LONG LASTING SHORT FILMS

On how the short film as a creative genre unto itself can serve to decolonize the media landscape, focusing particularly on Black cinema of recent years. Cultivating a better understanding on the short film as a distinct art form. Advocating for short films: making them, collaborating on them, watching them online, attending short film programs, creating shorts programs, and more, as a means of radical activism.

by Mark Elijah Rosenberg

 

“A Litany of Survival” (directed by Martin Hawk, 2020)

 

ABSTRACT

    • The author’s personal history of making and programming short films.
    • Logistically, short films remove barriers in production and exhibition.
    • What is a short film? Shorts vs. social media videos.
    • Short films (in contrast to features) can be more politically daring, more focused on narrow issues, more expressive and thought-provoking.
    • How to utilize short films as an activist tool.
    • Links to short films for viewing online.

 

In 1997, I was a young filmmaker, I’d made a few shorts, and I started a film festival. I wanted people to see my work, but I didn’t want to wait around for some gatekeeper to exhibit it. I wanted to tell people about my work, but I felt self-conscious about self-promotion, so putting my film in a cohort of other films lessened the arrogance. And I discovered a few things about putting on a film festival, particularly a program of short films.

First of all, I enjoyed showing other people’s work, just as much as showing my own. Maybe more. I still loved making films, but the anxiety of sharing something I made—the fear of rejection, when you’ve worked so hard on something, such a personal fear—that negative feeling left when I showed other people’s films. (Replaced, but to a lesser degree, with a pressure you feel to put on a good show.)

Second of all, short films benefit from being in a curated program, a collection of thematically related, complimentary films. Short films are in dialogue with other films; ideas can feed off each other and build a greater whole; artists are connecting with other artists. So many film festivals have “Shorts Program 1” and “Shorts Program 2,” maybe a short animation program, a short documentary program, but otherwise the films might as well be screened alphabetically. But I always said that curating a program of short films is like a cross between writing an essay, and being a DJ.

29 years later, the festival I founded, Rooftop Films, has shown 3,417 films (and counting; opening night of the festival was last week), to an estimated half a million (500,000) people. From a scrappy, all-volunteer-run, screening series in less-than-legal sites, we have grown into a small but potent cultural institution, still supporting independent, innovative and insurgent filmmakers.

So I do not think that every filmmaker, every artist, needs to promote their own work. Those are two different jobs: making art, and exhibiting art. Getting the world to see the work is the role film festivals, curators, theaters, streaming platforms, press outlets. Maybe as an artist you want to do both. I did, for a while at least. Maybe you feel like you have to organize screenings, because no one else is showing your work, or because you are particular about how you want it shown, or because you feel it’s necessary to the world. Imagine if Vincent van Gogh had opened his own gallery. If you can do it, that’s wonderful.

There’s a very modern tendency to push artist to promote their work. Major institutions like Creative Capital and the Sundance Institute run workshops and provide funding for artists to learn to market themselves. In this age of social media, everyone is pressured to collect followers, “friends,” “likes,” to create “content” to envelop their creative endeavors. But I think it’s crucial to separate the art from the advertisement of it. So I want to celebrate both the potent liberation the short film offers as a form to an individual artist, and the activist power the short film can stir for a programmer (or collective, or institution).

But if you don’t feel that urge—if you’re self-conscious about self-promotion, or if you’re not good at marketing or logistics, or if you just want to spend your time creating art not events—if you as an artist don’t want to take part in exhibition, I believe that’s an acceptable position to take as an artist. Know that you might end up like Vincent van Gogh. (His life was a struggle. But his art is eternal. Eventually, someone discovered and promoted it.)

When I started Rooftop, it felt radical to run a film festival dedicated to short films, so I’ve long been an advocate of the short film as a genre unto itself, separate from features. Much the same way you wouldn’t compare a poem to a novel, I don’t believe you should compare a short to a feature.

Rooftop Films

 

WHAT A SHORT FILM IS NOT

Here, it feels necessary to delineate between short films and social media videos. I will write broadly about the best short films and the majority of social media, acknowledging that there are exceptions to the points I’m making, but good reasons still to cover the characteristics generally.

