Brazil), Viviane Ferreira (Brazil, Encontro's Artistic Director), Kevin Jerome Everson (USA), Cornelius Moore (USA). In Rio Art Museum. Photo courtesy of Janaína Oliveira.

Politics of the Gaze 2020 social media promos. Images courtesy of Janaína Oliveira.

mean not only academic formats of knowledge, but also a broader sense of information sharing, including those that Eurocentric schools of thought usually qualify as less relevant. I believe that a shift in the ways we understand the world and the moving images—a shift built with reflections, films, and, above all, the presence of non-white/ hegemonic groups at all levels of decision-making spaces—will allow not only Black but Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and other film cultures to exist without the fetters of exoticism or tokenization. This sort of revolution will transform the landscape of film circuits so that the frequent lack of diversity—

whether in terms of race, gender, or locality—in most festivals and cinema industries will begin to recede. And then, finally, curating as a craft will be able to reconnect with its etymological origins and become, for us all, a gesture of care.

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Joiri Minaya, Container #4, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

by Dessane Lopez Cassell 91

There’s a certain current of mischief that runs through Joiri Minaya’s work.

Whether employing collage, installation, or performance, the artist often tackles several weighty isms simultaneously— racism, colonialism, exoticism, extractive capitalism—but with a delivery that evinces a sly humor.

Joiri Minaya. Photo by Simon Benjamin.

Take, for example, The Cloaking (2019), a public art project commissioned by Fringe Projects Miami, for which Minaya covered statues of Ponce de Leon and Christopher Columbus in brightly patterned fabric of her own design. There’s something deeply funny about the sight of these two notorious conquistadors—each genocidal in their own right—sheathed completely in lush florals. Each grandiose statue and violent legacy reduced to sort of a blob on a Miami street, accented by awkward bulges. The irony turns prophetic when you consider the timing of Minaya’s project: mounted in December 2019, her

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Joiri Minaya, Encubrimiento, Parque Colón, Santo Domingo, 2020. Photo by Sofía Marcos.

artistic intervention was in some ways a bellwether of the monument toppling and defacement that would continue amid the uprisings of 2020.

In projects such as this one, Minaya wields the veneer of “tropical” beauty skillfully, with a full awareness of its ability to attract and disarm.

Her art traffics in bright hues, verdant foliage, and coquettish fantasy, luring the viewer like a Venus fly trap. Yet rather than snap the jaws shut, Minaya’s objects and images invite you to squirm a little in your own complicity, instilling an awareness of the raced and gendered

dynamics of consumption that underpin much of contemporary image production.

Ironically, Minaya didn’t start out trying to be funny, not with The Cloaking or many other projects, though she’s always admired the bite of stand-up. Humor is a strategy she’s come to embrace more recently. “It’s also [a way of] making the monuments more ridiculous. I feel humor can also work like beauty,” she explains, as we chat about the allure of each quality—the way they can provide appealing entry points to ideas that might otherwise feel daunting.

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Minaya’s work is certainly replete with visual pleasure. The aforementioned patterns, for example, feature hand-drawn castor plants, manchineel trees, and yaupon holly set against fern green and sky blue backgrounds. Each leaf rendered in lush color and detail. The artist has been designing her own fabrics for several years now, perhaps a natural consequence of a childhood spent surrounded by the brightly hued prints that line the aisles of her mother’s clothing store in Santo Domingo. Yet Minaya’s designs reflect an intentional pivot from the ubiquitous hibiscus flowers that have long been co-opted for the “tropical” patterns of souvenir shirts and fast fashion—a method of commodification that the artist sees as an extension of the legacy of colonialism. Heavily influenced by her ongoing research into ethnobotany, Minaya’s patterns feature what she terms “plants of resistance,” flora that are local or endemic to the Caribbean, with long histories of traditional or medicinal use by Indigenous and Afro-diasporic peoples.

Minaya wields the veneer of “tropical” beauty skillfully, with a full awareness of its ability to attract and disarm.

Her performance-turned–photo series Containers (2015-2020) utilizes these patterns for satirical ends. In these images, Minaya and her collaborators don vibrant handmade bodysuits that contort the wearer into physically awkward or

the one she prefers for herself as a “Dominican United Statesian” multidisciplinary artist. Born in New York to Dominican parents, Minaya grew up in Santo Domingo, the Caribbean city that was once the capital of the first Spanish

This deployment of pattern and tropicality to decolonial ends has been a running theme in Minaya’s work for years now. “I just like messing things up whenever I can, in a critical way,” she grins. We’re chatting about labels, specifically

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2. For more resources on understanding the way in which dominant histories have unjustly maligned Haiti as an occupying force or threat to Dominican sovereignty, see Milagros Ricourt’s The Dominican Racial Imaginary (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016) and Anne Eller’s We Dream Together (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

uncomfortable positions, their poses recalling the odalisques of art history or the ubiquitous crouch of your tia’s vacation photos on Facebook. Shot on beaches or amid lush foliage, each image mocks the fantasy that underpins those picture-perfect renderings of the tropics. Paradise to Minaya is always fake, a reflection of the “economic, political, and social relations of power that keep postcolonial countries and the Global South bound to the Global North,” as the Caribbean scholar Angelique V. Nixon writes. 1

1. Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017).

“I just like messing things up whenever colony in the Americas, and thus the gateway to the “New World.”

It’s a place that maintains a complicated relationship to its own colonial history, perhaps best illuminated by the fact that the Dominican Republic is the only country in the region that officially commemorates its independence from a neighbor, Haiti, and not from a European power.2 In 2021, Minaya’s work hit this nail of contradiction on its head.

She cloaked a particularly famous Dominican colonial monument— the Columbus statue in Santo

Joiri Minaya, Container #7, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

I can, in a critical way,” Minaya grins.

4. Ricourt 2016, 79.

A collaboration with independent curator Yina Jiménez Suriel and local council member Mario Sosa, the intervention invited passersby to “reflect on which figures and events we monumentalize and which we do not, and more specifically—why do we have a sculpture denigrating our cacique [chief] Anacaona at

the feet of Christopher Columbus in one of the most important places in our city?”3 Indeed, the partial cloaking of the monument does highlight its positioning of Anacaona—literally at Columbus’s feet. With stunning efficiency, the monument’s composition enshrines both patriarchy and Western supremacy in national myth: back turned to the viewer, Anacaona is shown writing, her words extolling the “enlightened” colonizer above her. No mention is made of the Xaragua massacre in 1503, when she and hundreds of her people were slaughtered by the Spanish government.4

3. Instagram post by Joiri Minaya, January 18, 2021 (translation by the author).

Domingo’s stately Parque Colón—in one of her signature fabrics. Fittingly, the cloth employed to cover the popular tourist stop was blood red and adorned with bixa, guao, tobacco, guayacan, cassava, aji, and ceiba—plants historically used by enslaved Taínos and Africans to both nourish their communities and actively fight colonizing forces. (Guao, for example, also known as carrasco, is poisonous to many and can inflict a rash akin to a chemical burn.)

Minaya’s incisive project prompted a bit of a reckoning on social media. It drew praise and support from many who are

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Joiri Minaya, #dominicanwomengooglesearch, installation view at the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, 2016. Photo by Stefan Hagen.

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7. “UNWTO World Tourism Barometer Interim Update” (PDF). 2013. UNWTO World Tourism Barometer. UNWTO.

6. Thompson 2007, 6.

Much of Minaya’s work picks apart ideas of “tropical paradise”—that myth of an idyllic, exotic elsewhere first peddled

by British colonial administrators and their conspirators in Jamaica and the Bahamas in the 1880s, at a time when the colonial imagination equated the Caribbean with fatal disease.

Employing photography, often disseminated in postcard form, their campaigns to sanitize the islands’ public image would produce a “tropicalization” effect, a set of visual systems that imaged, packaged, and promoted the region for the purpose of touristic consumption, picking up right where the plantation system left off.5 As the art historian Krista A. Thompson notes, “A very particular concept of what a tropical Caribbean island should look like developed in the visual economies of tourism.”6 Sweeping vistas and picturesque, civilized “natives” promised a safe, sunny getaway for those looking to spend tourist dollars, pounds, or francs.

5. Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

likewise invested in peeling back the colonial veneer of dominant Caribbean histories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Santo Domingo Cloaking also drew the ire of those Trumpian sectors of Dominican society invested in “protecting” such monuments from “los progres.” Their condemnation of the intervention as an assault on Dominican history underlines the fraught dynamics of empire and erasure that underpin Minaya’s own rejection of the term “American” in relation to her identity, and her broader approach to art making. She favors a more inclusive conception of the Americas—and thus “Americanness”—as plural, though she readily admits the futility of trying to rehabilitate a colonial term.

Minaya’s work is steeped in the aftermath of such myth making. As we chat over video call on a blustery winter afternoon, she sits surrounded by a sea of pixelated limbs, remnants of her 2016 installation #DominicanWomenGoogleSearch adhered to the walls of her studio. First installed at Wave Hill in the Bronx, the project skewers the

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very notion of the exotic “other” as it has long been imposed on the bodies of Black and Brown women—that neocolonial gaze that imagines us as simultaneously sexy, submissive, and available, as well as always arching our backs. Sun-kissed shoulders and stray limbs crossed ever so sensually hang floating in space, swaying from clear wire to reveal the vibrant floral patterns printed on their reverse. Sourced from the image results of the titular search terms Minaya began typing into her browser, these parts of poses index popular (read: fetishizing) perceptions of Dominican femininity. Like so much that circulates online, there’s a flattening effect—a formula of café con leche skin, hourglass figures, and dark curls that feeds into stock image repositories and sites like hotlatinbrides.org. #DominicanWomenGoogleSearch is one of many works that grew out of the awkward yet formative experiences the artist had when she first moved back to New York in 2013. After earning an associate’s degree from the prestigious Altos de Chavón School of Design in DR, Minaya continued studying fine arts at Parsons. In classes and moving through the city, she became increasingly aware of how frequently people would associate the Dominican Republic—and by extension Dominican women—with ideas of paradise and vacation. (For years now, the country has ranked

Like so much that circulates online, there’s a flattening effect—a formula of café con leche skin, hourglass figures, and dark curls.

among the most popular tourist destinations in the Caribbean, making it perhaps unsurprising how deeply campaigns promising “fun in the sun” have infiltrated foreign perceptions of Dominican culture.7) “Especially as a woman of color,” Minaya explains, “there’s this expectation of a certain type of pleasing attitude […] all of these things that kind of boil down to entertainment.” Her brow furrows a bit as she mulls the lopsided dynamics of power and privilege that persist between “locals” and tourists, both on and off the island.

A collage from her postcard series Vacation Stories from Online Dating Catalogues (2015) critiques these “expectations” directly. Here Minaya

That arch of the back or flip of the hair that’s been repeated ad infinitum, an embodied echo of the classic palm tree motif bowing towards the horizon.

Joiri Minaya, Vacation Stories from Online Dating Catalogues #2, 2015, archival ink on paper (5 x 7 in limited edition) or digital print on postcard paper (4 x 6 in open edition). Image courtesy of artist.

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lampoons the unending stream of white dudes that flock to the Caribbean for sex tourism, via the

Minaya’s works revel in a brazen form of femme sexuality, thumbing their

Joiri Minaya, Continuum, 2020, archival pigment print (11 x 14 in). Image courtesy of artist.

very medium that has historically played such an outsized role in promoting the region and its people as things available for (mostly) white European and US consumption.

Appropriating a photograph from an exoticizing online dating site—also found via Google image

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search, a core source for the artist—Minaya’s version of the image converts the four women’s bodies to blank silhouettes. They’re no longer the focus here. The lone middle-aged male figure in

nose at that other suffocating gaze of respectability.

the background stands out in sharp relief, the sight of his sunburnt smirk rendered all the more comical in isolation.

To be clear, Minaya’s critiques are not directed at sex workers or anyone who employs their body to make a living. She’s more interested in probing the metrics that feed these economies of desire— that formula that dictates what a certain type of gaze finds attractive and therefore consumable: that arch of the back or flip of the hair that’s been repeated ad infinitum, an embodied echo of the classic palm tree motif bowing toward the horizon.

8. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 39.

We chat at one point about her affection for Tokischa, a queer Dominican trap artist who’s become notorious for her acidic freestyles and explicit, trippy music videos—joyous, rhythmic odes to her love of pussy, molly, and weed. Like Tokischa’s, many of Minaya’s works revel in a brazen form of femme sexuality, thumbing their nose at that other suffocating gaze of respectability. More recent collages like Continuum (2020) likewise reflect an interest in complicating the tired “exploitation vs. empowerment” binary. Superimposing an image of a bikini-clad Black woman over a sepia-toned ethnographic photograph, Minaya’s print blurs the distinction between present and past. Framed by palm fronds, the woman’s figure is slick and erotically posed.

Arms behind her head, her contrapposto hips meld into a pair of disembodied legs from another era, tracing a direct line from anthropological and touristic images that froze Caribbean people into timeless “natives” and more contemporary gazes that flatten us into exotic vacation companions.

As in #DominicanWomenGoogleSearch, the contemporary image in Continuum is grainy and pixelated, blurring individual features (a means of shielding individual identities)

and breaking down distinctions between consumer and producer, author and audience, á la Hito Steyerl’s “poor image.”8 This “blown out” aesthetic, as Minaya calls it, is one the artist gravitates toward for its almost painterly qualities. This makes sense, given the fact that she originally trained as a painter. It was when Minaya got to Parsons that she shifted gears to focus on “everything that was not painting,” taking advantage of the interdisciplinary program that she credits with pushing her practice in new directions. During those early years, she started working in performance and video, soon after creating works like Siboney (2014), a performance for the camera that exorcises both the art historical baggage of painting and the exoticism often mapped onto bodies like hers.

Clueless phrases like “Where are you from?” appear as subtitles while Minaya sets up and executes an elaborate egg tempera painting of a tropical pattern on a gallery wall, a harbinger of her later work. As Connie Francis’s rendition of “Siboney” begins to play, another subtitle reads, “I’ve seen the way you look at me,” as Minaya gazes back at the viewer. “But I’m not here for you.” Dousing herself in water, she employs her own body to wipe away her elaborate handiwork, sliding unceremoniously from side to side. The artist and her evocations of the tropical are not meant for your consumption, neither then nor now.

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Curators Erin Christovale and Meg Onli Discuss Their

Ulysses Jenkins in studio circa 1983. Image courtesy of the artist.

Retrospective Peace and Anwar Sadat (1986). Still courtesy of artist Ulysses Jenkins.

Forthcoming

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Ulysses

Jenkins

of

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Photo documentation of Columbus Day: A Doggerel (1980) at LACE. Image courtesy of artist Ulysses Jenkins.

Self Divination (1989). Still courtesy of Ulysses Jenkins.

Over the past fifty years, Ulysses Jenkins, an artist born and based in Los Angeles, has produced a remarkable body of work that interrogates constructions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history, and the power of the state. His work—documentary, public access television, music, video, performance, and other visual arts— encapsulates a fusion of forms to conjure vibrant meditations on how image, sound, and cultural iconography inform representation. From Jenkins’s work with Video Venice News, an LA media collective he founded in the early 1970s, to his involvement with the artist group Studio Z (alongside David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Maren Hassinger), to his individual video and performance works with Othervisions Studio, he has consistently and explicitly countered the embedding of white supremacy in popular culture.

In September 2021 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, we will collaboratively stage the first major retrospective of Jenkins’s work, Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation, which will then travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in January 2022. In this conversation, the two of us reflect on curating the exhibition and Jenkins’s impact on generations of artists.

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Video is a more democratic medium and, in many ways, synonymous with documenting Black quotidian life. We continue to see that legacy in the work of the artists [Ulysses] has influenced.

said, “You and your friends should do a show on Ulysses. I think it would be wonderful.” That was one of the first moments in my curatorial history I was given permission, by someone I respected in the field, to do the work I wanted to do.

What about you?

Meg Onli: How did you first encounter Ulysses’s work?

Erin Christovale: The first time I encountered Ulysses’s work was in the landmark show Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, curated by Dr. Kellie Jones in 2011. The show featured Black artists working in LA from the 1970s to the 1990s, but more broadly, it was one of the first shows that presented wide-sweeping scholarship of an older generation of Black artists.

Ulysses was the only video artist in that show, and that really stood out to me. At the time, I was actively thinking through Black experimental moving image with my ongoing project Black Radical Imagination, so the discovery of this artist whose work wasn’t widely recognized or easily classifiable was hugely important for me.

The same year, I met Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, founders of the Otolith Group. Once, over dinner, we bonded over Ulysses and our shared sense of his importance as an artist. Shortly after, I got an email from Kodwo, which basically

MO: Now Dig This! is a seminal exhibition to my curatorial practice. Especially given that you and I are both from Los Angeles, Dr. Jones had uncovered an entire history that I’d been so hungry for. I paid a lot of money to go to art school, and I remember seeing the show and feeling frustrated: What? I totally missed all of this.

The next time I saw Ulysses’s work was at the Whitney’s reopening exhibition, America Is Hard to See (2015), which screened his films Without Your Interpretation (1983) and Mass of Images (1978). Later I realized that I drove past his murals on my way to school as a kid and that some of his public access work was filmed blocks away from my childhood home. By the time I started working at the ICA and Alex Klein curated Broadcasting: EAI at ICA, Ulysses was a person I was thinking seriously about.

Erin, you and I have often talked about Ulysses as the forefather to the practices of so many people we are invested in—folks such as Aria Dean, who’s written about Ulysses’s work, and Martine

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[Ulysses] understands that there's no way to completely escape the stereotypical ways we have been represented in media.

So instead, he Syms, Sondra Perry, and Jibade-Khalil Huffman, who are all making video work that seems to be in dialogue with Ulysses’s. It is important to look back and chart that history, especially given the way Black experimental artists have come to the forefront in art spaces and independent film spaces in recent years, putting forward radically different modalities of moving-image making.

EC:Ulysses committed to video as a format at the same time it was introduced to the public— it’s highly ephemeral, malleable, and most importantly, it’s affordable. In contrast, when considering the history of film, numerous Black artists and artists of color have not had the opportunity to explore cinema because of structural barriers in the production process.

Video is a more democratic medium and, in many ways, synonymous with documenting Black quotidian life. We continue to see that legacy in the work of the artists he has influenced.

MO: His work with video makes so much sense. I’d argue that a major theme within Ulysses’s oeuvre is his constant examination of what he calls “the same old image problem.” He is always investigating and challenging Black representation within popular media. He understands that there’s no way to completely escape the stereotypical ways we have been represented in media. So instead, he tinkers, pokes, and prods. He’s such a prankster, you know?

Erin, your catalog text examines Ulysses’s view of multiculturalism, which to me feels like such a reflection of growing up in Los Angeles. How do you see that appearing within his work?

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tinkers, pokes, and prods.

EC: As he is thinking about and working with Native and Indigenous folks and Latinx artists like Rudy Perez and Patssi Valdez, he is still doing so through the lens of a Black man in America.

Since cinema is so often shaped by a white gaze, his work provided a rare opportunity of seeing through a largely underrepresented perspective.

I think of ritual and spirituality as other major themes in his work. He reasserts those themes in his work, but in a way that’s so particular to his style. They are defining facets across origin stories and cultural markers that are uniquely reflected through video, as opposed to their erasure in the colonial legacies of cinema. He isn’t relying on older spiritual practices. He’s reimagining them in ways that point to both diaspora and multiculturalism.

Something I appreciate about California is that it provides the opportunity to live amongst and practice a multiculturalism that diverges from the typical neoliberal version we’ve been fed. Ulysses grew up in Culver City, not far from Desi Arnaz studios, with the film industry looming over him every day. I think he had a desire to respond as a video maker.

1. My forthcoming book, Blackness in the Hills and the Photographic Negative, delves into the unruliness of a Blackness in the Americas that binds itself to the land.

Other than the film industry, how have you felt Ulysses’s work interjects within the art world?

