The Films
Africa, The Jungle, Drums and Revolution
1979, Sudanese Film Group, Soviet Socialist Republics, 11 min
The film examines representations of Africa in Soviet society. Children’s drawings that deal with Africa, Interviews with inhabitants of Moscow, and archival material depicting Africa from Soviet archives broach the issue of those representations and the stereotypes connected to them.
A Camel
1981, Sudanese Film Group, Sudan, 14 min
The short film Jamal by Ibrahim Shaddad is a report from the life of a camel, most of which plays out in a dreary, small room – a sesame mill.
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin
1995, Isaac Julien & Mark Nash, United Kingdom, 70 min
Interviews, reconstructions, and archive footage tell the story of the life and work of the highly influential anti-colonialist writer Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon, has also been acclaimed for writing The Wretched of the Earth and for his professional life as a psychiatric doctor in Algeria during its war of independence with France.
...After He Left
2008, Athi-Patra Ruga, South Africa, 27 min
After He Left is a response to the “miniskirt attack”, an incident of sexual assault that occurred at the Noord Street taxi rank in Johannesburg, South Africa. This popularized name arose from the perpetrators having substantiated their crime by saying that the young woman was “asking for it” by wearing a skimpy skirt in a public space. The event sparked national outrage and a call for an end to sexism and gender-based violence. Beiruth, Ruga’s avatar in this video, is one such iteration of this resistance. Beiruth finds herself naively wandering around the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg, as seen in this video. Although she does not talk or engage with passersby – her face is veiled – she seems to engage with the spatial politics of the architecture which surrounds her by inserting herself, as a queer and hyper-feminine presenting and performing person, into these spaces. Beiruth does not adhere to any singular signifiers of collective identities – her race, sex, sexuality and nationality are all ambivalent – thus, Ruga seems to challenge and explore alternative ways of navigating spaces as both an invisible and hyper identity.
Ghosts
2010, André Novais Oliveira, Brazil, 12 min
Public Service Announcement
2014, Athi Patra Ruga, South Africa, 15 min
Public Service Announcement introduces the viewer to the political structure and history of the fictional republic of Azania. Divided into three “acts”, the film begins with a monologue by an unidentified narrator and seemingly omnipotent presence. As the Azanian myth unfolds against a visual backdrop of neon and black, the genealogy of its protagonists becomes increasingly complex and the viewer is left with the sense that this matriarchal government is an autocratic state. The rebirth and catharsis represented by the growing procession of human and animal figures in the third act suggest that we have witnessed a revolution and the birth of a new era. Building on previous work, the artist uses this incarnation of Azania as a satirical lens through which to critique the flawed, convoluted political and symbolic rhetoric used in nation-building and the legitimization of ruling elites.
Another Decade
2018, Morgan Quaintance, United Kingdom, 27 min
Another Decade combines archive footage from the 1990s with newly shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Starting from testimonies and statements made by artists and art historians during the 1994 INIVA conference Towards a New Internationalism, Another Decade ranges across diverse cultural territory and is propelled by a sense that very little socio-cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom since that time. The dynamic tension explored in the work is between, on the one hand, art world actors speaking truth to institutional power and, on the other, lived realities of London’s multiracial citizenry. Those who necessarily inhabit a center of otherness.
Long Way Home
2018, André Novais Oliveira, Brazil, 113 min
In order to take a new job as an employee in the public sanitation department, Juliana moves from the inner city of Itaúna to the metropolitan town of Contagem in Brazil. While waiting for her husband to join her, she adapts to her new life, meeting people and discovering new horizons, trying to overcome her past.
America
2019, Garrett Bradley, USA, 24 min
In America, artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley imagines Black figures from the early decades of the 20th century whose lives have been lost to history. A multichannel video installation, it is organized around 12 short black-and-white films shot by Bradley and set to a score by artist Trevor Mathison and composer Udit Duseja. Bradley intersperses her films with footage from the unreleased Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1914), believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length film with an all-Black cast.
Missing Time
2019, Morgan Quaintance, United Kingdom, 15 min
Through a focus on alien abduction, cold war history, and Britain’s colonial history, Missing Time is a film that considers the relationship between amnesia, concealed histories, state secrecy, and the constitution of the self.
Dazed Flesh
2019, Grace Passô & Ricardo Alves Jr., Brazil, 45 min
A wandering voice is able to invade any matter, solid, liquid, or gaseous, and it decides for the first time to invade a woman's body. From this experience, it narrates what it feels as a subject, what "it" pretends to feel, what is unfathomable in itself, what its image is to others, and probes what a body means as a social construction.
Nũhũ yãgmũ yõg hãm: This Land Is Ours!
2020, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero, Brazil, 70 min
“In the past, when white people didn’t exist, we used to hunt with our yãmĩyxop spirits. The whites came, cut down the trees, dried up the rivers and scared the animals away. Today, our tall trees are over, the whites surrounded us and our lands are tiny. But our yãmĩyxop are very strong and taught us the stories and chants from our ancients who walked around here.”
Republic
2020, Grace Passô, Brazil, 15 min
Brazil, 2020: The pandemic brandishes the extent of the necropolitics operating in the country and its society goes through a crisis of ethics amidst a government that is the exact expression of colonialist power. República is a short film made at home with a domestic structure, at the beginning of the 2020 quarantine in downtown São Paulo, Brazil.
Yãmĩyhex, the Women-Spirit
2020, Sueli Maxakali & Isael Maxakali, Brazil, 76 min
After spending a few months in Aldeia Verde, the yãmĩyhex (women-spirit) prepare to leave. Filmmakers Sueli and Isael Maxakali record the preparations and the big party for their farewell. During the feast days, a crowd of spirits cross the village. The yãmĩyhex leave, but they always return with longing for their fathers and their mothers.