Both shorts and socials can be entertaining, enlightening; both can give voice to the oppressed and function as useful activist tools. But there are important differences in 1) the aesthetics of the material, 2) the objectives of the maker and the media, and 3) the method of their distribution and contingent consumption and interpretation. It’s important to understand these distinctions when either creating short motion picture work or exhibiting it.

Short cinema and social content cohere in the manner of creation. In both instances, the work can be made in a low-budget manner, using consumer tools (low-cost cameras or cell phones, minimal additional equipment, little to no crew, home editing software, collectively-sourced music, graphics and other additionals). These similarities benefit both formats equally.

1) With the aesthetics, the differences begin to grow. In general the best short films are made with more conscious attention to the nuance of the visuals and audio, while social media relies more on standardized tropes of attention-grabbing content: an influencer out in front explaining what the video is, a shock value hook in the subject matter, a pace of editing suitable for an audience that is assumed to be distracted and prepared to turn the video off at the slightest hint of boredom. While one of the great benefits of short film is brevity (discussed in more detail in the main article), in general shorts are still paced toward a viewer who will not stop viewing. Shorts are filmed with an eye toward grand, elegant or complex imagery (to be seen on a larger screen, or at least with complete focus from the viewer), and allowing for audience interpretation and emotion via a visual mode that is primal and deep.

2) In regards to intention, within the realm of artists making work that aims for a liberal activist message (as being discussed here), both shorts and social media have similar overarching goals to enact social and political change. But they approach this goal in crucially different ways. Social media works as an activist tool by generating mass appeal, viral spread, and discussion (inasmuch as internet comments are a discussion and not merely an echo chamber). Hence, most social media creators intend to create content with simple messages that can be easily upvoted or downvoted without much gray area. (The most enriching social media creators might make multiple separate videos to express more complicated or paradoxical ideas.) In contrast, the intention of an influential short film is typically to engage a viewer on a deeper and more complex level. The work is therefore conceived in a more subtle and evocative manner, wherein the viewer is lead to make their own interpretations, fostering self-led learning, as opposed to the “hot take” opinion-mongering of much social media. The intention of a short film is to make the viewer think; the intention of social media is to make the viewer agree.

3) The great power of social media video is in its exhibition model. It is ubiquitous and easy-to-consume; it is widely accessible to distribute and designed to be spread widely; it is cash-free to use. (“Cash-free” because users all “pay” via the advertising drain on our time and attention.) In an ideal forum, liberal actions can be effectively organized and quickly activated with a few clicks and keystrokes. Social media has inherent in the structure of the distribution the ability for viewer feedback and participation (again, with the caveat that clicking a “like” button has dubious value as participation, and may in fact serve as a placebo for many viewers who feel like they have helped a cause by “amplifying a message.”)

But many people believe that social media is democratic to exhibit, and therefore inherently empowering for the oppressed, and that notion is precariously perched on thin ice. On social media platforms, what users watch, and what they are allowed to post, is dictated by algorithms programmed by enormous corporations whose main interest is profit-seeking. Controversial content will be filtered or stifled. These corporations are also increasingly openly aligned with right wing governments, and the suppression of liberal voices will only continue to grow on most social media platforms. If you want to decolonize media, it is highly unlikely you’d be able to do so from inside mechanisms controlled by the colonizer.

On the flip side, short films suffer from a lack of distribution. The internet and video streaming on portable devices brought with them the promise of a boom of attention for shorts, but on these platforms, the artistic was quickly swallowed by the craven. It is still easy and ostensibly free to upload short films to platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, where anyone in the world could watch them. But without someone to promote short films, most flounder with exponentially fewer views than even an average social media post. Hence the importance of programmers, curators, festivals, new online platforms, press, etc., advocated for in this article.

 

WHY A SHORT FILM

As discussed above, some of the logistic benefits of making a short film are the breaking of barriers. Making a feature film is expensive, resource intensive, time consuming, and almost always requires some form of gatekeeper to exhibit and distribute. Shorts can be made cheaply and efficiently; shorts can be self-distributed effectively, and by sheer the sheer mathematics of time that go into curating a festival with limited selection, a nine-minute short is more likely to be programmed than a 90-minute feature. But what is the value of a short film artistically and politically?