MO: Thinking about the fact that Ulysses has had almost no solo shows within his entire career is really a gut punch—to neglect someone of Ulysses’s caliber, his artistic practice, not to mention his deep pedagogical influence. We titled the show Without Your Interpretation after one of Ulysses’s videos, because he was often the only person interpreting his own work, due to the lack of critical attention to his practice. I was blown away talking to Ulysses about why he writes about his work from many angles. He responded, “No one else was writing about my work. How else could I bring people into the fold?”1 I think a lot of that is coming from biases against Black artists—even in Los Angeles at that time— but also bias against moving image work and how it is shown within institutions.

EC: Something reiterated by Ulysses and his peers is that they were not creating with the market or institutions in mind because those spaces were actively not welcoming them. That refusal of their work allowed them to come together in more intimate and radical ways. Ulysses is always excited to talk about all of his friends and collaborators who made work with him. It’s an amazing group of people who will also be present in this exhibition, such as Houston Conwill, May Sun, and Daniel Joseph Martinez.

In looking back over the history of his work and impact, we’re also contending with the widespread lack of historical grounding we have as curators, historians, artists, and thinkers to really engage critically with video art, and especially Black video art. On top of figuring out how museumgoers

will navigate exhibition spaces in light of the pandemic, we’re thinking a lot about audio and accessibility: headphones and black boxes, how light and sound interact with each other in these spaces.

MO: What do you want people to get from this show?

EC: I want his name etched in stone, because he deserves it. Many of his contemporaries have great careers with much recognition, and his work is equally as important. I’m honored to do this work now and with you, especially since he is an elder. That is a reality, and I want us to celebrate him while he’s still here.

MO: I hope people see his incredible practice and feel, as we do, that there’s something undeniable about Ulysses. He’s so compelling—his style, his fashion, his aesthetics. I’m excited people are ready to look at and appreciate the quality of Ulysses’s video work. It honestly makes me happy. His work always feels vibrant and bursting at the seams. I love the textures that he’s making visually. He’s also just fucking cool.

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Ulysses Jenkins. Image courtesy of the artist.

I

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want his name etched in

because he deserves

Ulysses Jenkins, Transportation Brought Art to the People, Los Angeles, 1976. Image courtesy of the artist.

stone it.

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by Rachell Morillo

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). Film still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

It is difficult to muster more than anger toward William O’Neal, whose betrayal of Chairman Fred Hampton facilitated his government-sanctioned murder. Even more so when you consider the long history of Black revolutionaries in the United States who have experienced violent, untimely ends. It is difficult to not see everything in black and white, right and wrong, or simply just all red.

What ambitions could turn two young Black men from Chicago into a fallen leader and his familiar traitor?

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) searches for justification behind the betrayal and reveals the brutal intimacy of the deception. Directed by Shaka King, the film is a historically accurate period piece with the dramatic flair and intricacy of a Scorsese crime thriller. Strewn with Biblical connotations, the film also likens the ascent of the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman (Daniel Kaluuya) and the treachery of O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) to the story of Jesus of Nazareth and Judas. In doing so, it provides a clear referent for audiences who may not be familiar with this particular story or its dynamics.

While the film investigates the personal aspects of this violation of trust well, not enough is done to focus attention on the true culprit: state mechanisms that pit one Black man against another. Furthermore, the film historicizes the political work of the Panthers in ways that can be harmful to ongoing struggles. While it is a riveting historical drama, Judas and the Black Messiah mimics but does not embody the antiauthoritarian values of the Party.

The film is successful because of the precision with which it splices and reframes the organization’s story. King uses evocative cinematography, textured audio, and meticulous sound design to present a studied, artistic take on tensions among Party members, other organizers, and the government.

The opening sequence, for example, cycles through a compilation of documentary footage, summarizing Party history while adding visual texture. Set to the rhythm of the Watts Prophets’ “Dem Niggers Ain’t Playing,” the sequence reminds audiences of the Party’s roots as part of a larger boom in revolutionary organizing.

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Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). Film still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

The supercut subtly emphasizes the Marxist practices and youthful Black urban aesthetic that distinguished the Panthers, laying a strong visual and sonic foundation for the rest of the film. Each frame that follows parrots the intimate framing and texture of archival images from the 1960s.

With its mix of archival audio, original scoring, and improvisational jazz, Judas and the Black Messiah’s sonic components set a somber tone befitting a good crime thriller. The soundtrack keeps apace with the urgency and fervor felt by each of the characters while remaining authentic to the time period. Similarly, the styling of the film captures the allure and edge of the Panther’s distinctive fashion, which remains an integral characteristic of the Party’s influence today.

Costuming is also employed to evocatively render the arc of a character’s story. Sartorial

decisions illustrate O’Neal’s transformation from street kid to paid informant, and the journey of Deborah Johnson (Hampton’s partner, played

by Dominique Fishback) from college student to comrade to expectant mother.

Each formal decision makes audiences aware that King, as well as the rest of the team, spent time immersed in the lives of their subjects—touching their clothes, looking at their images, listening to their music. Yet the filmmakers stop short of breaking with Hollywood convention. Months, and even years, are condensed and edited into minutes; composite characters stand in for complex individuals; and stylization glamorizes rough and bloody struggles. As is typical, the grit and messiness of political organizing is cleansed for the sake of a thrilling yet digestible nostalgic narrative.

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Above and right: Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). Film still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Can 114

we

revere

fallen

leaders

without

exalting

martyrdom?

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O’Neal learns that what is true for Hampton is also true for himself, that what you give your life to is what you will die for.

Driven by generations of struggle, Hampton is unequivocal in his dedication to justice.

Kaluuya portrays him as the galvanizing but lambasting force he was: uniting, on one hand, the leftist, communist, and anti-war movements, and on the other, a divisive figure who often alienated people from his own communities. The film highlights the fact that it was precisely this unique ability to both stir and unite the people that made Hampton “the single greatest threat” to state operations, according to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, framed in the film as a Pontius Pilate.

Moving beyond his enigmatic persona, the film sheds light on intimate moments rife with anxiety and tender hope. Witnessing the chairman’s deepest fears and personal struggles adds depth to what it meant to live and love—not just die—as he did.

While the film rises to the challenge of recounting what occurred, it remains limited in its scope.

By favoring the story of such a powerful leader’s demise, the filmmakers reify dominant narratives of POC-led political movements. These accounts are predominantly centered on men and assert that in-fighting within organizations such as the Panthers and the Young Lords is ultimately responsible for their disintegration. Kaluuya’s and Stanfield’s portrayals of Hampton and O’Neal, respectively, are no exception to this honest yet ultimately glorifying depiction.

As Hampton, Kaluuya paints the chairman as an emboldened poet who wields words as a weapon.

In Kaluuya’s elocution we hear the speech patterns of so many Black leaders that came before, the strong undercurrent of Baptist traditions. In Kaluuya’s cadence, the power of the church and its history of oration meets the experience of Black youth—specifically the children of the Great Migration. Living in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, this generation was keen to make real the aspirations of both movements.

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From early on in the film, and to an increasing degree later on, Hampton is resigned to the fact that he will die for his people. Echoing Jesus’s own foreshadowing of his crucifixion, Hampton emphatically proclaims, “I believe I’m gonna die doing what I was born for.” In another context, this kind of claim might strike as hyperbole, but in his case it turns out to be truly prophetic.

Later, in a scene that proves to be Hampton’s very own Agony in the Garden, he admits to Johnson that he had very little issue with his impending death until he found he had “every reason to live.” Prompted by Johnson’s poignant recitation of an original poem, they sit with the weight of potentially bringing another life into the world.

It is then that we really see the chairman’s youth, that we watch him waver in his resolve to fight until he meets the same fate as Malcolm X, Huey Newton, or even Jake Winters.

Kaluuya’s Hampton is rivaled by an expertly acted Judas in Stanfield’s Bill O’Neal. The lauded actor demonstrates a meticulous attention to detail in telling O’Neal’s often simplified part of the story.

From his very first scene, we are introduced to a clever shapeshifter, some might even call him

slippery. We meet someone who is lost and easily spooked when confronted. O’Neal is therefore an infiltrator who experiences moments of deep internal turmoil, at times even seeming to forget his role as an informant.

While we receive few details as to how he came to live his current life, Stanfield’s shifting eyes and quivering voice make plain that O’Neal was a guarded man who had very little sense of community. His sense of individualism, fueled by capitalist greed, is in the end what feeds his glorification of the state and law enforcement agents. Through Stanfield’s astute and emphatic acting, we come to understand how O’Neal could become someone willing to sell information to the FBI. What Stanfield does particularly well is layer these complexities onto a character that would otherwise be reduced to a dimensionless villain.

In his tear-filled eyes and demure posture we witness Judas’s second guessing; we understand the heaviness of accepting and sinking into one’s fate as an archetype. O’Neal learns that what is true for Hampton is also true for himself, that what you give your life to is what you will die for.

Yet for all of the film’s artistry, its ease in sitting with multiplicity, it remains a project defined by limited imagination. While the film manages consciousness raising without sacrificing artistic vision, its content is not groundbreaking. For one, given how scarce nuanced portrayals of queer and femme Black leaders are in narrative films, a focus on those untold stories would have been more innovative. I would be interested to see how a Black feminist perspective could break open the parameters of this genre of feature films in a way that elides superficial representation.

I also question what—aside from reviewing the trauma of ongoing state violence—Black audiences stand to gain. At a time when the aesthetic of the Party has been coopted for commercial purposes and surviving Panthers languish in prison or are otherwise marginalized, I wonder if there is more harm than good in mainstream depictions that historicize an ongoing struggle. Can we revere fallen leaders without exalting martyrdom?

Yet for all of the film’s artistry, its ease in sitting with multiplicity, it remains a project defined by limited imagination.

In this way, O’Neal and Hampton, Judas and Jesus, are not too dissimilar. Each questions the role they have been assigned, but in the end, each remains resigned. Their roles are in no way one and the same, but they are fated. Drawing these parallels creates an uncomfortable dissonance for audiences even within the story of a Party whose intent was to create dissonance. Instead of opposite poles, we can understand these two roles as inextricably linked and subject to the same forces.

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UNSEEN T

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FOR TRAYVON FOR TUPAC AND THEIR MOTHERS We wrapped the T shoot the day before Hurricane Irma slammed into the Florida coast in the fall of 2017. By that time, it had already razed the Bahamas, parts of Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. It was disastrous—one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded at that time.

T, a film that largely centers Black grief and ultimately transcendence, was also very much inspired by the environmental crises we face—the

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There were some basic questions I found myself faced with: what is it to be Black in 21st century Miami? The country at large? Why does grief take form for us, down here, through the rest-in-peace T-shirt? Is it simply remembrance or is it plumage? Is it a cape or perhaps a skin—a shroud of our loved ones’ DNA that might travel with us, warm and protect us? What is it to carry the broad preservation of imploding American society in one hand and in the other, the microcosmic preservation of the self? One’s own heart. Which do we release when we’re tired? When there’s dirt in our eye?

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

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What is it to be Black in 21st Century Miami?

alignment between these two spheres, both traceable to the casual whims of white supremacy, greed, and violence.

In revisiting the script, something I haven’t done in years, I found myself once again in acute mourning and vindication, an experience that ended in tears. A testament to the power of writing. Not only as a means to an end of creative output, but also as a personal exercise. For oneself. I had the opportunity to sit across from 2017 me, to face myself and reflect.

To extend a bit of gratitude to myself for not slumping under the weight of the temptation to give up.

The country at large?

Maya Angelou’s words come to mind as an undercurrent to this process. I recall this agony in great detail.

While writing T was often a joy— imagine combing the internet for Black celebrations and rituals, discovering the likes of artist Nick Cave’s stunning Soundsuits, and Senegalese Kumpo—it was also grueling. The script required a specific confrontation with and immersion into my own grief. It required me to attempt to walk the path of a mother who had lost a child— an impossible task. The path of the sibling, the cousin, and every Black person in this country, living under siege of photos of dead Black people adorned in the flashing red, white, and blue graphics of evening news, sandwiched between commercials, later cycling back to us in glass frames and on T-shirts. I tasked myself with an infuriating personal standoff with America. For repossession of our narratives, our destinations, and our pictures.

Documentary-style film served as a means to present characters who are embodiments of true-to-life shared experiences in the Black community and a means of sowing earthly victory and cosmic fantasy into the banality of real-world corruption and evil. After all, what is art if it isn’t a spell?

To seduce the mind with new ideas and possibilities we might download into

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our cells. Then, manifest. Why not remind the forgotten, hardened, and impressionable of their humanity and their divinity?

The writing process was an existential cyclone. A churning. One that mirrored my experiences as a child of the tropics, observing the increasing number and intensity of hurricanes— how they devastate a region mostly inhabited by Black, Brown, Indigenous folk. But all the while directing my eyes toward our transcendent spirit. T is a kaleidoscope of all the beauty in the entire cosmos that I see in Black folks. The beauty of humanity at our best, and in Nature’s conviction to regenerate.

There will be more hurricanes, blizzards.

Bigger, stronger, more destructive, more dangerous. Likewise, there will be more confrontations and upheaval to dismantle the horrific legacy and propagation of colonialism that ravages and maims. Through it all, our movements, our art, our spells indeed reign. Because we are a spiritual, magical, impossible people.

I hope T lives on as songs do. That it even remotely looks and feels the way Jason Moran’s piano solo “Toni Morrison said Black is a Rainbow (Shadow)” sounds, that it grazes the hem of Pharoah Sanders’s “Love Is Everywhere.” I hope T continues to

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bring some tenderness. I hope it is as evocative as it is soft. Because T is a love letter. A love letter for Trayvon. For Pac. And Sandra. And now, for Tony McDade. And Breonna.

Oluwatoyin. George. The innumerable unnamed.

For their mothers and fathers and the millions who now know and love them and rep them forever on T-shirts.

For you.

ALL MY LOVE,

THE HOMIE,

KEISHA RAE 123

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All film stills: T (2019). Courtesy of filmmaker Keisha Rae Witherspoon.

T Written by Keisha Rae Witherspoon

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1

FADE IN: EXT. MIAMI BEACH CITYSCAPE - NIGHT

1

Moonlight bounces off uninhabited high-rise buildings. The tide laps at their first-story windows.

A SHRILL SQUEAL pierces through what sounds like WHITE NOISE in a room of dead air.

Adam!

WOMAN 1 (O.S.)

A MAN moans.

Treesy.

MAN 1 (O.S.)

CUT TO: 2

INT. DARK COMMUNITY HALL - NIGHT

2

The WHITE NOISE continues as we arrive at its source. EVA, 38, an androgynous and striking man rises from a bow, center stage at a microphone. Another WOMAN’S outburst...

Lucky!

WOMAN 2

EVA My name is Eva Ayanmo SantiagoPierre, III, and I will be your humblest host for this evening.

His gold teeth glimmer. He gestures something looking unblinking past his hand suspended in slight stream of smoke rises from an altar. A outbursts continue. A woman’s squeal. Another Lloyd!

ritual-like, the air. A few beats. The woman’s cry.

WOMAN 3

EVA In the Southern tradition of Rest In Peace T-shirts, welcome to this year’s T Ball. We are here to honor our dead. We are here to mourn. We are here to scream. To cry. To dance and celebrate. As always, we set forth in prayer that this will be the last T Ball.

He busies himself at the altar.

EVA (CONT’D) As land submerges into the water.

Into the subconscious. Into the sacred feminine. A moment of silence.

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Eva carries on with the ceremony surrounded by stillness.

A few beats.

Amin.

EVA (CONT’D)

Eva swiftly moves the stand to side stage.

EVA (CONT’D) DJ, drop that motherfucking beat and give life!

The DJ fills the hall with a percussive melody. Vignettes of pre-Ball and Ball footage of attendees donning their designs.

T-shirts, couture and thematic costuming abound. Some twirl, some pose, some reserved.

CUT TO: TITLE CARD: T

A startling BUZZ rings simultaneously with...

RECOG 3

AUTOMATED VOICE

EXT. QUAINT 50’S MIAMI HOME - DAY

3

Plastic sheets, tarp and rain boots are neatly organized on the veranda. All is tattered aside from a metal device adjacent the front door.DIMPLES, 65, emerges looking younger than her years. She greets us excitedly.

DIMPLES Oh my godddd, how cool.

She presses a button on the metal device, then yells out to someone in another room.

DIMPLES They really showed up. We didn’t get glowed for nothing. (back to us) Watch your step here. And RECOG, por favor. I don’t want any buzzers at my window today.

Buzzes and beeps from the device as the film crew enters the...

4

INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY

4

DIMPLES And you can’t stay too long, I still have some final touches with my piece. (she scans the room)

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Well, well, well, lots of people, lots of people. Dimples Dean. Yes, that’s my real name, and welcome to Liberty City.

She spectates a bit, amused, and gives us a partial tour of the house. Dozens of framed family photos occupy all wall space and shelves. Wedding photo of Dimples and her wife Tasha. She passes a photo of herself among many young adults.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) My students at the university. Mean seamstress too, though. What you think? Made it myself just for the occasion.

She poses in her outfit, then perches a hand-rolled joint between her lips. It bounces up and down as she directs us downward...

DIMPLES (CONT’D) Don’t leave out the shoe, now.

She lights it. She brings us to the first photo of her son.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) This is Jasper, here. My son. We call him Jazz. S’ one of my favorites.

She continues, presenting other photos of her son with care.

Graduations, parties, girlfriends, travel. She holds a frame, taps the glass. It comes to life with looping footage of her son, JASPER, 27, shirtless with a brassiere tied backwards around his waist wearing a large ornate church hat, as he fries an egg, dancing foolishly. He slips the egg onto a plate. The video loops. She picks up another digital frame, touches it. In it Jasper is pivoting his head to dangle his earrings, which are tampons. Panty liners make the eyebrows and pads that form a headband. Dimples focuses on the looping footage. She chuckles under her breath. Smokes.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) What can I say, my child had a sick sense of humor. Wouldn’t stay out my stuff.

You know how long it took Tasha to find that shit funny?

Another drag of her joint. Looks at us.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) You know Tasha died eleven months after this. To the day. And Jazzy was killed exactly eleven years later. To the day. (she looks at us) And what do you imagine today marks?

She takes a drag.

DIMPLES (CONT’D)

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But I guess everyone has a number. (to herself as she returns to the photo) So skinny.

Exhales and outs her joint. Returns the frame to its place.

Claps her hands to snap herself out of it.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) I see death around the co’ner...

She looks at the crew. Continues to rap.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) Gotta stay high while I survive...

Name that artist!

She holds an expectant gaze at the crew. Throws them a bone and exposes the small ‘Thug Life’ tattoo on her arm.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) In the city where the...?

The crew doesn’t respond. She smiles, shakes her head and waves an arm in amused disappointment.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see.

5

INT. DINING ROOM - DAY

5

Dimples slides an open box from underneath the dining table and drapes attached potato chip bags across the tabletop. A drone descends at the window.

DIMPLES Oh, look, they came anyway. How nice.

Dimples takes out a spray paint can and shakes it. The drone buzzes away.

DIMPLES Can’t replace ’em like they used to.

Good to keep bug spray around. Anyway, let me show you what’s good. Not going to show you the entire design, now. (she peers through her glasses) For that you’ll have to wait for the main event.

She smoothes a bag with her hand.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) Jazzy was a chips fiend. Potato chips, cheese puffs, tortilla chips. When he was a teen I told him MSG stops your dick from growing. That kept him off it for a while, ‘cause you know, that’s all you have to say. When that was debunked I started collecting the bags so he could see how much of it he was eating. Tried to appeal to

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his conscience, you know. Anyway, never got a chance to show him, so that’s what you’re looking at. He’d find it funny.

She carefully shreds the bags of chips, then unpins her needle from a pin cushion and sews them together. She takes their time for a few moments, not speaking, shredding, the sound of crinkling chip bags and faint percussive music bumping in the distance.

6

INT. DARK HALLWAY - DAY

6

Percussive music increases as we descend a narrow hallway.

Dimples opens the door to a...

