Editorial – Week Four: Creating work in good company
By Caleb Azumah Nelson - 23/08/20
In a conversation with another filmmaker in 2017, Ava DuVernay spoke about the idea of the image; how an image can feed or malnourish us, how an image imprints on minds, our memories. How intimate an image can be. I have always known that a single frame holds power, holds the ability to preserve a moment in time, holds the ability to comfort or anger, bring fresh joy or surface old grief. I have always known that a single frame could show me the way I see the world, and in turn, could show me myself. And if it was not something I knew, then it was something I could feel.
During the period of lockdown, I spent a lot of time rewatching films – shorts, features, music videos — ingesting images I knew all too well, building a place of safety for myself. From Kahlil Joseph’s hopeful and expansive visions of Blackness to Jenn Nkiru’s trance-like documentary on the Black community in Detroit and the origins of their rhythm, to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s vivid and moving portrait of a colonial hangover in Senegal, I found myself seeking solace from a mourning which deepened every day. The mass death we were (and still are) encountering was already an incomprehensible grief, further exacerbated by the sudden raising of the public consciousness of the precarity of Black lives, something we did not ask for, but had to deal with all the same. I found myself countering the violent images of Black death peppering my timeline with ones of beauty, of joy, of hope. This practice was in line with Tina Campt’s idea of futurity: imagining myself a future, in the now.
Working on Esme Allman’s CLUB as director of photography was a similar exercise. I am just as committed to expression as I am to freedom and the script and directorial vision allowed for both. There were constraints, yes: trying to render a space where queer Black women might freely participate in nightlife in a time where that space is not available was a task in itself. But this is how it goes for many on the margins, space and freedom are found and housed wherever they can be.
It was a joy to create and employ a visual language of freedom – through colour, through song, through rhythm. It was a joy to give image and sound to those intimacies, those moments where one might become enamoured with a stranger, or where a dance enters such frenzy, one might approach ecstasy. It was a joy to give motion to those moments of freedom. And I think both performers, Esme Allman and Shanay Neusum-James, knowingly engaged in this work of imagining freedom, creating something that our audience could not only see and know but feel too.
This process of creating was aided by the knowledge of where the work would be housed. There is a freedom to creating when you know your work will not be looked at, but seen. It encourages us to create quietly, to tap into the full range of one’s desires and ambitions, vulnerabilities and fears; to be full and whole and present. It was a delight to participate in Fringe of Colour Films because we understood we were in good company; we understood that if we were part of a group of Black and Brown people, making and expressing, they too might be imagining, they too would be hoping, and so would their audience. Here was a place where futurity might happen, where those conditions of freedom might be given room to exist and where I might also encounter new visions of freedom.
Here’s what’s in store for Week 4
Sophie Gresswell’s Where Are You From? splices together a group of images from various sources – archival, digital and stop-motion animation – to consider the language used to describe Black and Brown communities. Her film is a brilliant dissection of the complexity of identity, when you’re from here and you’re not; when your roots lie elsewhere.
tiata fahodzi’s film adaption of Arinzé Kene’s play good dog is sharp and lyrical from the beginning. Anton Cross is as charming as he is entrancing, giving a guided and detailed tour of a community, all of whom are looking for freedom in various forms; all of them wondering, when this freedom is denied, how much more can they take?
In Emily Mulenga’s, 4 Survival 4 Pleasure, we’re gifted with the following words on screen: “the most vulnerable reimagined as more than human…a means of ascension, of liberation.” Through every action of the various avatars, from taking a flight to playing in a band, dancing on an island to reclining in pleasure, we’re asked what is it that Black women do for survival, for pleasure?
PR 4 US, created by Christian Noelle Charles and Matthew Arthur Williams, featuring Cassie Ezeji, Sekai Machache and Adebusola Ramsay, centres on the moment someone is pulled out of the world they created for themselves to be free, and how they might make their way back there after a violent interruption.
SKAAP, by Mzonke Maloney produced by Brown Flamingo, is arresting from its first frame of a Black woman, tired, frustrated, riding a bus to work. We watch as the film splits between a Black nurse looking after her elderly white charge, and the moments this woman steals for herself, imagining herself inhabiting the enormous house, rather than taking care of someone in it. It is devastating in its simplicity and gives us room to think of how frustration and anger and protest might be acts of love too.
Hannah Lavery directs Nemidoonam, performed by Nasim Asl, in which a phone call between relatives weighs heavier across a distance, while in Tomb-Sweeping Day, Glasgow, 2020, we watch as sean wai keung is searching for self, trying to find others who might reflect their experiences like a mirror. Both pieces wrangle with how the loss of language can mean the loss of self. Hannah features in another Week 4 piece, this time performing in her own piece, The Drift, a visceral exploration of the what we inherit in the face of grief and feelings of unbelonging which warp, shape and morph our days.
Stories of Colour escapes the constraints of traditional storytelling, featuring gorgeous, fun and often heartbreaking tales, delivered in song and lyric.
EUphoria continues in this vein: an Afrofuturist musical, created by collective Black Speaks Back, following five separate narratives navigating a future Europe. Song is interspersed throughout with a soothing, measured voiceover; the whole film has a fantastic rhythm, the motion continuous.
UBILIC by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is a lyrical and meditative exploration of diasporic identities. By using hydrofeminism, a concept which looks at the complex relationship between humans and water, as a framework, Ruwona’s audiovisual essay questions how our old and new worlds are linked by the Transatlantic slave trade.
Washing Lemon Puff is a short and devastating piece in which the voice haunts you long after the video has finished, exploring the tension in identity when we assimilate and adopt Western ideals.
Beautiful Blue by Gold Akbani, is like a prayer, a loop, a chant, a trance-like vision on remembering, renewal, desire and our truths.
And finally, in Nish Kumar in Trouserless Conversation, Kumar engages in an illuminating and insightful set of interviews with Sanjeev Bhaskar (Goodness Gracious Me), Desiree Burch (Too Hot to Handle) and Rose Matafeo (Horndog). Kumar and his interviewees, directed by Diva Mukherji and Jessica Brough, speak on craft and their personal journeys in conversation which is as intimate as it is humorous.
Every piece in Week 4 wrangles with freedom of a kind, every piece is tussling with a truth. Every piece is imagining a future now, in their visualisation or critique. Every piece had a frame which stopped me, showed me the way I see the world, showed me myself. And even if these were not experiences that I knew of, then they were things I could feel.
Caleb Azumah Nelson is a 26-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and photographer living in South East London. His writing has been published in Litro. He was recently shortlisted for the Palm Photo Prize and won the People's Choice prize. His debut novel, OPEN WATER, is out next year on Penguin (Viking).
Twitter: @CalebANelson | Instagram: @caleb_anelson