I define “short” films not by their length, per se, but by their approach, scope and attitude. I believe that a short film is inherently different from a feature film, not merely an abbreviated version of a feature. The short films I find most interesting follow a different set of rules than feature films, and aspire to different artistic and political goals. There are three main ingredients to the short film which I believe make them exceptional and well-suited to the mission of decolonization. The most beneficial short films can be:

1) Experimental in form and imagery
2) Hyper-focused
3) Daringly political

These abilities carve out the framework for short films to have a discrete use in social movements separate from that of longer works. The first two topics are matters of form; the third is a matter of content, and discussion of such will be woven in with the other examples.

There are wonderful short films from around the world, throughout cinema history, and on myriad topics, but for the purpose of this essay I’ll focus my examples (crossing the breadth of fiction, documentary, experimental and animation) on Black (primarily American) films from 2014-2024, bracketing the time around the apex of the Black Lives Matter movement and highlighting the way some of these films presaged and reacted to that uprising.

1) Experimentation

Exemplary short films tend to be more unconventional than longer films. Because of their length, shorts can afford to be deeply experimental: an audience which for several minutes may be engaged with a certain technique (such as strangely altered or multiple layers of images; rapid, non-linear editing; repetition), may not be able to sustain their interest for an hour and a half.

“The Giverny Document” (directed by Ja’Tovia Gary, 2019)

 

Ja’Tovia Gary’s film The Giverny Document (2019) is an astonishing example of the utilization of visual abstraction and narrative deconstruction to craft a stunning treatise on violence against Black people in America. The film is a cohesive but jarring pastiche of historical archive (Nina Simone in concert, Fred Hampton in a press conference), modern found footage (Diamond Reynolds’ phone recording of the murder by police of her boyfriend Philando Castile), contemporary vox pops Gary conducted on the streets of Harlem (asking the question, “Do you feel safe?”), and luscious footage of nature (including a garden of Eden-like setting in which Gary herself wanders, sometimes nude and innocent, like Eve; sometimes silently screaming like Daphne).

The movie opens, concludes and is threaded through with direct cinema animation—drawings done with ink applied directly to celluloid, creating flashing colors and patterns over the images. These embellishments are multivalent in their usage: they connect the disparate material, and jar us from it; they serve as lovely additions (when Nina Simone seems on the verge of tears, the painting elevates the pain to poetry) and creative destructions (when Diamond Reynolds is immersed in tragedy, the painting obscures the voyeurism of the viewer). In an interview about the film with Hyperallergic, Gary said of Castile’s murder:

I’m not interested in showing that dead body. Black people know what that looks like already; we’ve been seeing that for millennia. It’s a dehumanizing tradition that the media perpetuates, and that Americans perpetuate when we share these videos. Folks think they’re raising awareness by sharing this as an act of resistance or consciousness-building, but I argue that it’s not necessary to share those videos, especially not the moment of death. I believe we can mobilize around ending state violence without circulating snuff films … There’s no need to simply reproduce those [violent] images without a critical engagement of them and their histories. There must be a treatment of the material. Once you show us repeatedly in these positions of anguish and on the receiving end of violence, that’s what we become in people’s minds, which makes way for repeated violence to occur with continued impunity. We’re shaping perception with media, so we’ve got to be very careful.

Through nonrepresentational iconography, Gary represents an elevated mode of witnessing, inspiring the audience to a new way of thinking. In a feature-length film, in order to hold the audience attention, Gary might be forced to dial back the disconcerting abstractions and craft an ordinary documentary narrative structure, but in a short film, she has the freedom to challenge the viewer, and the result is extraordinary.

As mentioned in the summary above, the experimental form enables such daring content. The provocative ideas Gary raises would not traditionally be possible to address in a feature-length film, with its attendant needs to sustain viewer attention, attract substantial financing, and acquire solo distribution.

Other short films that use narrative and visual experimentation to evoke complex political ideas include:

+ Rebirth Is Necessary (directed by Jenn Nkiru, 2018) – a non-narrative collage of archival footage of Black culture and icons, combined with new material of elaborate dance and costuming, set to a mix of evocative music and thought-provoking voice over. The film opens with a quote from musician Sun Ra: “We hereby declare ourselves to be of another order of beings.” The dreamlike flow of the film expands the concept of Black identity outward (in opposition to the confining, reductive representations seen in much mainstream media).