7

INT. DIMLY LIT BEDROOM - DAY

7

The music is too loud. Deafening. Dimples turns to us, her expression strange. She points to the ground. We can barely hear her as she yells over the music...

DIMPLES You don’t step past that point.

As she enters the room she grazes her hand along the multiple holiday lights hanging from the ceiling. They sway. Shadows begin to dance in the room. As she steps away, the scope of the room is now visible. Casually positioned on the bed is the mummified corpse of Jasper. His hand in a large chips bag, wearing a VR headset. Over the music...

DIMPLES (CONT’D) Our guests are here, Jazzy.

The crew remains stationed at the door. Dimples adjusts and smoothes Jasper’s shirt, then traverses the room to a chair in the far corner facing the bed. She steps onto the seat and sits on the chair’s back, elbows propped on her thighs.

The corner is dark, her face an indistinguishable shadow.

She sparks another joint. She’s mum as the deafening bass continues. She stands suddenly and begins to mumble words that are inaudible. She’s yelling now, gesturing like an angry preacher. The room is a cacophony.

DIMPLES (CONT’D) ... everything right. You...holes you can’t fill. [...] That’s not...works. [...] understand?!

Dimples ends her rant. She emerges from the corner. She returns to us. She peers into the camera.

8

EXT. BALL BUILDING - NIGHT A woman displays her long nails and hair style that match her T-shirt. Next to her, an older gentleman designed a blazer to match his tee, as well as a top hat and walking cane. His face is painted white. Further awesome showcases ensue.

And now Dimples steps forward with two large metallic wings spread behind her. She is magnificent. Shards of metallic plastic so fine they appear as hairs. She approaches the front of the stage, slowly spins. Her eyes are wet.

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8

9

DIGITAL SLIDESHOW - FULL SCREEN

9

Slide 1: A cutout of TAHIR, 17, throwing a peace sign. A computer voice reads the words as they appear on screen.

COMPUTER VOICE THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN MY CONCEPT. Slide 2: An image of ISIS, 17.

COMPUTER VOICE (CONT’D) THIS IS MY TWIN SISTER, ISIS. SHE WAS FUNNY AS FUCK AND INTO 80’S ROCK. The word WHY pops up.

COMIC BOOKS

COMPUTER VOICE (CONT’D)

The words THAT I GET.

AND MARXISM.

COMPUTER VOICE (CONT’D)

The words KIDDING, NOT KIDDING. COMPUTER VOICE (CONT’D) WE WERE INTO OPPOSITES AS KIDS. AND THEN WE GOT INTO BINARIES. AND THEN RED AND BLUE. Slide 3: A photo of Tahir and Isis wearing red and blue COMPUTER VOICE (CONT’D) AS THEMES, NOT STATIC COLORS. Slide 4: Graphic of a red column and a blue column Slide 5: The following appear in corresponding columns: Hot, Cold, Fire, Ice Slide 6: Image of circulatory system Slide 7: Image of a indistinct part of the American flag Slide 8: Graphic of red and blue party states Slide 9: Image of police lights Slide 10: Graphic of primary colors red, blue, yellow along with RGB colors red, green, blue Slide 11: Image of the blue pill and the red pill Slide 12: Image of the angel and the devil Slide 13: Image of Crips and Bloods gang members Slide 14: Graphic of the red and blue root and third eye chakras

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Slide 15: Image of clay earth and sky Slide 16: Image of young star and old star Slide 17: Graphic of binary star system, with red orb and blue orb orbiting around each other 10

EXT. STREET IN RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITY - DAY

10

Gravel crackles as Tahir makes a few loops with his bicycle and stops in front of us. He props himself on one leg. His face is kind, his emotion indecipherable.

TAHIR Black guy and a white guy walk into a bar. Black guy says to the white guy, “Hey, did you know that there’s scientific proof of parallel universes and that matter at its most finite acts as waves of potential?” White guy says, “Yes, the inner reality creates the outer form.”

He pauses. The faint sound of a helicopter in the distance increases. He concludes as he rides off...

TAHIR (CONT’D) There’s no punch line, BITCH. He takes a beaten path between two nearby houses.

11

EXT. BACKYARD - DAY We reunite with Tahir tucked into a makeshift fort housed in a tent festooned with gadgets throughout. He is joined by mischievous, noisy friends and his girlfriend, whom sits closest to him, her arm across his shoulders. Tinny music emits. One of the young men, JAMIE, 19, interjects.

JAMIE Let’s do Isis’ vocab debates.

Ready...I’ll start.

He clears his throat.

JAMIE (CONT’D) If one is to postulate among the effervescence of a synonymous diatribe, the key... and I want you to feel me... is to postulate among the heresy of tantric tentoria.

LUCAS, 17, steps in.

LUCAS Lemme... lemme just get in here for a sec because, see, the temptation is to circumnavigate the enterprise of demonstrative technologies.

The crew nods.

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11

LUCAS (CONT’D) A circuitous tendency that democratizes one of the most trivial and... disposable capitulations of the Socratic self.

JAMIE Amusing, but the hexagonal truth is myoelastic lithography can only exist in pignolias...

LUCAS Cut. Bitch, pignolia is not a real word.

TAHIR Pignolia is a word, bitch.

Bitch, nope?

LUCAS

They continue back and forth. A couple of gunshots pop in the distance. The startled cameraman DIPS a bit, causing the camera to VEER. The youth seem unaffected by it aside from the crew’s response. Two of the friends start to giggle with each other. Tahir remains composed. A few beats later an imposing man, Tahir’s father, NAIM, 40, rapidly approaches the group.

NAIM That’s enough.

He waves his fingers authoritatively directing them into the house.

Now.

NAIM (CONT’D)

As the youth enter the house Naim blocks the camera crew from continuing. He looks at us with fury in his eyes. He grinds his teeth, looks down at the ground, and then back at us.

NAIM (CONT’D) That’s enough.

He stares at us, turns away and enters the back door of his home.

12

EXT. FARM COMPOUND - SUNSET

12

ASH, 34, poses for us outside of a fowl coop with a bright smile to greet us.

ASH Welcome to African Americaaaaaa!

He makes at us he back and chuckles fowl.

a big, exaggerated tribal-king laugh. As he looks appears amused by our presence. He swerves his body forth a bit to jerk the camera operator around. He in his throat, then carelessly throws grain to the

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He continues to show us around his community’s farm as we trail behind. A few tribesmen and women are stationed throughout the compound, observing, chilling. He approaches the garden and spots an attractive CHERISE, 28, nearby.

ASH (CONT’D)

(to her) My love.

Amused, Cherise laughs to shrug him off a bit and continues on her way.

ASH (CONT’D) Tha’s aight.

(to us in British accent) Hasty marriage seldom proveth well.

He stands idly looking away from us, rubbing his stomach.

He recalls his game and continues to dodge the gaze of the camera. He finds this endlessly amusing, though eventually, appears distrustful. A chopper in the distance.

ASH (CONT’D) What y’all here for, though?

He looks. Spits. Looks away.

13

EXT. PERIMETER OF FARM - SUNSET LUN, 54, an O.G., speaks with us while displaying an old Tshirt. Ash leans against a fence, appearing a bit distracted.

LUN This is my little brother, Rudey.

We both got it, one made it, one didn’t.

He rests the shirt and shows us the shirt he is wearing.

LUN (CONT’D) My son, Ashley. Used to be Ash and Ashley. Always them two.

ASH Man, Uncle, what you telling ‘em all that shit fo’?

LUN They came all the way out here. You change your mind?

Ash looks at us.

Yeah!

ASH

Ash spots an approaching vehicle. A dunk pulls up full of adult black men playing music, a few of their faces concealed in painted stocking masks. As Ash approaches their car, a drone descends.

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13

RECOG.

DRONE

Ash looks at us. Shows a sinister smile. He walks over to the dunk, grabs a stocking mask from inside and puts it on. He swaggers toward the drone, lifts his mask to expose his face, then aggressively spits at the drone. He slides his mask back and smooths his chest as if smoothing down a necktie.

ASH But still a gentleman.

EDDIE, 26, from his crew responds.

FRANK Man, Ash, c’mon nigga.

Ash!

LUN

Ash looks at us for one more beat, then jumps into the car. As the men peel off, Ash sticks his head out the window and yells out.

ASH Aight, Uncle Lun. I’ma holla at you though, Cherise! Hahaa!

Lun and Cherise remain behind. For a moment, they say nothing.

LUN ‘Fo you leave.

Lun leads us back to his pile of shirts. He shuffles through them all, pulling out select shirts. He lays them on a clean surface. He points to each.

LUN (CONT’D) Deon. My brother Nick. Lil’ Aya. He looks at us, then goes to the shirts again, pointing.

LUN (CONT’D) Ash mama. Daddy. Ash baby.

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INT. DARK COMMUNITY HALL - NIGHT

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The ball is in procession.

EVA All of the greatness. All of it.

Coming to the stage, our first tee

by Bobby here representing his father Ken. BOBBY, 30, emerges in a traditional T-shirt design with a backwards three-piece suit underneath and a human mask on the back of his head. The presentations continue in parade-like fashion, as participants emerge with high-concept couture designs. A skeletal gown of teardrops that start at the eyes of the participant. A hologram tee that projects 3D video of

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the deceased. Another, a human-sized T-shirt supported by a wire frame, so that just the oversized tee is seen floating on stage.

KEL, 22, emerges. He wears a traditional T-shirt, no frills.

He wears a 90’s theme, rocking gold chains, baggy jeans and a gold watch. He pauses midway on stage. He might be overcome with emotion but he doesn’t show it.

EVA (CONT’D) Kel, here representing his father, Woody, in 90’s traditional garb.

You take your time, Kel. We’re here for you, darling.

He completes the walk with swag the remainder of the stretch.

Another participant emerges.

EVA (CONT’D) Ash for his cousin Ashley.

Lun approaches the mic shirtless with fitted jeans.

LUN Ash aint here!

Lun turns, with a trail of attached R.I.P. T-shirts out of his back pocket. The shirts drape behind him like a train. The room is silent.

CUT TO: Tahir stands center stage.

EVA In tek couture, Tahir on behalf of his sister Isis.

Tahir wears a helmet and skin suit of flashing vein-like red and blue lights, and a blank black T-shirt. His entire body is alive, and alight. Attendees fix themselves on him. The echo of a chopped and screwed version of Bruce Springsteen’s "Dancing in the Dark" cuts through the silence. Tahir models Springsteen’s iconic opening moves. The music echoes and drags as time slows and breaks down.

SPRINGSTEEN I get up in the morning. And I ain’t got nothin’ to say.

The faces in the crowd are still. Tahir’s lights begin to streak through the air.

SPRINGSTEEN (CONT’D) I get up in the evening. I’m feeling the same way. I ain’t nothing but tired.

Attendants focus. His movements appear as the floating Vitruvian Man. Observers slowly stir.

Slide 17 continued: Graphic of the red and blue orbs merge and touch just enough to create a shard of violet

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Waves of percussive sound saturate the space. Michael Jackson dance moves. A face in the crowd stares. Tahir now as an atom with streaks and shards of red emanating from the center.

The red and blue lights coalesce and the color violet is introduced.

Slide 18: Image of amethyst crystal Tahir’s arms extended, his body as a T. Perhaps as Christ. Or MJ. Or Prince.

As purple pours onto each face, Tahir now floats as the Hindu goddess Kali the Destroyer, with red eyes, 12 glowing arms and an extended tongue. The eyes in the crowd are wider, and fixed.

Slide 19: Image of European royal church figures in purple garb Slide 20: Image of lavender field Slide 21: Graphic of violet crown chakra SPRINGSTEEN (CONT’D) You can’t start a fire without a spark. This gun’s for hire. Even if we’re just dancing in the dark.

Tahir’s final stage of development as a static orb of pure energy. A flash of Dimples’ body as an indistinct black shadow, her eye slits glowing supernaturally, a few flecks of light on her wings shimmer. WHITE NOISE drags. Or perhaps it’s the ocean.

END

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150

An Interview with Stefani Saintonge

Stefani Saintonge. Photo by Lendl Tellington.

by Lendl Tellington 151

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Stefani Saintonge. Photo by Lendl Tellington.

For some editors, their craft relies on the mercy of a director’s ideals. In best-case scenarios, editors bring their own set of values and distinct vision to each film. This collaborative process can make it difficult to distinguish whose voice sculpts the film. But when Stefani Saintonge is behind a cut, you feel it. Saintonge, a first-generation Haitian American, is a multifaceted filmmaker who has homed in on a voice so proprietary that she has been tapped to cut films for a spectrum of artists and filmmakers including Simone Leigh (Untitled [M*A*S*H], 2018), Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young (Back and Song, 2019), Faren Humes (Liberty, director’s cut, 2019), and Keisha Rae Witherspoon (T, 2019). Most recently, Saintonge edited Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in Thy Name (2021), helmed by filmmakers Terence Nance, Jenn Nkiru, Bradford Young, Mishka Brown, and Nanette Nelms, collectively known as the Ummah Chroma.

To discuss Saintonge’s work as an editor, one must first look at how her experiences as a director inform her approach to filmmaking. We discussed some of her projects and experiences that have shaped her approach to editing.

Lendl Tellington: Can you tell me about how your experiences making your narrative short Seventh Grade (2014) inform your journey as a filmmaker?

Stefani Saintonge: I directed Seventh Grade at a time [when] I was scared of the medium. I didn’t have much experience. I wanted to show I could do a narrative film. Maybe it wasn’t coming from the best intentions. There’s this way of doing narratives—I thought you had to do it that way. And so I was very, very careful not to take risks. I still love this film, but I’ve had to grow to appreciate it more. I see Seventh Grade as a departure from what I was making in grad school.

LT: Were there certain stakes involved in making Seventh Grade that didn’t exist when you were making films in grad school that encouraged some of that hesitancy?

SS: I had a director of photography, an editor, and a producer for Seventh Grade. I was spending a lot

more money. I wasn’t controlling every part of the process, and that felt less organic. In grad school for documentary film, I would shoot footage myself. My thesis, La Tierra de los Adioses [2015], was [shot] in Mexico with one of my good friends, Chantelle Flores. She was doing the sound and interviewing, and I was shooting and editing. It was a very intimate process. Fucked like a Star [2018; directed and edited by Saintonge] was like this too.

Between 2015 and 2017, Saintonge took a number of trips to Haiti, visiting without her family for the first time.

What resulted is Fucked like a Star.

Much of the eight-minute experimental short brilliantly juxtaposes shots of the domestic lives of Black women (braiding, threading, and spice making) with archival footage of worker ants, contextualizing these everyday gestures as not only foundational in a cultural sense, but integral to survival.

This particular film evolved out of a collaboration between Saintonge and the film’s executive producer, Zuri Obi. It marked a return to the nonhierarchical manner the filmmaker employed while in grad school, but once Saintonge got her hands on the edit, the pair decided together to credit her as the film’s director.

LT: How much of Fucked like a Star was preconceived versus developed through the edit?

SS: Zuri Obi, a good friend, was finding subjects and shooting them, and I ended up editing. I didn’t plan how the edit would go when we were shooting. All that was preconceived about the film was looking for and shooting work that is gendered, such as cooking and doing hair. That’s how I approach most projects—I see what the footage is telling me and find the rhythm based on that.

LT: Music plays a big role in Fucked like a Star.

Once you get into the edit, do you chop to a playlist of songs?

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SS: Zuri chose the first song (“Nan Point La Vie”

by Siwo), and I loved it. It helped me get started [on the edit]. The rest was in reverse: we reached out to people for music. The middle section is the ants’ copulation part, so I wanted to find something waltzlike.

LT: Fucked like a Star is told in four parts. I’m curious if the chapters were a consequence of the edit.

SS: At some point the film felt like a long montage, so Zuri suggested chaptering it. That was an “aha” Saintonge's workspace. Photo by Lendl Tellington.

the audience experiences. . . . I really understood that [when I worked on] Back and Song.

A four-channel installation by Elissa Blount Moorhead and Bradford Young, Back and Song draws from a litany of archival footage focused on healing and medicinal practices within the African diaspora.

Each channel follows its own course while the soundscapes occasionally synchronize across the entirety of the installation. Saintonge’s role was to assemble the provided archive to support Moorhead and Young’s thesis: “present health and wellness as part and parcel of the American Black experience from cradle to grave.”

LT: What excited you about working with this archive?

moment. The chapters suggest a storybook, and it worked well because we’re referencing a text, Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. Segmenting the film forced me to come up with a new feeling for each chapter. It started to feel more like a film and less like a music video.

LT: Currently there are many projects utilizing collagelike editing that straddles film and music video modes. In your opinion, what makes a film distinct and not a music video?

SS: Narrative and thesis are a big part. People think experimental film doesn’t have a story—it’s random. I think there’s validity to that, but the successful ones have a narrative to the emotions

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SS: The thing I liked most was the archive. [The films were] shot and edited by white ethnographic filmmakers.

It wasn’t raw footage. The archive was already cut, and so you’re cutting around their gaze. I was trying to find our own moments within their edit as a means to spotlight what their [white ethnographic] gaze couldn’t pick up.

LT: How did you marry four screens together for Back and Song—not knowing what the screening experience would be like since you were editing for a film installation in a century-old church, not a traditional theater experience?

SS: That was making me the most nervous. It was really hard. I had the split screen on my computer.

I felt like I was getting an education every time I’d talk to Brad and Elissa about some research that they had come across. It feels like I’m just talking to the director, then they give me the footage and I just feel out the edit, hoping that I’m capturing the tone from our conversations.

LT: I notice there are similar songs used in Fucked like a Star and Back and Song.

SS: [Laughs] I’ve been found out! It’s the same artist actually, Ti Roro, and it’s from the same album. He’s a drummer from Haiti. I always like to cite Haiti.

LT: Can you tell me about experiencing Back and Song in person? Because you were only able to see the piece exhibited once it was open to the public.

SS: I was feeling emotional, sitting there and watching it. You’re really physically hugging your audience or something. And I think that’s what cinema is, capturing your audience. Experimental film has to do that without a character—sometimes without a protagonist, without a story arc.

Faren didn’t have the most fruitful editing process with the initial cut of Liberty. I will just say that. I have had similar experiences, so she said, “How about I just send you the drive?”

LT: In the first cut, there’s a scene showing the tension between Loggy [Milagros Gilbert] and Alex [Alexandra Jackson], and it ends with a dance battle. This all plays out as one sequence. In your director’s cut, this scene is broken up throughout the film as we follow Alex and Loggy through a day in Miami’s Liberty Square. What encouraged you to approach it that way versus the other cut’s more traditional chronology?

You're really physically hugging your audience or something.

And I think that's what cinema is — capturing your audience.

For Liberty, a narrative short by Faren Humes, Saintonge’s process was a little different. The film fuses verité and neo-realist ideals within the landscape of a Miami gentrifying neighborhood. The story follows the relationship between two Black teenagers grappling with moving and growing apart.

Humes brought Saintonge on to make a director’s cut of the film, after its acclaimed festival run.

SS: I didn’t have the script. Looking at the footage, it felt like this dance was somehow a metaphor for their relationship. That was my instinct when I saw that. We continue coming back to the dance throughout the film because their whole relationship is right there.

LT: There are two cuts of the film Liberty [directed by Faren Humes]. I am curious about how you got involved in the director’s cut?

SS: Faren and I have been friends since I was a teenager. We went to the same college, the University of Florida, together.

When she finished graduate school, we lived together in New York. We go way back.

Stefani Saintonge. Photo by Lendl Tellington.

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The dance sequence was very poetic. Loggy and Alex are so good in terms of their skill. I like process. Women’s processes are important, and they’re something that shows up a lot in my work.

I’m always going to like those quotidian moments of exchange amongst women because of my own interests. Americans tend to cut up everything.

They think that the audience is going to get bored, but if the film calls for it, just let it play out.

LT: That reminds me of that moment included in your cut with the youngins playing dice. One asks Loggy for a freeze cup.