+ Afronauts (directed by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, 2014) – a science-fiction movie about Zambian outcasts preparing to beat America in the space race to the Moon. The use of evidently low-fi materials in the spaceship props and costumes, contrasted with archival imagery and sound of historical space exploration, leaves open multiple possibilities of understanding: fantasy, alternate reality, erased history. The film’s plot is fractured and non-literal, inviting the viewer to fill gaps in the story, creating self-fulfilled desire for a saga which twists world power into a new structure.

 

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Many short films blur the lines of fiction, documentary and experimental cinema, in ways that can be shocking or comedic; again, mode-switching that might be unsustainable in a feature-length film. LaZercism (directed by Shaka King, 2018) features star actor Lakeith Stanfield in an absurdist infomercial for treating “racial glaucoma,” as though eye-surgery could eradicate systemic prejudice. It’s easy to laugh at the revealing dark comedy, until the joke is pierced and enhanced by actual cell-phone footage of police violence toward Black people.

King’s Mulignans (2015), is a racial parody about the stereotype of the (white) mafia man, who is lionized in cinema despite his clear bigotry. In the film, a crew of Black men sit on a stoop and act in a manner typical of a movie mafiosos, rejecting and threatening passing white people, thereby flipping the symbolism of the trope from one of degradation to one of gentrification. In an interview for the Sundance Institute, King said:

It was the kind of thing where because we were satirizing a single scene, it could only be made in short form. We had no plans for what to do with this piece, which I think is very liberating. Not having the financial constraints of having a return on investment . . . all those sort of worries can stifle creativity. … I always struggled trying to make a narrative short, because I was trying to cram so much story into the medium that I ultimately came to realize that for me as a storyteller shorts work better when I’m just trying to create a vignette or a moment. — Sundance

Again, the form of the film liberates the function of the politics. King returned to making short films after his debut feature Newlyweeds, and utilized the positive attention of his shorts (which played at Sundance and other festivals) to package his next feature, Judas and the Messiah, a fictionalized true story about the governmental betrayal of the Black Panther party, a film which was eventually nominated for multiple Academy Awards. A not insignificant corollary benefit to making short films, aside from the creative freedoms, is the possible opportunity to transition from making short films, which rarely earn any money, into making features, where an artist could have a sustainable career.

2) Focus

Many excellent short films use their brevity as a device for an intense focus on a single moment, incident, or feeling. Stop (directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, 2015) effectively conjures the fate of one Black teenager’s entire life in a few-minute encounter. The film efficiently introduces us to a likeable Brooklyn high schooler with a bright future in baseball and college, immediately making the viewer understand and identify with the protagonist. But his bright future is put on the line when cops harass him on his walk home from baseball practice, knowing that he has a small amount of marijuana in his bag (in an era when minor possession offenses could mean major prison time). The single tense and humiliating scene is harrowing because of our connection with the character, even in such a tight timeframe. And yet, the simple film also denounces the NYPD’s entire stop and frisk policy, and evokes the long dark history of governmental persecution of Black people in America. That the movie is able to do so much in such a condensed timeline is a testament to Reinaldo Marcus Green’s storytelling ability, but also indicative of the way compressed narratives can pack a punch.

 

Other films that use concentrated beams to illuminate larger issues include:

+ The Vacation (directed by Jarreau Carrillo, 2022) – A Black man endeavors to take a trip to the beach, but he is stranded in a car that won’t start and bombarded by a ludicrous concatenation of associates who burden him with their troubles. The richly drawn characters evoke different aspects of Black existence, speaking to the pervasiveness of social and economic factors that hinder the community. Set entirely in and around the vehicle, the film channels the futile comedy of Waiting For Godot in a modern social satire.

+ Emergency (directed by Carey Williams, 2021) – a small group of Black college students find a white woman passed out on their living room floor. Unable to rouse her, they fear she has over-dosed and may die. But afraid of the consequences of calling law enforcement, they hesitate to help her, until ultimately they can enlist another friend who can pass for white to contact the cops.

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For other films, the focus may not be time and location, but the specificity of subject matter. Five or 15 minutes may be enough time for certain films to illustrate how a microcosmic instance represents a macrocosmic issue. Garrett Bradley’s masterful documentary Alone (2017) portrays a woman aptly named Aloné Watts who decides to marry her boyfriend, Desmond Watson, despite the fact that he is incarcerated. On her inspiration for the film, Bradley wrote:

I woke up one morning noticing that my loneliness could be measured in heat – that the warmth of my sheets extended only as far as my own body. I wondered how many men and women woke up in America feeling that same isolation — and for how long. – NY Times

But this fundamental ache is here focused particularly on the plight of Black families, who disproportionally make up the US prison population. By making a film about one relationship, by making a film that is specific and raw, Bradely evokes a universal desire for love and companionship, garnering empathy among diverse viewers. The method of filmmaking evocatively embodies the mood of the characters: the camera floats close to the subject, but the hazy black and white picture, oblique angles, and ethereal music and voice over conjure a sense of sad isolation. Portraying a church service, free time at a pool hall, and quotidian home life, but all at a distance, often obstructed by foreground objects with metaphorical significance (a phone, as the only form of communication with her husband; a chain, hanging from the ceiling), the film offers a glimmer of hope, slices of happiness, but weighted with despair. At other times, the camera stays completely outside the space of the action—within the prison, or outside the home of Aloné’s family, when they berate her harshly for marrying an incarcerated man. The act of not showing becomes (as with Ja’Tovia Gary) a dramatic defiance that respects the subjects of the film; parallels the institutional erasure forged by the prison system;  and entices the viewer, asking them to conjure the image in their mind, casting a lasting engagement with the film.

Without the need for explicit or extended explanation, the film thus operates as implicit but potent criticism of the American justice system which causes such acute heartbreak across this broad spectrum of Black citizens. And at just 12 minutes long, viewers who might not dedicate 90 minutes of their time to the issue of racial justice are enticed to dig deeper. The form influences and serves the content and the cause.

The power of these films (and more listed below for further viewing) is not measured in length, but potency. The mark of a good movie is not how long it stays on the screen, but how long it stays in the mind.

Alone (directed by Garrett Bradley, 2017)

 

EXHIBITION AND CONTEXT

I started Rooftop Films with a $60 used 16mm projector, a bedsheet stapled to the wall, and folding chairs borrowed from a wedding rental company. I curated submissions from friends, word of mouth, and attending local film festivals. I hand-wrote flyers inviting people to my Lower East Side rental apartment, where I hosted the screening (illegally; I was evicted after the first screening). That Rooftop Films has continued for 29 years and counting is certainly due to a substantial amount of hard work by a cadre of caring people, but also because there is indeed an eager audience for short films and engaging events. Rooftop now shows feature films as well, but our shorts programs attract larger crowds, routinely drawing an average of 1,000 people for multiple shows per year.

In addition to the quality of the films Rooftop screens, I believe there is added interest in our screenings from our themed programs—perennial sections like “New York Non-Fiction” and “Queerly Beloved,” and ad hoc selections curated from the waves of submissions and reflecting the zeitgeist of the time, such as (to note solely some of the civic programming) “Un-American Films” (films about the injustices of American political policy, screened annually on the 4th of July), “Black + White = Gray” (films about racial strife and harmony), “Come and Take It” (films about female characters fighting for autonomy and control), “Crossing the Line” (films about immigrants). We have screened programs of short films about the environment combined with an eco-carnival to foster hands-on audience participation, and screened programs of films about gentrification combined with a protest against a corporate development in the neighborhood. In October of 2001, just three weeks after 9/11, we screened a program of relevant short films—some made, rapidly, about the attack and aftermath; others providing historical context. A program of short films can be nimble and adaptive to current events (in a way that features usually cannot be, due to the length of production and strings attached to exhibition).

A program of short films differs from a screening of a single feature because of the variety of ideas, artists and styles included. The shorts program can be effective at building audience awareness and spurring community action, in a way that feature films aren’t. With that mixture, there are more opportunities within an event to connect with a given viewer. If one audience member doesn’t enjoy the serious documentary in the show, maybe they appreciate the comedic satire on a related issue. If another viewer doesn’t understand an experimental film, maybe the fiction narrative that follows helps comprehension through context. In any given program of short films, there are more artist voices to augment the arguments. The nature of inclusive diversity should mean more relationships fostered, more unity forged. A feeling of community effort permeates the filmmakers and fans.