LT: Can you tell me about how you became involved with T? SS: Keisha is going to kill me for saying this, but it was Monica Sorelle (T’s producer) who called and asked me to cut it because Keisha was willing to let the film go. She had been sitting on the footage for like a year. I guess Keisha felt things weren’t captured well. Monica was like, “Maybe if you bring in an editor, we can get an outside opinion on what to do?” They wanted me to tell them honestly, as an outsider, if there was a film.

LT: Wow.

SS: Yes, I love it so much! You can tell they’re really playing. Faren said “cut,” and they were still going.

LT: The inclusion of that moment says so much more about Liberty as a community.

SS: There weren’t many takes, so there wasn’t much raw footage to choose from. That scene was important to me because Faren staged it so well.

It’s rare to set something up that well, and it still is verité. I thought that was really cool.

SS: And then I cut a draft of the film, and Keisha was like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you did this.” Yeah! The footage was amazing. I was really touched by everything I saw. She didn’t see it. It’s crazy when you don’t see you’ve made something that’s genius.

LT: In Liberty’s director’s cut, there’s a sequence in which Loggy and Alex are dancing in the middle of the courtyard, glitching in and out of frame. It’s a very Stefani sequence.

LT: Almost all filmmakers have that moment.

Some people think of filmmaking as an additive process, like you’re starting from square one. I think it’s a reductive process. You have all these options in the beginning. With each shot and edit, you’re slowly trimming away at something more specific, but that initial feeling of infinite possibilities can be overwhelming even after filming.

SS: [Laughs] I was afraid to show it to Faren.

That’s me playing around. I didn’t plan it out.

There was a shot of them dancing and the same shot without them in the frame. I decided to cut them together as a sequence. I like including moments of magic realism.

SS: That’s true. She was seeing the raw footage and seeing her mistakes or what she thought were mistakes. I didn’t think there were mistakes at all.

I feel like Keisha was in the same place I was with Seventh Grade, feeling: Can I do this? I don’t know if I’m a filmmaker.

T (directed by Keisha Rae Witherspoon) is another Miami-based short narrative.

Witherspoon employs a pseudodocumentary style as means of steeping the audience in her universe. We follow three individuals as they prepare for the annual T Ball, a celebration of those who have passed on. As with Liberty, Saintonge’s involvement was unanticipated and came later in the production process.

LT: It seems like the edit could have gone a number of ways. How did you make the decision to structure the film’s narrative? There wasn’t a script, right?

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SS: That’s a good question: why structure it that way? There was a script, but I didn’t read the script. [Laughs] I never read the script. We were building to the RIP dance. And Dimples [Koko Zauditu-Selassie] was definitely the core, the heart of the film. Maybe that’s my trick. I did that

with Liberty too: I find one person or one scene that can emotionally frame the film. It was a nobrainer to start and end with Dimples. She has the most emotional moment when we get to the big reveal of her son—no spoilers—and we’re leading to that.

I hope that that’s what people are connecting to watching T—the collective grieving. It’s such a smart film, and it’s humorous and magical. The whole concept of T is just brilliant. I’m so glad Keisha’s gotten that validation and it’s done as well as it has. I’m so happy for her.

LT: It’s not exactly easy to spot someone’s editing. The editor’s own aesthetic ideals can be compromised by the studio, RFP, or director’s needs. It seems like people are just like, “Yeah, just take my footage.” It is a testament to the trust that a lot of these folks have in

you and your vision. The one thing that is obvious is your thumbprint in these pieces.

SS: What I love about these projects is working with people who want to experiment more, want to free up the process, and trust someone else to also be an artist with them. These are my favorite pieces I’ve edited.

What I love about these projects is working with people who want to experiment more, want to free up the process, and trust someone else to also be an artist with them.

Stefani Saintonge. Photo by Lendl Tellington.

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by Jlin

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As

an

electronic

composer, I operate using a very simple three-trick

pony—

an ethos I call CPU, which stands for clean,precise, and unpredictable.

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Like everybody else, when I first started making music I sounded unclear and very unsure. By 2010 I had built a foundation, and by 2011 I had developed a signature sound—a pyramid that shifts constantly— and I have a love-hate relationship with it.

(More love than hate, though.)

I met Paloma Dawkins, the creator of Songs of the Lost, back in March 2019 in downtown Chicago.

Being asked to create a score for a video game was a welcome challenge and opportunity. I love taking on projects that I’ve never done before. Paloma, of course, explained her vision in great detail, which was helpful to me in the composition process.

There would be ten levels in the game, each with a different mood board and motive. In the end, I composed ten scores for each level.

by Jlin The way I work when it comes to collaborative projects is quite simple. After the conceptual vision is given to me, I begin by creating a one-minute demo piece— that first starting point always helps me test the waters. The beginning, for me, that first sentence of the composition, is the best part of any project.

Water has always been my greatest inspiration when it comes to creativity. It adapts and becomes a part of anything it touches.

That is always my ultimate goal in whatever project I take on, to adapt and become whatever that thing is.

Paloma chose the first track for the game that day we met in Chicago.

The track was already premade, but had no title.

I played it for her to get a feel of the direction she wanted me to go in, and she decided to use that track for the level titled “Tower.” From there I created each track doing my one-minute demo method until all the tracks were complete.

When artists give me mood boards, I do my best to carry out what they’re asking for, but through my own signature.

Once this project was complete, I do like I always do: take a break.

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The last four bars, in this case 53-57, are my make-it-or-break-it point.

Either I make the jump smoothly or I have to start back where I fell short.

I chose to highlight bars 41-57 in the track because it was actually quite difficult arriving to this section. The sounds chosen are very off-beat and ricochet all over the track. This score is actually one of favorites, because creating a rhythm inside a non-rhythmic pattern of sounds was very challenging at the time.

When I create an enhance point, I always have to think about the next eight bars. It’s like having to listen for two or more things at once.

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by Jlin Starting at bar 41, I decided to strip the track down some by allowing the percussion to lead and the synth sections to chaotically follow. Prior to the start of bar 41, the synth sections are completely untamed and running the gamut of the entire track up until this point.

Bars 45-48 set the tone of the transition into bars 4957. Transitions are vital in my compositions, because cleanliness of flow and unpredictability are crucial.

Bar 49 marks the beginning of the enhance point for the

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next sequence (eight bars) of the chaos, which will start at bar 57.

Mood (2014). Film still courtesy of Hermenegildo Rojas.

El Impulso Archivístico:

el Deseo del

Narrador

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Tamazulápam del Espíritu Santo, 1992, Oaxaca, México. Image from TV TAMIX Archive, courtesy of Hermenegildo Rojas.

by Tzutzumatzin Soto Spanish to English translation: Fionn Petch, CM Idiomas

English to Spanish translation: Rafael Segovia, CM Idiomas

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The first time I searched for historical images from my own community—Xochimilco, to the south of Mexico City—I found those produced mainly by travelers, anthropologists, or ethnologists. Most of this documentation centered a touristic and folkloric imaginary and comprised photographic and audiovisual records whose subjects did not participate in their production.

But since the late 1990s, access to video cameras and the knowledge required to produce our own images have become increasingly common, allowing more autonomous types of stories to be told. However, ethnographic and self-determined depictions do not usually inhabit the same spaces.

The former exist in public and private archives, while the latter are often kept in family collections or stored by the creators themselves.

Commemorating vivid experiences via audiovisual storytelling plays a key role in preserving cultural knowledge. It serves as our own way of representation. But what happens to those images when they are stored and preserved in archives?

Should we desire the archive? Should we claim for ourselves these modes of accumulating, categorizing, keeping, and safeguarding? Do we wish to appropriate the categorical language of the museums, encyclopedias, and archives that have been complicit in conquering our territories?

In 2015, while researching these questions, I learned of TV Tamix, an Ayuuk community television broadcast developed during the 1990s in Tamazulapam Mixe (Oaxaca, Mexico). I met

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“La alquimia del archivo: se supone que éste pertenece a todos.

La comunidad del tiempo, el sentimiento según el cual todos seríamos herederos de un tiempo sobre el que tendríamos derechos de propiedad colectiva, es éste el imaginario que el archivo busca difundir.”

—Achille Mbembe1

1. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” en Refiguring the Archive, eds.

Carolyn Hamilton, Michèle Pickover, V. S. Harris (Heidelberg: Springer Países Bajos, 2002), 19–27.

1. Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, eds.

Carolyn Hamilton, Michèle Pickover, V. S. Harris (Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 19–27.

“The alchemy of the archive: it is supposed to belong to everyone. The community of time, the feeling according to which we would all be heirs to a time over which we might exercise the rights of collective ownership: this is the imaginary that the archive seeks to disseminate.”

—Achille Mbembe1

La primera vez que busqué imágenes históricas de mi propia comunidad – Xochimilco, al sur de la Ciudad de México – encontré aquellas que fueron creadas principalmente por viajeros, antropólogos o etnólogos. La mayoría de estos documentos se centraban en un imaginario turístico y folklórico y estaban compuestos de registros fotográficos y audiovisuales en cuya producción no habían participado sus propios sujetos.

Pero a partir de los años 90, el acceso a las cámaras de video y a los conocimientos necesarios para producir nuestras propias imágenes se ha vuelto cada vez más común, y esto hace posible contar historias de manera más autónoma. Sin embargo, las descripciones etnográficas y las de motivación propia no siempre comparten los mismos espacios. Las primeras existen en archivos públicos y privados, mientras que las segundas se conservan las más veces en colecciones familiares o son almacenadas por sus propios creadores.

La conmemoración de experiencias vivas a través de la narración audiovisual juega un papel importante en la preservación del saber cultural. Sirve como nuestra propia forma de representación. Pero ¿qué sucede con esas imágenes cuando son almacenadas y conservadas en archivos? ¿Deberíamos desear el archivo? ¿Debemos reclamar para nosotros esos modos de acumulación categorización conservación y preservación?

2. https://vimeo.com/97926609

Approaching the concept of the archive from an Ayuuk perspective creates a space for dialogue about the permanence of pictures and their potential for preserving local memory. This requires the value of the images to be continually reiterated to benefit the common interest, and a preservation perspective is a necessary step to get there. The short video Éstado de Ánimo (Mood; 2014)2 offers an example of what can happen when such images sit dormant. The found-footage video was recorded by Genaro Rojas when he was working as an elementary school teacher in San Juan Juquila Mixes, and highlights concerns about the potential of memory that inhabits forgotten objects, as well as the need to create tales of both what they meant to others and what these memories offer for multiple contemporary readings. Recorded at the turn of the century, it sat for more than ten years until Hermenegildo and Carlos Pérez (cousin of the Rojas brothers) began working on a collaborative documentary, Barras de Color (Color Bars), about TV Tamix’s history.

En 2015, mientras hacía investigación en estos temas, supe de TV Tamix, un canal de televisión ayuuk desarrollado en los años 90 en Tamazulapam Mixe (Oaxaca, México). Conocí a Genaro y a Hermenegildo Rojas, dos hermanos miembros del equipo fundador de TV Tamix, quienes han reflexionado sobre la creación de imágenes audiovisuales de base comunitaria, principalmente en VHS, y sobre su papel para la preservación de la memoria colectiva de la cosmovisión ayuuk.

Abordar el concepto de archivo desde una perspectiva ayuuk genera un espacio para el diálogo respecto a la permanencia de las imágenes y a su potencial para preservar la memoria local. Para ello es necesario que el valor de las imágenes se reitere continuamente con el fin de beneficiar al interés común, y se requiere de una perspectiva de preservación como paso necesario para lograrlo. El video corto Estado de ánimo (2014)2 constituye un ejemplo de los que puede suceder cuando este tipo de imágenes permanecen inermes. Este pietaje

2. https://vimeo.com/97926609

Genaro and Hermenegildo Rojas, brothers and members of TV Tamix’s founding team, who have reflected on the creation of community-based audiovisual images, mainly on VHS, and their role in preserving the collective memory of the Ayuuk worldview.

Tamazulápam del Espíritu Santo, circa 1992, Oaxaca, México.

Image from TV TAMIX Archive, courtesy of Hermenegildo Rojas.

Seated before the camera in Mood, Genaro is visibly frustrated, aware that dusk is approaching and worried about not having enough light to record the objects before him: cups, mezcal bottles, dustpans, and more.

He ponders the possibilities of using video as a tool to impress this moment, saying: “These objects are abandoned now.

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Santa María Tepantlali Mixe, 2013, Oaxaca, México.

Photo by Carlos Pérez, from TV TAMIX Archive, courtesy of Hermenegildo Rojas.

Forgotten in some corner. No one sees them.

They seem totally useless. All these objects you are seeing are part of my surroundings. I live with them; I share this part of the Earth with them.” Genaro’s concern for the objects in the shabby courtyard parallels a later problem: the deterioration of the cassettes on which the images from TV Tamix are preserved.

Years after Genaro’s recorded confessionals, Hermenegildo created the structure of the TV Tamix archive, which comprises videos on farming, community organization, and music, and amounts to some four hundred hours of recordings of life in Tamazulapam Mixe. Thanks to projects like TV Tamix—which now seeks to establish itself as an archive independent of state institutions—new understandings of what an archive can mean to a community have emerged.

For example, as we see in Mood, archival material can be reconfigured into new productions that reflect on time, memory, and community.

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encontrado de video fue grabado por Genaro Rojas cuando trabajaba como maestro de primaria en San Juan Juquila Mixes, y pone de relieve ciertas preocupaciones respecto al potencial memorioso que habita en los objetos olvidados, así como a la necesidad de crear historias sobre lo que estas memorias significan para los demás, así como las múltiples lecturas contemporáneas que permiten realizar.

Grabado a finales del siglo pasado, estuvo guardado durante más de diez años antes de que Hermenegildo y Carlos Pérez (primo de los hermanos Rojas) empezaran a trabajar en un documental en colaboración, Barras de color, sobre la historia de TV Tamix.

En Estado de ánimo, sentado ante la cámara, Genaro se ve frustrado, consciente de que se acerca el ocaso y preocupado de no tener suficiente luz para registrar los objetos que tiene enfrente: tazas, botellas de mezcal, recogedores y más. Pondera las posibilidades de utilizar el video como una herramienta para imprimir este momento, diciendo: “Estos objetos están ahora abandonados. Olvidados en algún rincón. Nadie los ve. Parecen ser totalmente inútiles. Todos estos objetos que ustedes ven forman parte de mi entorno. Vivo con ellos, comparto esta parte de la Tierra con ellos.” La preocupación de Genaro respecto a los objetos en ese patio descuidado se encuentra en paralelo con otro problema por venir: el deterioro de los casetes en los que fueron preservadas las imágenes de TV Tamix.

Años después de las confesiones grabadas de Genaro, Hermenegildo creó la estructura del archivo de TV Tamix, que contiene videos sobre el cultivo de la tierra, la organización comunitaria y sobre música, y equivale a unas cuatrocientas horas de de grabación de la vida en Tamazulapam Mixe. Gracias a proyectos como TV Tamix – que actualmente busca establecerse como un archivo independiente de las instituciones estatales – han

In this context, I ponder the meaning of the archived image. Why does it become a desirable project to generate spaces to contribute to a community’s culture via reflection, discussion, and creation? I understand the desire of archiving—collecting, safeguarding, cataloging, and sharing with a community—as a response to the anguish of forgetting lost or waning community traditions and as an engine of action to maintain them.

Mood addresses two concerns: the imminent deterioration of the magnetic tape these cultural memories had been recorded on and the quest for recognition of TV Tamix’s importance to its community. This idea was described by Hermenegildo as: “Exta’n pujxjetyp tamp. Exta’an jëk pëjkëkp.

Exta’n jëk pëjkmujkp, exta’n jëdëkojk jënpejtp.”

Translated from the Ayuuk language into English, this means: “An audiovisual work is in itself an archive that encloses our lived experiences. An accessible archive is an archive that stays alive in order to be able to appreciate those lived experiences again.”

surgido nuevas formas de comprender lo que un archivo puede significar para una comunidad. Por ejemplo, tal como lo vemos en Estado de ánimo, el material de archivo puede ser reconvertido en nuevas producciones que reflexionan sobre el tiempo, la memoria y la comunidad.

En este contexto, reflexiono sobre el significado de la imagen archivada. ¿Por qué resulta un proyecto deseable el generar espacios para contribuir a la cultura de una comunidad a través de la reflexión, la discusión y la creación? Entiendo

The translation of this phrase, however, does Agencia Municipal de San José Konkixp Municipio de Tamazulápam del Espíritu Santo, 2013, Oaxaca, México. not express the deeper Photo by Conrado Pérez Rosas, from TV TAMIX Archive, courtesy of Hermenegildo Rojas. meaning of the word exta’n (to refer to the role el deseo de archivar – recolectar, salvaguardar, of the archive) in the Ayuuk worldview, specifically catalogar y compartir con una comunidad – regarding the purpose of the audiovisual archive. como una respuesta a la angustia de olvidar las Exta’n is an image of collective memory that retradiciones perdidas o en vías de desaparecer de signifies the concept of ejx pajt, which refers una comunidad y como un motor de acción para to the territorial boundary markers erected conservarlas. by a community. This marker has a practical purpose—knowing where your own territory ends Estado de ánimo responde a dos preocupaciones: and that of your neighbor begins—but perhaps el inminente deterioro de la cinta magnética more importantly, ejx pajt is the sign that marks sobre la que fueron grabadas estas memorias the relationship between the people able to culturales y la búsqueda de reconocimiento de interpret it. As Hermenegildo continually remarks la importancia de TV Tamix para su comunidad. in our email exchanges: it is about fostering the

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preservation of the community ties that generate them and taking on their safekeeping, to share the memory. In Ayuuk, this sentiment can be understood through nimyuk (gathering together), exmuk (looking together), kajpxmuk (discussing and making decisions together), and tunmuk (embarking on work together).

The importance for communities to have their own space for historical documentation is a common concern among archivists. These spaces frequently develop discussions about how land possession has changed, the relationship between Indigenous communities and the central government, and the ownership of memory through appropriated images. However, they often fail to gain collective support for activities such as fundraising and do not have enough resources to properly catalog or attend to the archives. This is often exacerbated by prohibitive technical vocabulary surrounding archives, which prevents some communities from seeing them as a priority.

Speaking of the archive is often bound up with an academic approach, leaving me to ponder: does the archive make it necessary to appropriate a practice that is alien to our communities? Even when archivists from communities want to work toward the common good, they are in fact separated from those who have not been able to find meaning in the vocabulary of the archive.

This exists in contrast to the natural practice of the oral tale, or the direct interaction, which does not need an audiovisual record to legitimize it.

Finally, for archivists, people dedicated to an archive, and whoever wants to narrate archive images—their own and those of others—the goal is to generate connections between members of the community. In this way, the archive is imagined and constructed as a place for the dialogue. As in Mood, these documentation processes reveal the importance of listening to those who narrate found objects, giving a new meaning to the images created by others.

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Hermenegildo describe esta idea como: “Exta’n pujxjetyp tamp. Exta’an jëk pëjkëkp. Exta’n jëk pëjkmujkp, exta’n jëdëkojk jënpejtp.” Traducido al español de la lengua ayuuk, esto significa: “Un trabajo audiovisual es en sí mismo un archivo que contiene experiencias vividas. Un archivo accesible es un archivo que sigue vivo para permitir apreciar nuevamente esas experiencias vividas.”

Sin embargo, la traducción de esta frase no expresa el sentido profundo de la palabra exta’n (para referirse al papel del archivo) en la cosmovisión ayuuk, en especial en lo relativo al propósito del archivo audiovisual. Exta’n es una imagen de la memoria colectiva que resignifica el sentido de ejx pajt, que se refiere a las demarcaciones de límites territoriales erigidos por una comunidad. Estas demarcaciones tienen una finalidad práctica – saber dónde termina el propio territorio y dónde empieza el del vecino – pero lo que es tal vez más importante, ejx pajt es el signo que marca la relación entre la gente capaz de interpretarlo. Tal como Hermenegildo lo hace notar constantemente en nuestra correspondencia por e-mail: se trata de propiciar la preservación de los vínculos comunitarios que las generan y hacerse cargo de su salvaguarda, compartir la memoria. En ayuuk, este sentimiento puede entenderse como nimyuk (estar juntos), exmuk (mirar juntos) y tunmuk (emprender un trabajo juntos).

La importancia para las comunidades de tener su propio espacio para la documentación histórica es una preocupación común a los archivistas.

Estos espacios con frecuencia llevan a cabo discusiones sobre cómo se ha transformado la posesión de la tierra,

la relación entre las comunidades indígenas y el gobierno central y la propiedad de la memoria a través de la apropiación de imágenes. Sin embargo, con frecuencia no consiguen obtener el apoyo colectivo para realizar actividades tales como la recolección de fondos y no tienen recursos suficientes para catalogar adecuadamente a cuidar los archivos. Esto se exacerba con frecuencia por el vocabulario técnico prohibitivo que rodea a los archivos, y que impide a ciertas comunidades verlos como una prioridad.

Agencia Municipal de San José Konkixp Municipio de Tamazulápam del Espíritu Santo, 2013, Oaxaca, México. Photo by Conrado Pérez Rosas, from TV TAMIX Archive, courtesy of Hermenegildo Rojas.

El discurso sobre el archivo está con frecuencia vinculado a una perspectiva académica, lo que me deja pensativo: ¿el archivo hace necesario apropiarse de una práctica que es ajena a nuestras comunidades? Incluso cuando los archivistas de las comunidades quieren trabajar a favor del bien común, están de hecho separados de aquellos que no han podido hallar sentido en el vocabulario del archivo. Esto se da en contraste con la práctica natural de la narración oral, o de la interacción directa, que no requieren de un registro audiovisual para legitimarlas.

Finalmente, para los archivistas, gente dedicada a un archivo, y quien quiera narrar imágenes de archivo – las propias y las de otros – el objetivo es crear conexiones entre los miembros de la comunidad. De este modo, el archivo se imagina y se construye como un espacio para el diálogo. Tal como sucede en Estado de ánimo, estos procesos de documentación revelan la importancia de escuchar a quienes narran los objetos encontrados, dándole un nuevo significado a las imágenes creadas por otros.

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Asian Conical Hats in Cinematic Dystopias

by Astria Suparak 173

They populate the black market in Blade Runner (1982).

They can be spotted in the prison-city of Escape from LA (1996).

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On the territory of the yakuza in Ghost in the Shell (2017).

In the underground tunnels harboring rat-eating outlaws in Demolition Man (1993).

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They’re toiling in a hardscrabble village floating in Waterworld (1995).

In a destitute mining town suffering through an epidemic in Firefly (2002).

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Hawking goods on the lawless streets of Alita: Battle Angel (2019).

Guarding a tropical gambling den in Solo: a Star Wars Story (2018).

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And they drift by in “The Colony” of Total Recall (2012 reboot).

(Yes, Britain will continue to be a colonizer in the future.)

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Within the realm of science fiction futures, anonymous pedestrians in Asian conical hats scurry by in the background, while white main characters remain in focus.

The streamlined, waterproof headgear—known variously in English as a rice hat, a bamboo hat, or a “coolie hat” (we’ll return to that last one later)—would indeed be practical in the perpetual rain of many dystopias. Except central characters are persistently hatless, while silent extras are outfitted in this tropical head covering regardless of weather conditions or time of day, even when indoors.

Conical hats are used by white filmmakers, television showrunners, and their costume designers as a shortcut to signify not only an Asian or Asian-influenced population, but also an overpopulated, impoverished, immoral, diseased, and expendable one. Such economy in one object (read: racist trope)! A wet climate further steeps these locations—constructed to read as Chinatowns, Southeast Asian slums, or some other “seedy” area—in foulness.

Lazily applied by white filmmakers, the traditional headpieces are ubiquitously used to depict an alarmingly Asian future.

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Over fifty variations of conical hats exist throughout East, Southeast, and South Asia, with a few similarities influenced by centuries of trading. They are most often made from dried leaves or stalks from local plants (such as palm, rice, bamboo, sedge, rush, cane, or nito) that are woven or sewn together, then stitched to a bamboo wood frame and waterproofed (with lacquer in Japan, turpentine in Vietnam, and resin in the Philippines). There are many shapes and sizes, and more complex designs are taller and have an inner band that floats the hat from the wearer’s head, creating space for air circulation to keep the head cool (like the Thai ngob, Filipino salakot, or Japanese sandogasa).

The ancient Asian technology of the conical Asian hat was so effective and advantageous that white colonizers took one of its many permutations (the salakot, which roughly translates from Tagalog to “native helmet”) and mass-produced a version for their militaries.

Conical hat variants have been worn by the working class, soldiers, entertainers, nobility, and royalty. Plain styles are used as protection from the sun and rain by farmers and fishermen across Asia, by vendors in the floating markets of Bangkok, and by street cleaners in urban China.

In feudal Japan, samurai and foot soldiers sported a more rugged jingasa (sometimes made from hardwood, leather, or metal), and present-day traveling Buddhist monks don a gently domed takuhatsugasa.

Some hats include sutras or poetry written on the outside (Japanese ajirogasa) or hidden between layers and only visible when held up to a light (nón bài tho from Huê, Vietnam). Others are customized with embroidery, painting, or batik designs (like many Indonesian caping). Colorfully decorated, broad-brimmed jaapi are used for festivities and ceremonies in Assam, India; narrow belo are gifted to women in Laya, Bhutan; and elaborate salakot were treated as heirloom objects and status symbols in the Philippines.

Ornamented differently by ethnic groups, the salakot usually has a spiked or knobbed finial and can feature tassels, feather plumes, horsehair, beads, metal, and pockets in the lining for storing valuables.

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1. Antonio Pigafetta and Theodore J. Cachey, The First Voyage around the World (1519-1522): An Account of Magellan’s Expedition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

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In 1521, Hara Humamay (later named Queen Juana of Cebu) was described by a Venetian scholar on expedition with Ferdinand Magellan as wearing “a large hat of palm leaves in the manner of a parasol, with a crown about it of the same leaves, like the tiara of the pope; and she never goes any place without such one.”1 During the ensuing colonial period in the Philippines, Filipinos and Spaniards serving in the Spanish army used the native headwear, with its embedded ventilation, as sun hats.

The traditional Philippine helmet was covered in cloth by Spanish troops and gradually adapted to the shape of the flatbrimmed morrión (popularly associated with conquistadors).

By the 1860s and ’70s, French colonial troops in Indochina had copied the lightweight hat design; their mimicry was then repeated by invading British and Dutch armies in nearby regions. This derivative of the salakot, now known as a “pith helmet” or “safari hat,” became standard issue for those troops. The design was also co-opted

by Italian and imperial Portuguese and German armies occupying territories with hot climates, including parts of Africa and Southeast, South, and West Asia (commonly referred to as the Middle East). The pith helmet also became army-issued gear at the end of the century for North American troops in what is now the southwestern United States and the Canadian Northwest Territories.

After World War II, the Southeast Asian-rooted headdress was in turn adopted by the Viêt Minh from their former French colonizer. It is still used today by police and military units, regimental bands, mail carriers, and travelers in parts of North America, Britain, West Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. So prolifically deployed by every white colonial power, the Asian-descended pith helmet became a symbol of colonialism itself.

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The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void.” The Chinese Exclusion Act was signed three years later. The British government officially ended the coolie trade in 1916.

2. Beginning in the 1820s, the British began using Chinese and Indian indentured laborers to replace the “free” labor of enslaved Africans in grueling and deadly industries, such as mining, railway construction, and cotton and sugar production. Coolie labor was marketed as morally better than slavery, as it was under contract, paid, and ostensibly voluntary and temporary, with laborers assured that they would regain freedom after years-long terms of service. Yet in reality, it was another system based on exploitation, brutality, white supremacy, and racist hierarchy. Laborers were routinely deceived into signing contracts based on misleading promises, and some were kidnapped and sold into the trade. Workers had to pay off the debt of their own transportation—during which Indian women were often raped—and they were manipulated to remain indentured well beyond contract terms.

French colonies systematically overworked Indian miners to death. Asian laborers’ freedoms, including where they could live and whom they could marry, were severely limited by colonial legislation. The indentureship of Asian migrants was a white British, European, and American illusion of “free labor.”

5. By the eighteenth century, the word “coolie” was used to describe overseas Asian workers. Originating in South Asia in the seventeenth century, the term originally meant “day laborer.” The Chinese photosemantic matching translates to “bitter strength” and is generally understood as “hard labor.”

4. Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (Delran: Simon and Schuster, 2015).

The distinctive, pointed hat known as a nón lá in Vietnam and a dŏulì in China is sometimes referred to as a “coolie hat” by non-Asians—a vexing term whose first known use was in 1924. This was after the British and American governments officially ended the century-long deadly and exploitative system of “coolie trading.”2 And it was during the United States’ ban on immigrants from Asia, a period which, in addition to the severe race- and ethnicity-based restrictions that preceded and followed, lasted a hundred years. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Supreme Court and lawmakers on the floor of the Senate called Chinese people a “degraded and inferior race,” “rats,” and “swine,”3 and newspapers and magazines published cartoons and editorials depicting Asian immigrants as diseased and barbaric— not dissimilar to the way white sci-fi wields the Asian conical hat.4 Decades of coordinated official and unofficial campaigns stoked racism, violence, and

3. The People v. George W. Hall, Supreme Court of California (1854).

There are dozens and dozens of variations of the Asian traditional headdresses, and white filmmakers will use any one of them to paint the population as meek, subdued, powerless—and, well, colonized. Quiet Asians who should keep their heads down and just stay out of the way.

Meaning: stay out of the center of the frame, out of the focus of the lens. We’re not even supposed to notice the Asianified people. The head coverings are used to not simply obscure the face but to anonymize the whole body—an undifferentiated mass of generic Asianness, whether the background actors are actually Asian or not. If someone’s going to rise up against the oppressors of this apocalypse, it’s not going to be someone in a nón lá!

lynchings targeting East and South Asians at the turn of the previous century, which is disturbingly echoed today by escalating, deadly violence amid the global pandemic.

The term “coolie” is now commonly considered a racial slur toward Asian people and is prohibited in South Africa as hate speech.5

In spite of their wide-ranging uses, regional variations, and significations across Asia, conical hats are used by white filmmakers and production designers as just another trope to flatten us into a monolith, into a fungible idea of “Asian” barely worthy of a name or a speaking role. Asian conical hats are intentionally selected over the hat’s white derivative, the pith helmet. This racialized costuming choice is one more way the “coolie” archetype endures. Even in their wildest visions of the future, Asians remain figures of subjugation. The implications can be seen all around us. Amid racial capitalism, it’s easy to buy a “coolie hat” to complete your Halloween costume—or your dystopian film.

Screenshot from Party Time’s website (taken February 17, 2021). The description says, “Give your Halloween costume a traditional exotic Chinese look with this Coolie Hat!”

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José Honorato Lozano, Mercaders Ilocanos (Ilocano Merchants), 1847, from Vistas de las islas Filipinas y trajes de sus habitantes, via Biblioteca Digital Hispánica.

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Various Philippine animals and plants, detail from Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas (1734) by Pedro Murillo Velarde, Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay, Francisco Suarez, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Salakots and women's hats, from The Inhabitants of the Philippines (1900) by Frederic H. Sawyer, via Wikimedia Commons.

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French soldiers in Indochina circa 1861, from the French publication L’Illustration, via militarysunhelmets.com.

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Working-class Tagalog attire from the Spanish colonial era, with barong tagalog, esclavina (rain capes), and salakot, from Aventures d'un Gentilhomme Breton aux iles Philippines by Paul de la Gironiere (1855) by Paul de la Gironiere, via Wikimedia Commons.

Philippoteaux (artist) and Pierre (engraver), Oceanie: Habitants de Manille, Malais de I'lle Luçon, 1859, published by Dufour, Mulat, and Boulanger, via correosfilipinas-blog.tumblr. com.

Trage de Diario Sargento 2º de Gala, from Album de la Infanteria Española: desde sus primitivos tiempos hasta el día (1861) by Serafín María de Sotto, 3rd Count of Clonard, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Filipino salakot made of tortoiseshell, made before 1899, courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

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Tinggian rain cape (plaited straw) from the Philippines. Photo by Dean C. Worcester, from The National Geographic Magazine, 27 November 1913.

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Sandatahan with crossbow, northern Luzon, 1898, via 1898miniaturas.com.

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A British soldier picks a sun helmet from a pile left behind by Italian troops in the Western desert. June 1941. Crown Copyright provisions, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Late-nineteenth century salakot from the Philippines, via militarysunhelmets.com.

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On the Aerodrome at Amman. Col. Laurence [T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia], Sir Herbert Samuel, Amir Abdullah, April 1921.

Photograph by unnamed American Colony Jerusalem Photo Dept., from American Colony Jerusalem Collection, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Key to images on page 181

Thank you to Bùi Kim Đĩnh, Kimberley Acebo Arteche, and Brett Kashmere.

This visual essay was commissioned by Seen and is one part of Astria Suparak’s ongoing research project, Asian Futures, Without Asians.

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Blade Runner (1982)

Escape from LA (1996)

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Demolition Man (1993)

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

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Madeline Anderson’s Cinematic Assemblages

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Historical events and people can often feel abstract and larger than life. Film brings us close. Madeline Anderson’s incisive cinematic assemblages—I Am Somebody (1970), A Tribute to Malcolm X (1967), and Integration Report 1 (1960)—bring us even closer.1 Anderson’s coverage of early civil rights demonstrations invokes the nonlinear past with newsreel-like immediacy and immersive affect. Her composite films consist of distinct cinematic acts, which unfold more poetically and musically than they do narratively.

The optimism of demonstrators and the hostility of the police and other upholders of segregation are palpable and seemingly unmediated.

The films image the radical Black struggle against white supremacy through essayistic montage and Black musical traditions, pulsating with formal rigor. At the same time, a centering of the Black subject—often filling the frame with faces—constitutes Anderson’s epistemology. Among these faces (and voices) is that of Claire Brown, whose reflections are particularly salient.

1. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has undertaken important efforts to make these materials available to the public. In 2016 they facilitated photochemical preservation on Integration Report 1 at Colorlab.

Ultra-high-definition or 4K scans were done on I Am Somebody in 2015 and on A Tribute to Malcolm X in 2016, both at Colorlab. Thanks to media archivist and conservator Bleakley McDowell for research assistance.

by Terri Francis

2. Michelle Materre, “From the Archives: Madeline Anderson on I Am Somebody” YouTube video, 39:50, February 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NNexsk_fDPo. The event was recorded in 2015 at Film at Lincoln Center.

Madeline Anderson c. 1994. © The Trustees of Indiana University. Permission granted by the Black Film Center/ Archive, Indiana University.

In I Am Somebody, Brown provides plainspoken and critical narration of Black women hospital workers in Local 1119B striking for change in South Carolina. The opening sequence initially plays like a travelogue of idealized images of Charleston until Brown, also a member of the strike, steps in as our astute guide to bring us into her view of the city “as it really was . . . if you were poor and Black.” She speaks at times as if to herself, placing the viewer—us— within a circle of imagined listeners who share and affirm her experience. Brown’s voice is disembodied yet speaks with and for the strikers. Perhaps this is an effect perfected in postproduction when she visited Anderson at her home in New York. The filmmaker recorded Brown’s narration while the latter watched the footage, giving it an unrehearsed, personal, and improvisational feel.2 Through Anderson’s cinematic collections, we experience the history of those extraordinary-yet-ordinary makers

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4. Madeline Anderson. Artist Statement. http:// signsjournal.org/madeline-anderson-i-amsomebody-1969/ Accessed March 10, 2021.

3. Michael T. Martin, “Madeline Anderson in Conversation: Pioneering an African American Documentary Tradition,” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 72-93; 74.

Anderson’s sincerity and proximity to her subject matter lay at the heart of her filmmaking approach.

The filmmaker once said: “I think that media has to be utilitarian. I was criticized a lot for that view and I accept the criticism. I was not interested in making entertainment. I wanted my films to be used to improve our people.”3 According to Anderson, white feminists said I Am Somebody was not a feminist film, a surprising claim given its narration by a Black woman, who chronicled the brave actions taken by over 400 Black women healthcare workers to push for union recognition and better pay and working conditions. In her 1969 artist statement, Anderson said of her work: “To me, the importance of the film was not its classification, however, it is a film made by a Black woman for and about Black women. At the time, my concern was, had I been successful in making a film that was true to their experience?”4 And in lifting up the experiences of everyday women in I Am Somebody and documenting it for today’s viewers, she fulfilled her filmmaking ethic—to be useful and to improve the lives of others.

Anderson’s stories of injustice are framed as stories shared in solidarity between friends and compatriots. Her aesthetic lends itself to an emotional as well as cerebral response. A Tribute to Malcolm X, for example, seats us in a chair across from the great man. We feel the warmth of his broad, beautiful smile, a punctuation to his philosophical reflections. The camera placement and editing allow us to leap, calmly, from one scene to another—forward in time, after Malcolm’s assassination, to hear his widow, Dr. Betty Shabazz, speak of his outlook on human rights, and then back in time, across the Atlantic to sit across the table from him in Cairo. For the

Black diasporic figure, Anderson’s images call up feelings of recognition and return, a sense of belonging and closeness to the histories that have shaped our present day. In this way, Anderson’s films are vast, even in their brevity.

In a 2015 post-film discussion with curator Michelle Materre, Anderson spoke of Integration Report 1, referring to the early years of the Civil Rights Movement: “I didn’t want to make big films. I only wanted to make ten-minute films every year to show the progress we were making.”5 After telling the Film at Lincoln Center audience about how she had been a member of the NAACP since the age of fourteen, Anderson went on to explain that she titled the film Integration Report 1 with the idea that it would be the first in a series of reports. Networks, however, did not show any interest in supporting the project. To view Integration Report 1 is to feel the weight of its continued relevance as we continue to face police brutality amid job and housing discrimination, as well as persistent inequities in educational opportunity decades later; it is also to mourn the subsequent films Anderson might have produced.

5. Materre, “From the Archives.”

who took a courageous and nonviolent stand to improve their lives and, in return, faced the state’s brutality.

Running twenty minutes, Integration Report 1 is both concise and epic. Through Anderson’s film, we—the inheritors of this late 1950s freedom fight—witness marches, demonstrations, and

I was not interested in making entertainment. I wanted my films to be used to improve our people. —Madeline Anderson

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sit-ins against segregation in Alabama, North Carolina, New York, and Washington, DC. With startling perspicacity, Anderson’s cameramen and interviewers, under her direction, capture the acuity and courage of activists discussing their plans in living rooms. In the street, segregationist ideologies come down to the blunt statements of unidentified, angry white mothers who picket and refuse to bring their white children to a newly integrated school in Glendale, Queens.

For the Black diasporic figure, Anderson’s images call up feelings of recognition and return, a sense of belonging and closeness to the histories that have shaped our present day.

Though narrated by actor Robert Graham Brown, speeches, hymns, and protest songs constitute the largest part of Integration Report 1’s soundtrack.

Discussing the film’s production history with Materre, Anderson makes it clear that generous and caring actions of camaraderie helped to bring the Integration Report 1 to reality. During the editing stage, she recalled, she was approached by the author, filmmaker, and performer Maya Angelou, who asked how she could help, saying, “I don’t have any money, but what do you need?”

When Anderson said she needed music, Angelou offered to sing for the film. Presumably, it’s her voice we hear in the ensemble, along with actor and singer Lillian Hayman and musician James Bartow, singing the spiritual “Over My Head” in the opening montage. Here, the tone expresses both grief and grievance—“Over my head, I see trouble in the air. Over my head, I see trouble everywhere.”—adapting the lyrics and rhythm to speak to the struggles of the 1950s.