I believe we can decolonize the media through short films and programs. I advocate for more short film shows, better time slots for shorts at festivals, more attention paid to shorts in terms of press and social media, more highlighting short films online. You can make a short film. You can show a short film anywhere. You can collect short films online or in person. You can change the world, one short film at a time.

Rebirth Is Necessary (directed by Jenn Nkiru, 2018)

 

FURTHER VIEWING

FICTION – DRAMA

  • Bruiser (by Miles Warren, 2021)
    • https://vimeo.com/569678130
    • After his father gets into a fight at a bowling alley, Darious begins to investigate the limitations of his own manhood.
  • War Paint, by Katrelle N. Kindred
  • Stop, by Reinaldo Marcus Green
  • Afronauts, by Nuotama Frances Bodomo
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb3pu5jXWHU
    • It’s July 16, 1969: America is preparing to launch Apollo 11. Thousands of miles away, the Zambia Space Academy hopes to beat America to the moon in this fictionalized film inspired by real events.
  • Emergency, by Carey Williams

 

FICTION – COMEDY

  • LaZercism, by Shaka King
  • Mulignans, by Shaka King
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIMFWl3sm3U
    • Mulignan(s) /moo.lin.yan(s)/ n. 1. Italian-American slang for a black man. Derived from Italian dialect word for “eggplant.” See also: moolie. Source: Urban Dictionary and pretty much every mob movie ever.
  • The Vacation, by Jarreau Carrillo

 

DOCUMENTARY

  • Field Niggas, by Khalik Allah
    • https://www.khalikallah.com/ [full film can be found online if you search]
    • Set entirely at night, Field Niggas takes us to the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem and introduces us to its faces. The non-synch audio track consists of conversations with and among those faces: dreams, regrets, arguments, affection, observations, opinions.
  • Into My Life, by Ivana Hucikova, Sarah Keeling, Grace Remington
    • https://www.amdoc.org/watch/intomylife/
    • Growing up in the largest affordable housing cooperative in Brooklyn, Cassandra’s world was artfully framed by her mother’s Super-8 camera. Today, still living in the same place, Cassandra examines and edits these remarkable films, gaining insight into the challenges her mother faced as a creative black woman and the importance of her vision.
  • A Litany of Survival, by Martin Hawk
    • https://vimeo.com/446916812
    • Under the cover of night, BLM activists organize at the Mayor’s house to make their case for equal human rights in the heavily segregated city of Rochester, NY.
  • Writing on the Wall, by Miya Lee
    • https://boweryfilmfestival.com/film/writing-on-the-wall/
    • “Writing on the Wall” documents the transforming streets of Soho, New York City during the Black Lives Matter protests in June and July 2020. After the neighborhood’s high-end stores boarded up their windows and doors, two artist-led activist groups quickly saw an opportunity: Using the stores’ plywood boards as blank canvases, they spent weeks painting murals in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
  • A Conversation with my Black Son, by Geeta Gandbhir and Blair Foster
  • Alone, by Garrett Bradley

 

EXPERIMENTAL

  • If I Go Will They Miss Me, Walter Thompson-Hernandez
    • https://www.wthdz.com/new-page-1
    • This film explores the relationship between a twelve-year old boy’s imagination and the visceral realities that affect his community.
  • The Giverny Document, by Ja’tovia Gary
    • https://vimeo.com/460252974 [ for educational use password, email in**@*****ia.com ]
    • Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.
  • Rebirth Is Necessary, by Jenn Nkiru
    • https://www.nowness.com/series/black-star/rebirth-is-necessary-jenn-nkiru
    • This film explores the magic and dynamism of Blackness in a realm where time and space are altered. The now, the past & the future are rethought and reordered to create something soulful and mind bendingly visceral. Unfolding through the gaze of Jenn Nkiru, it is an audio – visual feast which pulls on broad yet unique sound and visual references to push the story forward.

 

 

ANIMATION

  • The Fire Next Time, by Renaldho Pelle
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKAeg3gNHAk
    • Rioting spreads as social inequality causes tempers in a struggling community to flare, but the oppressive environment takes on a life of its own as the shadows of the housing estate close in.