In one of many firsts, Anderson—a director, editor, and producer of social documentary and television— became one of the pioneering Black women members of the New York Motion Picture Editor’s Guild. She explained in a 2013 Black Camera interview how difficult it was for her to join the union since she did not have a parent or close contact already in it with whom to apprentice. Alongside her grit and

determination, Anderson maintained a playful vision of herself as an editor. She remarked: “I didn’t want to tell someone how to edit. I wanted to edit. One of my fantasies was that someone would be standing at the door pushing film in and I would sit there and edit and just edit.” This passion for craft and process directly feeds the intimacy she creates between the viewer and the subject.

Watching Anderson’s cinematic assemblages on my laptop, twenty or so inches from my face, monumental historical movements came down to the scale of voices and gestures—the pause as one demonstrator waits for another to descend from the police wagon, gently placing his hand at the small of her back. It’s the serene cool in a man’s posture as he stands, taking a puff of his cigarette as he waits to be arrested at the lunch counter sit-ins. We’re in the action, but Anderson lets us notice the softer actions of these history makers as they bear witness and push justice forward.

Their actions are often subtle, but emphatic and sure, as in Jackie Robinson’s insistence that as an interstate passenger he does not need to sit in the Negro waiting room at the airport. Anderson’s vision, as a chronicler of historical material, takes a participant-observer perspective. Her camera is positioned close to the crowds, among the people, with a space for us.

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I Am Somebody (1970). Film stills courtesy of Icarus Films.

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Integration Report 1 (1960). Film stills courtesy of Icarus Films.

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by Imran Siddiquee

At the heart of Writing with Fire (2021) are three Dalit women who work at Khabar Lahariya— the rural Uttar Pradesh-based newspaper. The journalists are often filmed from behind as they walk forward in pursuit of a story, conveying the weight of their vulnerability and power. Directors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh frame their subjects stepping purposefully into danger again and again, keeping pace as reporters Meera, Suneeta, and Shyamkali move through a society that presents imminent threats to Dalit women. Whether seen walking against traffic or down an empty country road, past dangerous mines or across vast farmland surrounded by leering eyes, we are ever aware that women just like these journalists are being brutalized all around them.

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1.The caste system in India is one of “religiously codified exclusion that was established in Hindu scripture” where at birth children inherit a social status (and associated level of “spiritual purity”) from their ancestors. At the very top of this system are Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants)—or upper castes—and at the bottom are Shudras, or peasants. Outside or below this structure altogether are Dalits (branded as “untouchables” and often forced in slave and bonded agricultural labor) and Adivasis, or the Indigenous peoples of South Asia. Source: Equality Labs, 2018, Caste in the United States, https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey/#what-is-caste.

Writing with Fire (2021). Film still courtesy of Autlook Filmsales.

The film’s epigraph explains the precarious position of Dalit women within (or outside of) India’s centuries-old caste system and describes Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News) as the country’s only newspaper run entirely by women.1 Meera, a leader within the organization, later describes her choice of profession as “unthinkable” for her caste and gender. And throughout the film, Dalit women who are not journalists explain the precarity of their lives directly. The fear and anger that they express further underlines the risk and promise of the paper’s work. Thomas and Ghosh capture Khabar Lahariya just as the publication moves from print to digital. Their subject matter recalls 2011’s Page One: Inside the New York Times, which followed (and lionized) three white

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Writing with Fire (2021). Film still courtesy of Autlook Filmsales.

men working at the world’s most famous newspaper as it made a similar transition. Yet, the similarities end there. The women in Writing with Fire use their tools to cover stories—their stories— that exist beyond the frame of that other film, or that of most mainstream journalism itself.

The film opens on Meera holding a smartphone; she’s recording the story of a woman who has been raped repeatedly by a group of men. This woman was subsequently abused by the local police to whom she and her husband reported the violence. We watch Meera watch her explain that these men can do “whatever they want, even kill both of us.” After ending the recording, Meera calmly asks for the paperwork the family has gathered about the horrific attacks. It’s not that she’s without fear or oblivious to the odds stacked against them. Rather, Meera understands what can be done. After speaking with the survivor, we see her in a police station, questioning the police chief about the department’s inactions regarding the case. They avoid both her gaze and

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their responsibility. Afterwards, while seated on a train, Meera explains, “This is how one fights for justice in a democracy, and journalists must use this power responsibly.” Meanwhile, at home, her own husband demeans her choice to work as she prepares dinner, cares for her daughter, and checks in on her ailing mother.

Shyamkali and Suneeta have no disillusions about the reality of the Brahmanical capitalist patriarchal system they are up against either.

Shyamkali, who has survived an abusive partner, struggles with the paper’s transition to digital due to her inability to read the English lettering on her new phone. Similarly, Suneeta is pressured by her family to choose an acceptable marriage over her

career, regardless of her own needs. Yet, perhaps more than the upper caste reporters around them, the women understand what’s at stake if they don’t push on.

Writing with Fire has received great praise in the United States, where a Washington Post headline described it as “The most inspiring journalism movie—maybe ever.” The film won an audience award at Sundance this year, mirroring in some ways the success of 2004’s Born Into Brothels, another Sundance-winning documentary about vulnerable Indians using cameras to imagine

a better world (in that case, the children of sex workers in Calcutta). Thomas and Ghosh, though, unlike the directors of Born Into Brothels or Page One, are not white and do not position themselves or anyone else as saviors. As they told Filmmaker Magazine earlier this year, “It was very important to us that the authenticity of the story is not compromised in the pursuit of making it a film that can be accessed by an international audience.”2 It is a distinctive choice then that we never learn who is funding Khabar Lahariya, nor do we understand in a pivotal scene where the smartphones that arrive in the mail are coming from.

Writing With Fire (2021). Film still courtesy of Autlook Filmsales.

By keeping certain things unexplained and certain machinations of the operation off-screen, the film keeps Dalit women and their work at its center. Yet in other ways the choice not to name all the power structures at play in the paper’s likely expensive shift to online video reporting raises some attendant questions in a film fundamentally about

2. Filmmaker staff, “‘Dalit Women as Colleagues, Bosses, Leaders and Risktakers’: Editors Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh on Writing With Fire,” Filmmaker, January 30, 2021, https://filmmakermagazine.com/111008-dalit-women-ascolleagues-bosses-leaders-and-risktakers-editors-rintuthomas-and-sushmit-ghosh-on-writing-with-fire/#.YEeJUxNKhH0.

Perhaps more than the upper caste reporters around them, [Meera, Suneeta, and Shyamkali] understand what’s at stake if they don’t push on.

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By keeping certain things unexplained and certain machinations of

Writing with Fire (2021). Film still courtesy of Autlook Filmsales.

the operation offscreen, the film keeps Dalit women and their work at its center.

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power.3 What were the power dynamics in the production, and how did caste and class play a role in its own making? The importance of who sits behind the camera—who gets to edit, frame, and share a piece of media— is a fact that the film itself reminds us of repeatedly.

4. Statistics as of April 2021; source: https://www. youtube.com/c/KhabarLahariyaDigital.

3. The paper was founded in 2002 by nonprofit Nirantar (https://www.reuters.com/article/india-women-dalit/ report-like-a-dalit-girl-one-indian-publication-showshow-idINKBN1581E4/), and the United Nations Democracy Fund is among its funders (https://www.un.org/ democracyfund/news/how-undef-funded-award-winninglocal-newspaper-empowers-rural-women-india).

What Meera, Suneeta, and Shyamkali see through their cameras, how they understand Writing With Fire (2021). Film still courtesy of Autlook Filmsales. and choose to describe an event, is linked in the film to Khabar Lahariya’s success on YouTube—where they from. This is followed by a series of near-comic have now amassed over 150 million views, takes of the man unsheathing his sword, which covering everything from the economic impact he carries with him at all times. The absurdity of COVID-19 on the trans community to the of the hypermasculine spectacle contrasts with risks of surveillance online for Dalits and other the terror of what he just said; we understand the marginalized groups.4 At the same time, we learn gravity of the moment and why Meera needs to that their fiercest competition may be from the get this shot right. very power structure their work seeks to expose, as supporters of Narendra Modi are also using When she returns for another conversation, social media messaging to spread their own fire. the man is eagerly building two cow shelters and preparing to enter politics himself. That The importance of perspective is emphasized earlier question about the country’s future, of across two separate interviews that Meera does Hindu nationalism’s influence on young people, near the end of the documentary with an up-andimplicitly returns as he stands on a ladder against coming leader of Hindu Yuva Vahini, a Hindutva the backdrop of a passing train. The imposition organization described as being of the railway system, always a fraught symbol in “all male.” The first is done after cinema of and about South Asia—of colonialism, Yogi Adityanath, a Modi devotee of capitalism, of “progress”—provides an ominous and member of Hindu Yuva Vahini, answer. Yet we know Meera uses the railway too, is elected chief of Uttar Pradesh, often traveling to do her reporting. When she bringing new energy to the farreappears on-screen in Writing with Fire, the train right movement. Here the camera has passed and she continues questioning the captures Meera’s careful approach: man building a world that seeks to dominate her through a smile she asks him, and those most vulnerable in her communities.

“What is your vision for the youth Meera asserts her viewpoint nevertheless. of our country?” as she pushes him to consider the responsibility the organization has in shaping the country’s future. He answers, “My absolute priority is to protect our holy cows,” and references Muslims as a group that they need protection

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Studio Visit:

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Rikkí Wright

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A Los Angeles–based artist, photographer, and filmmaker, Rikkí Wright explores notions of community, beauty, and sisterhood. In rich hues and melodic compositions, her images, whether moving or still, examine desire and beauty politics.

Wright’s work has been exhibited in group and solo presentations in New York, Los Angeles, and London, among other places. She is a two-time BlackStar alumna: her experimental short films A Ritual of Sisterhood (2018) and A Song About Love (2019) screened at the festival in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

For this issue’s Studio Visit, Wright takes us on a journey in nature through her lens and words, and shares her art-making inspirations that bloom among the outdoors.

All photographs by Rikkí Wright. Pages 198-199: “An image I captured in Joshua Tree, CA, 2017.” Pages 202-203 (clockwise from top left): “Twins in Long Beach.”; “Every year I visit my grandparents in Alabama, I drive through Selma. Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is a portal of sorts. A place where you can feel the past.”; “Incorporating water somehow into my work is important for many reasons beyond its beauty.”; “Self-portrait on Edmund Pettus bridge, 2018.” Pages 204-205 (clockwise from top left): “My first time in the desert. For the first time in my life, I screamed at the top of my lungs because no one was around, then took this self-portrait.”; “A self-portrait captured of myself on the roof of my first apartment in Los Angeles. In my grandmother's dress.”; “Self-portrait in Mammoth Lakes, CA, 2019.”; “A self-portrait captured of myself on the roof of my first apartment in Los Angeles. In my grandmother's dress.”

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1. Where is your studio located, and how long have you been in this space?

I work and create mostly in nature. I have been interested in the outdoors as a site of collaboration with nature since I began capturing images. It felt much more familiar and comfortable than working in a studio, even before realizing I couldn’t afford a studio. Shooting outdoors has pushed me and my practice into a space that is most honest to the work I create.

6. Do you feel living and working in this city, in this place, has changed your practice in any significant ways?

Very much so. Although so much of my work is informed by where I’m from, Alabama. In Los Angeles I am in direct contact with my storytelling peers, and it has provided a landscape for me to grow in community and in conversation with folks I am grateful for.

7. Do you have a uniform while working?

2. How did you find it?

Luckily enough, we find each other wherever I am. For some time now I’ve considered my life nomadic. My work certainly, in some way, tells that story as well. Location and landscape are evident and sometimes not, which is usually intentional.

3. Where in the studio do you like to work most?

In stillness. I capture myself a lot in my work, and being able to find a vast space of stillness to create is integral to that part of my practice. There’s a sacredness that comes with being alone with self in nature. I also find this to be true when taking portraits of others. There’s a level of vulnerability that one is able to access when there are fewer distractions.

4. If you had to describe your ideal creative space in three words, what three words would you choose?

My uniform is definitely whatever provides comfort—usually some sweats, a T-shirt, and my Crocs—that’s my approach, how I decide what I’ll wear on a daily basis.

8. What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a documentary centrally focused on food and the South and memory and loss. The film stemmed from the relationship I shared with my grandmother in the kitchen and the closeness that I felt and the bond we created in that space.

9. What is the first step in your creative process?

Where do you begin?

It usually starts from a feeling, a daydream, a thought, or an image. Where I begin differs from project to project. As I become more informed, as I grow deeper into the understanding of myself, one small interaction, a sound, or sight can create a spiral within me that must be released in some way, shape, or form.

Peaceful, light, unbridled.

5. What is your schedule in the studio?

This past year has been interesting—publications don’t want to be liable in any way, so most of the jobs I’m on are actually required to shoot outdoors.

Beyond capturing images, I also do ceramics and I garden, so these days I’m spending the majority of my time outdoors. Thankfully, living in Los Angeles allows that to be possible.

10. What is a hobby or one thing you really enjoy doing right now outside of the studio?

Currently I have been carving wood—mostly little miniature spoons from sticks I’ve found on walks.

I want to carve a wooden comb next. Woodwork, ceramics, cooking, and doing hair all intersect in some interesting way. The tools and methods of each are so similar.

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A Conversation with Nora Mendis

Above and right: Betty (2020). Series still courtesy of HBO.

by Farrah Rahaman 206

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For over a decade, Nora Mendis has combined her technical know-how and experience as a production designer with a natural talent for the aesthetic and spatial. Her credits include Passing (2021), Betty (2020), Couples Therapy (2019), Topside (2020), The Incredible Jessica James (2017), The Sound of Silence (2019), and many other films and episodic works. As one of a handful of Black women at the helm of the art department, Mendis expands notions of production design into a space of world making, a process of collectively visioning and building worlds from mere concepts and ideas into physical settings we might, if only temporarily, inhabit.

I first met Mendis this past January, through my role as curatorial assistant for BlackStar’s upcoming exhibit Swarm, a retrospective of Terence Nance’s work, curated by Maori Karmael Holmes. Mendis is the exhibition designer, so we toured museum sites for the exhibit over FaceTime. I walked her around the space, in my palm. We paused as Mendis noticed the details of the installation environment, its modularity and dimensions, the placement of lighting tracks, and how much light came in from the windows.

A few weeks later, and nearly a full year into the pandemic, we spoke over Zoom with Mendis’s infant by her side.

Farrah Rahaman: You’re an incredibly prolific designer! Let’s talk about your background and your journey to the art department. How did you become a production designer?

art world. I did a lot of silent, Super 8, and 16-mm movies. I also stayed painting. When I graduated, I didn’t know which direction I wanted to go. I was interested in film and making my own films, but I didn’t know how to pursue that. I went into the industry and started from the bottom and wasn’t sure which department I was interested in. I felt most aligned with the art department.

I’ve done almost all of the positions in the art department and set building, the idea of designing a world. I came up as a set decorator and eventually became a production designer. It was sort of slow and wandering. The industry can cause a lot of burnout. There were moments where I wasn’t sure if I was ready to do this all of the time. For a couple of years, there was a bit of an on-again, off-again thing. But I always come back to it.

FR: How do you decide to take on a project?

Nora Mendis: Thank you! I went to art school for film, but it was geared towards the gallery and fine

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NM: It’s hard. It depends on many things, but

mostly whether I feel aligned with the script and the director. Now I’m able to be more choosy. At first, I did all kinds of films.

FR: Where does the interpretive process start for you?

NM: The moment I read the script is when I start to think about everything from a design perspective and then from a logistical perspective. I’m a research freak. I go deep into the research and love pulling tons of references and spending time at the library. New York City has incredible resources that existed for designers and architects before the internet. The New York Public Library’s main branch has a print collection. Most museums have resources for designers as well. The Cooper Hewitt, for example, has architectural plans. The Met has a textile gallery.

It’s also about knowing the characters. If it’s a movie about teenagers, you shouldn’t just be looking at other movies about teenagers. It’s about going deep on social media finding what people’s spaces look like. From there, it’s creating a color palette and talking to the director about their vision. It’s a fine line between making something design-y and making something naturalistic.

FR: How granular do you get in your process? Are you mood-boarding? How are you saving your references?

NM: Essentially, everything you see on camera that is not an actor or their clothing is the art department.

Everything from the room they’re standing in to the objects they’re holding: phones, drinks, books, food, cars.

It’s very important to show the interiority of a character through the way they move around in the world.

the art department umbrella. I work closely with those three people and their crews. We’ve got our construction crew, carpenters, shoppers, scenics, set dressers, and our prop assistants.

From the moment I start pulling references, I want to make sure that everybody looks at them.

It’s mood boards, shared Google Drives, Dropbox, and things like that. I make a book of references for each set or each character, depending on the film. The point is to get everybody on the same page. I also like to do an art department movie night, obviously pre-COVID, where we choose a movie that is a strong reference for the film and hang out.

FR: You’re working in all of these different colorways and modes. Betty and The Incredible Jessica James are so expressive. Their worlds are bright even when they’re grungy, but you’re also making more distilled spaces with Couples Therapy or The Sound of Silence and the blackand-white world of Passing. How do you approach each color palette as you’re layering, texturing, and building the worlds?

NM: In an ideal world, the color palette conversation would happen immediately with the director. Again, it depends on the script and the characters. For The Incredible Jessica James, it was Brooklyn but heightened. It’s like Jessica Williams but more. I’m always into some full-on pattern mixing and layering. When we decided that we were going with the super bright, super heightened palette, we just went all the way there.

It's very important to show the interiority of a character through the way they move around in the world.

My department functions essentially like a triangle, where the production designer oversees the overall design, then you have your art director, your set decorator, and your prop master, who are all heads of their own departments, but under

The Sound of Silence is about a quiet, lonesome, maybe even lonely main character. The question is, what has he been collecting his whole life?

What is his palette? How is it different from other palettes in the film? His home was very analog, very brown, but not lacking in texture. His foil in the film is this very corporate office, very fancy, very glass.

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Passing (2021). Film still courtesy of Netflix.

Shooting in black and white for Passing was a different way of looking at the world. When my decorator sent me photos of furniture, I had her only send me photos in black and white. I wanted to see the textures and the way an object interacts with other objects. So, if something’s super smooth or super rough, that’s going to show up. I didn’t want to get distracted by the color.

Although iPhone black and white is not the same as the way the film was graded, it still helped me see. We chose bright carpets and textiles. When you walk into the space, you’re like, Whoa, too much. But in black and white, it’s amazing.

And then Betty is more naturalistic. We’re trying to get the vibe of what the women’s spaces are in reality. Maybe a little bit heightened, but we’re not trying to make it super “for TV” either.

FR: Betty is impressive. It feels so familiar, especially as a young femme of color. There is a deep late-millennial, early–Gen Z vibe that feels like you’re plopped into their world. It feels very distinct from the glossier shows featuring people of a similar age.

Even when you're in a space that has no actors in it, the story is still there.

NM: All of that is super thought out. It was important to me that Janay’s hair products be different than Camille’s hair products, for example, and that people’s spaces feel realistic. With Indigo’s apartment, she does have art up on the walls, but it’s local Brooklyn women-of-color artists, designers, and painters. She doesn’t have original art on the wall; she has a print because she’s in her twenties and lives in Bushwick. When we go to her mom’s super fancy apartment in SoHo, we see actual pieces that we rented from artists. We did a lot of work to find artists we felt represented

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who this Black professional woman would have in her house. It is really fun to be able to have the money to support artists and bring their work into the show.

FR: That makes me think about the various scales of the operation. You’re attuned to the conceptual workings of the characters’ worlds, but your mind is on the logistical and financial considerations as well.

NM: Yes, and I don’t think there’s any scale where you escape that. Unfortunately, in the art department you never have enough money. You are thinking about the bigger picture of the budget. Budget concerns are serious concerns for the art department, but also everything is possible. I’ve done a ton of little movies, and everything is possible—it’s just harder. With the bigger jobs, you have more room for clearances or custom building, finding the perfect chair and being able to pay for it. But it’s not necessary to create a perfect film, you know?

FR: Do you feel the muscles you’ve gained on smaller sets have translated to the larger operations?

NM: Absolutely. I feel like those muscles are indie muscles. You always need them in some way. Even if you have fifty carpenters at your disposal, it’s important to remember the many ways in which filmmaking can work and not just be beholden to one way. It’s not just Hollywood and industry. It’s not just having huge crews. There are ways of making interesting work that

All images above: Behind the scenes production shots from Betty (2020). Courtesy of Nora Mendis.

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people forget, and they become less creative. Then something amazing like Moonlight [2016] gets made, and they question how it’s even possible.

FR: Who are some of your North Stars in terms of production design, or just design and aesthetics more broadly?

NM: I am drawn to a lot of painters and photographers. In terms of film and aesthetics, this is such a hard question! I love Claire Denis.

My favorite film is 35 Shots of Rum [2008], full stop!

It’s so naturalistic, and in a lot of ways it just feels right. I love Kevin Jerome Everson’s experimental work. He’s been doing it for a long time and he’s so prolific. His work is incredible—talk about witnessing and distilling something into a film in a way that is so visually compelling. I don’t have specific production designers as much as movies I’m drawn to and the ideas behind them.

[Talking to her baby, Amaru] So you want to be part of the interview now?

FR: I have a question about Baby Amaru, who I love seeing photos of, by the way! Has having a child altered your orientation to the production space?

NM: It’s complicated. When I was first pregnant, I designed Topside, which premiered at Venice last year. It was a mother-daughter story about people who live in the subway tunnels in New York City, specifically the Freedom Tunnel. It was a really dark, sad film. I’m into dark dramas, but being pregnant while designing that film changed the way I looked at it and changed my connection to the actors and main characters.

I interviewed for Passing about a year before it was supposed to go into production. I was connected to it far earlier and have been obsessed with the book,

by Nella Larsen, for years. I have family members who have passed, and my grandma still talks about these cousins who came to Thanksgiving for a few years and then just disappeared. That’s real in our shared history. I was extremely pregnant when we shot the film, because production kept getting pushed and pushed. The last day of production was four days before my due date, so I was nine months pregnant. I almost was reconsidering, but I was obsessed with the book and with director Rebecca Hall. I felt so connected and considered if I wasn’t pregnant I would have 100% done this movie, so I did.

FR: I hear you. I’m struck by how much New York is a character in so much of the work you do. How do you approach working with the city’s different scapes, from the wide outdoor environments to the very contained spaces?

NM: I love New York. My partner and I moved to Mexico City for a little while, then moved to the Bay Area, and then we came back. With New York City, it’s just all there—1920s New York is still here.

The lives of these skateboard girls exist alongside the lives of people who are living in the subway tunnels and the couples in therapy.

In fact, with Passing I was shocked by how much of old New York still exists. The fire hydrants look the same now as they did in 1900. Lots of

People act like the diversity is coming or it's here already, but there's a lot more work to do both in front of the camera but also behind it.

The other big thing is figuring out how to work with a baby and figuring out how that negotiation works. The good thing about filmmaking is that you work really hard when you’re in production—maybe you’re working fifteen hours a day for months—but then you can take some time off to do something else, like raise your baby.

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subway stations, lampposts, and architectural features are the same, so it all just continues to be layered. It’s very interesting the way architecture can represent and show segregation. Even when you’re in a space that has no actors in it, the story is still there.

FR: You’ve worked as a producer and trained as a filmmaker. Do you think you’re going to dip your feet back in other storytelling roles?

NM: My partner [Sam Ellison] and I made a documentary, Chèche Lavi [2019], along with Abraham Ávila and Rachel Cantave. Being a producer on that film was a game changer in how I understand filmmaking. I appreciated that, but I really love and am committed to production designing.

FR: What are you hoping to do more of? Do you have a dream project you haven’t been able to take on yet?

and you change a lot in a location. It’s interesting sometimes to read articles by film critics who have been doing their jobs for thirty years who don’t seem to know what a set decorator or a prop master does—to be so involved with the film industry but still not have a sense of what goes on behind the scenes.

FR: What are some tips you might have for emerging designers?

Choosing is a creative act, and you change a lot in a location.

NM: Period and futuristic stuff are really fun because I deeply enjoy the research. I love apocalypse movies, and I want to do a nerdy, maybe Afrofuturistic apocalypse movie. I’m more drawn to storytelling and the filmmaker’s connection to the script. I love telling stories that we don’t see very much or different perspectives on a “common” story. I love getting down with things that are experimental and weird.

I want to continue connecting to stories and bringing more people of color and Black people into the production world, because it is not where it needs to be. People act like the diversity is coming or it’s here already, but there’s a lot more work to do, both in front of the camera but also behind it.

NM: The biggest one is to keep at it. Burnout is real. Make sure to take care of yourself and your crew. My note is for people to be intentional about the spaces they’re in. Being aware that you cannot do it alone is super important. Behind the designer, director, and DP, there is a lot of support and a lot of collaboration and creativity as well.

Even if you’re working on a tiny movie and there’s only two or three people in the art department, treat everybody with respect and treat everybody as a collaborator.

FR: This highly collaborative, creative energy you’ve been describing upends the singleauthor philosophy that continues to dominate filmmaking, both in terms of how the industry rewards individualism and how audiences view directors. How have you come to understand this over the years?

NM: In terms of general audiences, it doesn’t bother me. I find it funny and think it’s great when people are like, “Oh, I thought you guys just found the apartment like that,” especially when the set was built on a soundstage. Even when shooting on location, a huge part of my job as designer is to do the director’s scouting and choose the location based on our vision. Choosing is a creative act,

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by Razan Al-Salah 214

Less Lethal Fetishes (2019). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Thirza Cuthand.

the banana packer is edible and the gas masks are kinky: the materialist politics of fetish and humor in Thirza Cuthand’s DIY videoworks

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Cuthand’s DIY aesthetic, ethic, and politic

are always anchored in a material condition.

Much like the banana, her humor and kink

removes her banana packer and eats it.

(2012), Cuthand, playing and being herself,

the material. In the last scene of Boi Oh Boi

personal and the political, the formal and

the messiness of identity between the

banal, Thirza Cuthand’s DIY videos unravel

Hilarious, kinky, and radically rooted in the

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gender identity, I do feel like a nomad.”

body has become home, although, in terms of

expanse from this body to that body. This

sometimes but not enough to cross that

even for me, that fierceness. I feel like a boi

hardness, softness, and gentleness; and yes,

than man or woman. Owning my curves, my

to “becom[e] something completely different

both complicate and render banal her identity

1. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 39.

Cuthand’s aesthetic emerges from her beginnings in the DIY movement of the mid-’90s. Still, it extends beyond the decade’s formalist visual style. Her work embodies a political and ethical means of producing radical films untethered to a financial patron.

In other words, it’s a “poor image”1 that holds the film’s ethics and politics in the means of low-budget production.

2. Indigenous Art Awards Laureates: Thirza Cuthand, The Hnatyshyn Foundation, https://www.rjhf.com/programmes/ prixenartautochtone/2017/CUTHAND-THIRZA.php.

“I didn’t originally intend to be an experimental filmmaker,” Cuthand once explained.2 “My work is largely dealing in a DIY aesthetic due to the very real experience of normally living in poverty.

Experimental works are less costly for me to produce. If my actors are all pipe cleaner dolls, or if I am jumping around performing in a baby doll dress, or if I am delivering a lecture in front of a green screen with some footage of dandelions behind me, crucial messages can still be conveyed humorously and poignantly without the need for things like grants or patrons.”

In films that do feature a cast, Cuthand’s poor image lends itself to a collaborative making process with nonactor friends and community members. Cuthand radicalizes her community relationships by setting them up within a fictive narrative.

Her filmmaking process is a social experiment of a possible elsewhere, here.

In The Longform Lesbian Census (2017) Cuthand takes a rudimentary colonial government tool for population control and subverts it by using the census to complicate the “lesbian demographic.”

Cuthand reappropriates the power of the census taker to ask very intrusive, funny, and kinky questions.

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“I applied for this job to be a census taker and I didn’t get it,” Cuthand tells me. “It was just this really long process, you had to take all these tests. And if you got the job, you had to prove you had a filing cabinet that would lock and a landline. Everything I learned from applying to that job kind of made me want to do this lesbian census.”

So she started thinking: “It was kind of a joke between me and my friend Riki [co-creator of the video]: what if there was a lesbian longform census? And then we thought we would actually ask our friends all these invasive questions. . . .

They didn’t have to tell the truth, but most of them told the truth.

When we shot it, we interviewed two couples together. There were these relationship issues that would show up. . . . I’m not usually that kind of person that inquires that directly about somebody’s life, love life, relationships. It was a really

Cuthand’s filmmaking as relation making is remediated into the digital in 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (2017). In this intimate film, she advertises a two-spirit dating site for “snagging and shacking up” that includes recommendations for nearby pipeline protests that you can take your date to. Collaborating with two-spirit friends, Cuthand reimagines a digital infrastructure as a safe space for seducing and organizing.

Reclamation (2018). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Thirza Cuthand.

Extractions (2019). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Thirza Cuthand.

interesting experience of community trust and community building.

My favorite part that actually made it into the film was when one of them was talking about being a switch, and her partner was like, ‘Oh, are you?!’”

“I use fantasy in a lot of films, and there’s this kind of Thirza Cuthand mythology that’s been created over the years that involves these more idealized two-spirit communities,” she says. “I think about that as this sort of parallel fictional universe that’s populated by all of these characters. There’s always that thing that performance artists and actors have . . . where people try to figure out if your public persona is your on-screen persona and they try to reconcile those. Are you that person in the video? Are you acting or is that really you? It’s gotten to this point where I don’t know anymore! I know sometimes I’m doing a role, but in some ways the roles are all me.”

Through this inseparable relation between narrator and character, cast and community, making and being in the world, Cuthand unsettles her authorial power as an artist separate from her art. In Less Lethal Fetishes (2019), part of her NDN Survival Trilogy, she grapples with the moment when her work is pushed into the international art market. She wrestles with the complicity of art world funding that is often sourced from global companies profiting from resource extraction and international conflicts. The film begins and ends describing her

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3. Former Whitney board member Warren Kanders was a majority owner and CEO of Safariland.

fetish for gas masks, a gesture that becomes loaded the moment her work is curated into the Whitney Biennial in 2019. (That year activists ramped up their actions against a Whitney board member with ties to a tear gas manufacturing company.3 Their products have been used to suppress protests in Palestine, Ferguson, and Standing Rock.)

Cuthand blurs the use of the gas mask—between an object of kink and survival—to subvert the cooptation of her work by the biennial. She problematizes the pressure being deflected from those in power to the participating artists. She imagines different ways she can respond as an artist, such as infiltrating the biennial with an additional video.

As she explains in the film: “In my video I was going to have people from these different communities say something meaningful and profound while wearing this . . . gas mask.

It was going to be a smart, incisive piece that I would just slip into the biennial with my other two videos that were screening. So that was the plan, but it never happened.

I didn’t know what I wanted these people to say. I felt weird about asking random friends to be in my video just because they fit certain demographics. But I kept the gas mask.”

In Extractions (2019), the second film in the NDN Survival Trilogy, Cuthand maps the seemingly inescapable ubiquity of extractive capitalism. Beautiful found images of explosive mining are shot in high-definition and intercut with shaky POV footage of a different kind of mining: eggs being extracted from Cuthand’s body. She narrates her fear of raising a child in her home province, Saskatchewan, where

children are also systematically extracted from their Indigenous communities in the name of “care.” The shaky poor image of Cuthand’s everyday resistance breaks with the spectacle of an apocalyptic imaginary that separates the future from the present: a colonial fragmentation of time that renders the apocalypse inevitable and seals Indigenous peoples—and colonialism—into the past. “People say the apocalypse already came and happened for Indigenous people and that we are the survivors,” she says in the film.

Cuthand’s futurity does not require a multimillion-dollar CGI dystopic utopia. Throughout the NDN Survival Trilogy, the future is filmed in the present. Reclamation (2018), the third film, imagines Indigenous people repairing and reviving a postapocalyptic earth after the settlers escaped to conquer another New World on Mars. Rooted in community and landbased creative practices, Cuthand’s material aesthetics carry her (non) fiction comic narrative into a collaborative process. Her nonactor cowriters, Lacey, Cherish, and Elwood, are longtime friends. “I gave them a sheet of paper that explained this future that I was envisioning, where white people were on Mars and Indigenous people were reclaiming the land and building their communities back up again,” she says. “I asked them the same kind of questions, and they kind of made it up from there. The visuals were just shots from different places around Canada.

It’s interesting because, yeah, it was about the future—but there are no robots, right! But rather going back to when things were cleaner, better, and more wholesome. Indigenous revival.”

Opposite image: 2 Spirit Dream Catcher Dot Com (2017). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Thirza Cuthand.

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Paroles de Nègres (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre.

by Claire Tancons 222

The factory is located on the island of Marie-Galante, a few nautical miles away from the larger islands that form the archipelago within the archipelago that is the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Its workers, neighboring cane fields, and field hands are the main sites and protagonists of Paroles de Nègres (2020), a feature-length documentary

by Sylvaine Dampierre, cowritten with longtime collaborator Gilda Gonfier.

Paroles de Nègres hovers over the harrowing questions of ancestral recovery, restorative justice, and economic reparation for the formerly enslaved and colonized populations in US and Caribbean territories.1 With an emphasis on French particularism, it takes hold of the Black Atlantic imagination.

The film pursues a dual narrative thread that is emblematic of Marie-Galante. It parallels, and ultimately intertwines, the slavery-era trial of a sugarcane plantation master and the contemporary trials of the sugarcane economy. Factory workers,

1. I wish to establish at the onset both my awareness of and reverence for the use of the term “enslaved” instead of the noun “slave” in order to distinguish between Africans’ temporary historical circumstances versus a permanent condition. I do, however, also use the term “slave,” as it would have been used within the historic context of the trial. I do so also in recognition of the vexing, untranslatable, or rather untranslated, term “enslaved” in the French language, whose users continue to use the noun “esclave” rather than the lengthy sentence “personne mise en esclavage.”

“It’s like gold,” exclaims one of the workers from the Grande-Anse sugar factory. He has just extracted the sweet substance from one of the tanks where it is being processed in the upper levels of the rickety instrument that is their workplace. It sticks in the cusp of his hand with the density of thick, damp sand, like on the beaches where the sea hasn’t refined shell and coral bits into dust the color of ochre. sugarcane planters, and cutters translate, from the written French transcription of the trial back into spoken Creole, what the enslaved said at the trial of their enslaver. Dampierre and Gonfier deliver these mirrored histories via a mélange of makingof cinematographic strategy and Theater of the Oppressed methodology in the service of daunting tasks. They invite us to ask ourselves if the consciousness of a people formerly enslaved can arise from the reenactment of its traumatic history in the absence of concurrent economic reparation, without which diminished material conditions only produce new forms of enslavements. They also probe the question of whether the restoration of dignity should be measured against the old, romantic project of “giving voice to the oppressed” in the absence of economic compensation commensurate with the labor produced and the wealth created. In short, Paroles de Nègres asks: how can one embody his or her past and present at once under continued conditions of thinly disguised and loosely acquiesced oppression?

Like an alluring tropical cathedral, albeit one in a state of advanced dereliction, the factory’s engine room is an organ of broken tubes and rusted metal pipes. Its workers are its fine-tuners, caught in the industrial melody that syncopates the rhythms of their nights and days. Their quarter shifts are metered like a classical music sheet. The worker who likened sugar to gold itself murmurs as much to the listener—the film’s soundscape informs

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The opening sequence lingers on bird’s-eye views of the sea as the a slave narrates details of the voyage from the Habitation Vallentin in MarieGalante to the Assize Court in Pointe-à-Pitre. The openness of the Caribbean Sea and the thoughts of escape it brings to mind contrast with the tale of confinement retold by the slave/worker/

Paroles de Nègres (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre.

2. Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Press, 1985).

you of the functioning of the instrument; the sounds it makes alarm you of its failings. Through another worker, one hears a different sound: the stock market.

The global prices for sugar are put in the balance as he recounts the tonnage. The factory saw its last profit six years ago, in 2015. The economic dimension of sugar is introduced midway through the documentary, both in the symbolic image of gold and in relationship to productivity. Parole de Nègres is grounded in a broader history that is world history itself, one in which “sweetness and power” are entangled in much the manner narrated by Sidney Mintz in his eponymous book.2

narrator as he describes the six days during which sixteen of the seventy-five slaves from the plantation of Master Vallentin are called to testify at his trial—held captive in the witness room, brought sustenance, and left to sleep on stone benches in the process.

With the context thus set, the film unfolds in a series of vignettes oscillating between the historical and the contemporary, tracing the habitual toil of labor in the fields and at the factory. One can only infer that the extraordinary task of telling the story of

Paroles de Nègres (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre.

Parole de Nègres is grounded in a broader history that is world history itself, one in which “sweetness and power” are entangled.

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enslaved forebearers was facilitated by a significant shift toward acknowledgment of slavery in France and the francophone Caribbean. This acknowledgment was brought on by the relatively recent opening of Mémorial ACTe, a one-of-a-kind center dedicated to the history of slavery in the Caribbean, located in Guadeloupe.3 The workers are introduced as a tight-knit community of men

Top and bottom: Paroles de Nègres (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre.

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3. Mémorial ACTe Centre Caribéen d’expressions et de mémoire de la traite et de l’esclavage (MACTe; Caribbean Center of expressions and memory of the slave trade and of slavery), whose programmatic title reveals its ambitions, was inaugurated in May 2015. In addition to a permanent display interpreting the slave trade and slavery, the MACTe also features temporary contemporary exhibitions and hosts artists residencies. Controversial to some at its inauguration, it is generally welcomed by the local population and appreciated by foreign visitors, if not uncritically.

whose ties, extending far beyond their factory shifts, belie love and pride in the work they do. Despite a recession, the contribution they make to the island’s economic development is significant. Importantly, they impart their hard-won knowledge and well-honed skills upon younger generations of otherwise unemployed adult men. Whether in the factory or the fields, the videography is insistent on the seeming nonchalance of precise gestures incorporated into the embodied memory of these workers.

Three precise cuts are needed to cut cane: one at the base of the stem, another to cut off its top, and the last to rip off its cutting leaves. Their rhythmic repetition produces in time the heap of canes that will be hauled onto oxen-drawn carts or motorized vehicles, and driven into the factory.

The hearing proceeds at Assize Court, as accounted for in the 1842 edition of La Gazette de la Guadeloupe and supplemented by personal archives from the same epoch handed over to the coauthors by genealogist Michel Rogers over a decade ago. It is rendered during break-time readings and in situ filming sessions during which the workers, like the men enslaved before them, seem all the more interchangeable for the fact that they all bear banal French names. Sébastien and Félicien, the accused and accusing slaves, respectively, and their cohorts find stand-ins in Louis, Paul, and JeanClaude, the contemporary factory workers/canecutters who sometimes introduce themselves in their present quality and sometimes do not.

In this contemporary cast, two exceptions stand apart. The figure of a traitor, Félicien, mayhap appears under the guise of a quitting worker who announces to his comrades that he has had it and won’t return to the factory next year—only to be met with circumspection from the rest of the

group, who fear that he might all too easily be proven wrong.

Despite this, though, rather than turning against each other, the workers seem willing to share the burden of their condition. This might be rendered in their readiness to figuratively take in the gag introduced by Master Vallentin to punish rebellious slaves, a passage of the trial written into the script of the film that they follow seemingly unquestioningly—at least on camera—having supposedly left the questioning about the veracity of this judicial archive to the film’s coauthors. The crime around which the court hearing took place— poisoning—is revealed early enough in the film and is the harrowing presence, the spectral image, against which no representation can take hold. It is doubly embodied: first in the factory, doubling as the dungeon where Sébastien was left to perish over three months and likely killed by means of the same crime of which he was accused, and second by the workers themselves, doubling as the enslaved. Yet, the loudest statement made by the film might be that the lively and even boisterous men of great presence and pride procure more afterimages than do the specters of the enslaved, and that the crime of their enslaver recedes in the face of the myriad existential challenges of their

Whether in the factory or the fields, the videography is insistent on the seeming nonchalance of precise gestures incorporated into the embodied memory of these workers.

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survivors. The factory workers at Grande-Anse are no more voiceless than the enslaved were acquiescent to their fate.

Like the question of treason among the enslaved, that of truth—judicial truth versus historical truth, for instance—and its corollary dilemmas such as historical narration versus contemporary reenactment might be too lightly skimmed over by Dampierre and Gonfier. For if the historical event relies in equal part on the catastrophe of slavery and the humane drama of treason, a greater depth of rendition of the latter dimension is lacking in the contemporary version. Hands—belonging to Dampierre or Gonfier, perusing the gazette in a short sequence as if a historical mise en abyme— are a passing critical inset in the film whose dual structure alone might not actually provide the criticality presumably aimed for by the filmmaker and her collaborator.

Following from this belated appearance of a lone white character, and as if to further impart the notion of the lasting workings of the white man’s hand, toward the end of the film, on the occasion of a mass celebrated in the honor of its patron Saint (Éloi), the factory is literally turned into a cathedral, the house of the white man’s god. But if in this closing scene the workers, their families, and friends pray that the factory continues to function well as guarantor of their community’s subsistence, in the closing credits it is the gwo ka drums that provide the sounds of true redemption.

Soné ka la!4

Paroles de Nègres (2020). Film still courtesy of filmmaker Sylvaine Dampierre.

That they leave much to the imagination, however, is their weakness’s matching strength, if not the apologetic precondition of such a delicate endeavor as theirs. The sole white character who makes an appearance toward the end of the film, presumably the factory overseer, could be a standin for Master Vallentin. Initially perceived by his

slaves as benevolent according to the standards of the times—he is praised for “spoiling his negroes with cod on Tuesday and syrup on Friday,” as one of them recounts—he turns murderous when he sets out to poison Sébastien. (In the contemporary footage, the white manager oversees the collapse of a machine part that he appears not to notice and leaves for his men to fix.)

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by Beandrea July 228

Cicely Tyson. Portrait by Manjit Thapp.

A Tribute to Cicely Tyson

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I must confess that until very recently, all I had actually watched of the iconic late actor Cicely Tyson’s work was the epic “This Land” speech she gives in the Tyler Perry production Madea’s Family Reunion (2006). Yet, when I learned of her passing while aimlessly scrolling Twitter, I gasped. It was as if I was grieving someone I had known all my life, that she had always been there and that she always would be. So I knew I had to go in search of her—this woman whose existence and showmanship meant so much to generations of Black people—to understand the monumental impact of her loss.

In the span of a few days, I watched some of her most lauded performances: her Oscar-nominated lead role in Sounder (1972), the juggernaut television movie The Diary of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), the original version of the miniseries Roots (1977), and the Harriet Tubman biopic two-parter, A Woman Called Moses (1978).

If you know anything about Tyson, you probably know of her outspokenness about choosing roles that projected what she called “positive” Black images. As the Oscar buzz mounted for her Sounder performance, she candidly explained to The New York Times in October 1972: “[The Black woman] has always been the strength of our race, and she has always had to carry the ball. But there has never been a positive image of her.”

Whether playing fictionalized versions of reallife heroes such as Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King, and Rosa Parks or everyday Black womenfolk such as Rebecca Morgan, Miss Jane Pittman, Binta Kente, or her unforgettable run opposite Viola Davis on How to Get Away with Murder, Tyson commanded the screen and delivered fully formed Black women characters in a way that had never been seen before on-screen. And her intentionality about the roles she accepted had an unanticipated ripple effect: Tyson effectively spearheaded the conversation about the need for stories that depict the complexity of the inner lives of Black women for American audiences long before it was in vogue.

Tyson was acutely aware of the impact that her pioneering status as one of the United States’ leading actors had on the Black community. But

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the measure of her impact goes even further than her fight against systemic erasure: she was a oncein-a-generation actor who possessed something that simply can’t be taught. She was storytelling personified.

But the measure of her impact goes even further than her fight against systemic erasure.

She was storytelling personified.

After fifteen years of performing for the stage in Harlem and on and off Broadway, in 1972 Tyson scored her first official Hollywood role as the star of Martin Ritt’s critically acclaimed film Sounder. It turned out to be her breakout role, earning her an Academy Award nomination at a time when only one Black actor, Hattie McDaniel, had ever won an Oscar. At forty-seven years old, Tyson stepped into the role of Rebecca Morgan, a character half her age, for the film about a closeknit Black sharecropping family struggling to survive during the Great Depression era. Sounder is emblematic of one of Tyson’s signatures as a performer: delivering dramatic dialogue at a whisper’s volume without diminishing its impact.

She injected what at times felt like bursts of wind into her elocution of words, riding her exhale to its absolute end.

In October 1972, the New York Times wrote of Sounder: Cicely Tyson has always been a lovely actress, easily capable of enameled glamour when it is called for. But here, in “Sounder,” sweating from work under a Southern sun, her kinky hair braided in cornrows or covered with a rag, clothed in hand-me-down dresses that are too large for her and bleached of any identifiable color from a thousand washings, she passes all of her easy beauty by to give us, at long last, some sense of the profound beauty of millions

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S5jIQhUUfA

2. Beandrea July, “If You Support Black Lives, Then Watch Black Stories,” Vanity Fair, July 9, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2020/07/if-white-people-support-blacklives-why-dont-they-watch-black-movies-and-tvshows.

1. Ellen Holly, “At Long Last, the Super Sound of ‘Sounder,’” The New York Times, October 15, 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/15/archives/atlong-last-the-super-sound-of-sounder.html.

At long last. The notion of a movie about the inner lives of Black folks that wasn’t about proving the humanity of Black people to a white audience was controversial back in 1972, the vestiges of which still persist in Hollywood today. While promoting the film, Tyson was met with pushback from (mainly white) film critics who were perplexed by how much they identified with a poor Black family during the Great Depression in Louisiana.

At the start of Tyson’s career, movies and television had rarely given audiences the opportunity to see and empathize with Black characters as human beings with the same basic wants and needs as their white counterparts. Her performance forced them to grapple with this unnerving realization, serving as a clear example

She injected what, at times, felt like bursts of wind into her elocution of words, riding her exhale to its absolute end. of the racial empathy gap fifty years before it was coined as a term.2 Decades later, in 2012, she reflected on this during an interview with Oprah: “We, in order to survive in this society, have had to learn them. They have never had to learn us.”3 Another one of Tyson’s specialties was bringing depth to characters in even the most lackluster of films, often elevating these stories beyond their obvious failings. The Autobiography of Miss Jane

Pittman broke ratings records and received critical acclaim as one of the first made-for-television movies that carried the kind of fanfare usually reserved for the movie theater. But looking at this 1974 film from a 2021 vantage point, it feels like an almost parodist telling of the complex history of slavery and emancipation, replete with bad makeup and the insertion of a white protagonist not in the eponymous novel. In spite of all this, Tyson—and her five-foot-three frame—truly disappears into her character Miss Jane.

Celebrated poet Nikki Giovanni penned an apt description of Tyson’s performance as the titular elder: I’ve known old women and women older than that; their shoulder twitches, the shaking hands, the loss of voice, the wobbling voices, the eyes sparkling, the slapping of their knees, the flat tone that never quite asks a question but states an order—Cicely Tyson had them all.4 The scene that’s now tucked away in my mind is when Jane learns of her husband Joe Pittman’s fatal accident, which occurred when he attempted to break a difficult horse. When she sees the horse dragging Joe’s dead body across a field, Jane collapses like a ragdoll straight into a pile of manure, which sticks to her dress as she writhes on the ground. Along with the powerful reverberation of her lower volumes, Tyson also had a habit of repeating a line a few times in a row in rapid succession, imbuing each utterance with a different emotional color.

4. Nikki Giovanni, “‘Jane Pittman’ Fulfilled My Deepest Expectations,” The New York Times, March 3, 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/03/ archives/-jane-pittman-fulfilled-my-deepestexpectations-television-i-am.html.

of black women of a certain kind whose tale has almost never been told and whose praises are so wrenchingly seldom sung.1

In a later scene, she confronts a Cajun spy recruited by the Ku Klux Klan to kill her son, Jimmy. “You gon’ kill my boy? You gon’ kill my boy? You gon’ kill my boy?” she repeats; in just a few seconds, she goes from asking with innocence to wielding the line like a weapon. The micro-exhilarations that Tyson pulled off make you lean in and hold your breath.

There’s probably no better example of the power of Tyson’s subtlety than the groundbreaking 1977 television miniseries Roots. As Kunta Kinte’s

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deferent and regal mother, Binta, Tyson appears only in the first episode of the eight-part series.

Nonetheless, she uses her physicality to make a handful of short scenes feel larger than they actually are. While giving birth to Kunta, she works her face into a dynamic flow of facial expressions, and her laboring moans reveal a vulnerability and a tenderness that could’ve easily been traded for something far more stoic. Tyson showed us who Binta was as a person in that moment, and—absent much character development in the script—that reveal ensured that when we see Kunta’s new life unfold in Virginia, we continue to feel the invisible imprint of Binta there too.

Later in her career, we were able to watch Tyson deliver the kind of monologues typically reserved for the stage. In Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland universe in particular, such monologues are a set piece. As Annalise Keating’s mother, Ophelia, in How to Get Away with Murder, we get to revel in Tyson playing against a worthy scene partner in Academy Award winner Viola Davis. As she combs Annalise’s hair, Ophelia spins what appears to be a long-winded yarn. But in its last few sentences, Tyson deftly reels it all back in, and Annalise’s tears fall like rain. Tyson was truly one of the great modern masters of monologue performance, a modern-day griot in the best sense of the word.

Portraying the often disrespected, if not erased, dignity of Black womanhood is one thing, but repairing the damage of decades of active misrepresentation of Black people is quite another. Tyson was part of an era of Black actors who took it upon themselves to heal the damage of these images, not only to Black people but also to the collective American psyche. Members of this generation didn’t have the luxury of just acting; they also had to be activists, producers, cultural critics, and diplomats. Just as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte helped redefine Black masculinity for a generation of Americans, so too did Tyson make Black femininity and Black female personhood something that American viewers could no longer ignore or disregard.

Before the 1970s, Hollywood had never produced serious work about the historical contributions that Black women—like Tubman and King—had

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She basically introduced the archetypal Black biopic heroine into the canon of film and television, and made it stick. made to the nation. We 2021 dwellers may find the typical slavery biopic tiresome, but in 1978 Tyson was the first person to portray Tubman for the screen, and this matters. She basically introduced the archetypal Black biopic heroine into the canon of film and television and made it stick, something that is easy to overlook today. An exceptional performer whose storytelling abilities were bone-deep, Tyson helped free us from the prison of the white supremacist imagination.

In her last televised role, the iconic late actor fittingly played a trailblazing Black actress in her elder years, Miss Luma Lee Langston. By way of this character on the Ava DuVernay–helmed drama Cherish the Day (2020), Cicely Tyson clearly draws on her own life: “It was about not letting other people put me in their boxes ever.

You understand that? Boxes are a prison. I’m free.”

Fly free, Ms. Tyson!

Fly free.

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Contributor Bios Astria Suparak’s

cross-disciplinary practice often addresses urgent political issues and has been widely acclaimed for high-level concepts made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as a series of projects and events at the intersection of sports, politics, and art; and an oral history and map of the global impact of the riot grrrl punk feminist movement.

She has curated exhibitions and screenings for arts institutions, festivals, and unconventional spaces such as roller-skating rinks.

Beandrea

July

(@beandreadotcom) is a freelance film critic and audio producer from Dayton, Ohio, based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in several publications including Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and The Hollywood Reporter, and has been heard on NPR. Of the nine films that Sidney Poitier has directed, the eighth one, a 1980s dance movie about kids from Ohio, is still her favorite.

Claire Tancons

is a curator and scholar invested in the discourse and practice of the postcolonial politics of art production and exhibition. Tancons has charted a distinct path in performance, inflecting global art historical genealogies with African diasporic aesthetics in international exhibitions and biennials. She was the inaugural Mellon Global Curatorial Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, teaching about processional performance, also the topic of her Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation award. Born in Guadeloupe, Tancons lives in diaspora and works in situ.

D’Lo

(dlocokid.com) is a queer/transgender Tamil-Sri Lankan-American actor/ writer/comic. His acting credits include Looking, Transparent, Sense 8, and Mr. Robot, and his standup and solo shows have toured internationally. His work has also been published in academic journals, literary anthologies, and print/online journalism sources, such as The Guardian, NBC, CNN, and The Advocate. He is currently a Civic Media Fellow through USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab.

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Dessane Lopez Cassell

is a curator, writer, and editor based in New York. Her work focuses on artists’ moving image, documentary, and experimental film practices concerned with race, gender, and decoloniality, with a particular interest in voices from the African and Caribbean diasporas. Currently, Cassell is the reviews editor at Hyperallergic and sits on BlackStar Film Festival’s programming committee.

Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo,

PhD, is an assistant professor of American studies and English at Brown University. Her first book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, received the 2019 Barbara Christian Literary Award from the Caribbean Studies Association. She is finishing her second book, Blackness in the Hills and the Photographic Negative. Her writing has been published in ASAP/ Journal, Avidly, The Black Scholar, Hyperallergic, and Small Axe.

Erin Christovale is the associate curator at the Hammer Museum and the cofounder of Black Radical Imagination.

Farrah Rahaman

is a Trinidadian cultural worker who approaches media in its most consequential understanding, being attuned to the forms of artistic expression that mediate and mediatize liberation practices and potentials. Through her scholarship, spacemaking, and creative pursuits, Farrah claims her work in the tradition of radical, decolonial praxis.

Most recently, she is the creator of a performance intensive study circle dedicated to the life and legacy of Claudia Jones. Farrah is also the panel producer at BlackStar Film Festival.

Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Heitor Augusto works as a film programmer, researcher, writer, and lecturer whose practice shows a predilection toward connecting the African diaspora. His most recent curatorial

research focuses on queer and experimental Black cinema. He is the head programmer and cofounder of Nicho 54, an institute working for racial equity in Brazilian film industry, as well as reshaping the collective imaginary. You can reach him at heitoraugustod@gmail.com.

Imran Siddiquee (@imransiddiquee) is a writer

and filmmaker challenging systems of domination. Their writing on race, gender, and popular media has been published

by The Atlantic, Bitch Magazine, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, Longreads, and others. They are the communications director for BlackStar Projects, home of the BlackStar Film Festival, and a co-creator of the South Asian American Digital Archive’s Revolution Remix Walking Tour, which they lead in Philadelphia.

Janaína Oliveira

is a film programmer and scholar. She has a PhD in history and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Howard University. She is the head programmer of the Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival. In 2019 she programmed the “Soul in the Eye: Zózimo Bulbul’s Legacy and the Contemporary Emergence of Black Brazilian Cinema” series at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is the founder of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum and the 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar programmer.

Jemma Desai is a programmer, researcher, and

writer based in London. Her practice engages with film programming through research, writing, performance, and informally organized settings for deep study, and her work experience spans distribution, cinema exhibition, and festival programming. Her most recent body of work is “This Work Isn’t for Us,” which draws attention to the human cost of attempting institutional reform while navigating “diversity” policy rooted in white supremacy.

Jlin

is an electronic composer and producer from Gary, Indiana. She first hit the electronic scene with her contribution

track “Erotic Heat” on Bangs & Works Volume 2, which was released by London-based record label Planet Mu in 2011. In 2015 her debut album, Dark Energy, was released by Planet Mu, with totally unexpected success. With the success of her first record, she followed up with her second album, Black Origami, in 2017.

Karas Lamb

is a journalist, copywriter, and creative professional. A self-described “observer, translator, and connector,” Lamb is a career storyteller contributing to digital platforms, print publications, and brands. She has written for Secretly Group, E-One/Last Gang Records, Ropeadope Records, and Blue Note Records. Her bylines include Okayplayer, Consequence of Sound, Pitchfork, and Entertainment Weekly. Karas is committed to the study of Black music and its role in American sociopolitical movements and popular culture.

Keisha Rae Witherspoon

is a JamaicanAmerican fiction and documentary filmmaker. Her work is driven by interests in science, spirituality, fantasy, and documenting the unseen and unheralded nuances of African diasporic folks. Her film T won the 2019 audience award for best short at BlackStar Film Festival, and went on to win the Berlinale Golden Bear in 2020. She is cofounder of Third Horizon, a Miami-based Caribbean filmmaking collective that stages the annual Third Horizon Film Festival.

Lakshmi Padmanabhan

is a writer and academic living in Chicago, Illinois.

Her research interests include experimental cinema and visual art, postcolonial theory, and queer feminisms. She has written for venues including Art History, Public Books, Post45, Camera Obscura, New Review of Film & Television Studies, and Women & Performance. She has programmed experimental film and video at BRIC, AS220, and Magic Lantern Cinema. She teaches film and media studies at Northwestern University.

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Lendl Tellington

is a versatile storyteller working across film, photography, journalism, and experiential art.

His practice centers the subversion of aesthetic traditions to more accurately depict the nuance within our experiences. He homes in on the seemingly humdrum existence behind popular history and the present moment as a means to contextualize the contributions of marginalized communities. When not behind the camera, he is the technical director for BlackStar Film Festival.

Luce Capco Lincoln

is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, writer, curator, and political educator born in Gainesville, Florida. Lincoln’s artwork and writing explore ideas of queer and trans justice, nonbinary embodiment, Pilipinx history, and intersectional solidarity. For the past eight years Lincoln worked at the Global Action Project, where he directed programs to create social justice films with LGBQT and immigrant youth. Currently, Lincoln is a founding member of a BIPOC worker cooperative, Shadow Work Media.

Maori Karmael Holmes

is a curator, filmmaker, and writer. She founded BlackStar and serves as its artistic director and CEO. Her writing has most recently appeared in The Believer, Blavity.com, Film Quarterly, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, How We Fight White Supremacy: a Field Guide to Black Resistance, and We Inspire Me. Maori was a 2019-2020 Soros Equality Fellow and is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Meg Onli

is the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has curated the exhibitions Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time (2019), and Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus Is to Be Successful (2021). Onli is the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014 Graham Foundation Grant, a 2019 Transformation Award from Leeway Foundation, a 2018 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship, and the 2021 Figure Skating Prize. She is currently

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cocurating, with Erin Christovale, a retrospective of Ulysses Jenkins’s work, Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021).

Rachell Morillo

is an artist, educator, and writer who nurtures equitable spaces for creative thought and expression.

Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, Intense Art Magazine, and the Studio Museum’s Black Refractions and Fictions catalogs. She is currently Assistant Educator for Community & Access in the Museum of Modern Art’s Education Department, where she develops programs for the museum’s community partner organizations. Rachell earned a BA in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College.

Razan Al-Salah

is an artist and filmmaker investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds, breaking these thresholds of view into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense. Her work has shown in community-based and international galleries and film festivals. She teaches at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Terri Francis is the author of Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism. She is an associate professor of cinema and media studies and director of the Black Film Center/Archive in the Media School at Indiana University.

Tzutzumatzin Soto

is an activist for the preservation of and public access to audiovisual archives in Mexico, principally in community contexts. She studied Latin American studies and specialized in management of image collections. She founded the Archive Experiences Seminar, a project that seeks to exchange ideas about preservation and exhibition of archival films. She is currently in charge of the videographic, iconographic, and digital collections of Cineteca Nacional de Mexico.

Subscribe Subscribe to Seen and receive two issues a year delivered to your door. seen.blackstarfest.org Support BlackStar BlackStar celebrates and provides platforms for visionary Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists. We do this by producing year-round programs including film screenings, exhibitions, an annual film festival, a filmmaker seminar, a film production lab, and this journal of visual culture. blackstarfest.org/donate

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