Lose Your Mother: Shorts
“You do not go where your mother is not.”
Taking its title from the Saidiya Hartman text Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic Slave Route and inspired by a print by the graphic designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti entitled Kusina Mai/ Kusina Mai Futi, a Chivanhu saying warning against being in a foreign land without the necessary support of people that would protect and encourage you, BlackStar Projects in partnership with the Boston Ujima Project present an evening of short films exploring ancestral connections through time and space. These dynamic filmmakers ask, who are we if not amalgams of the people and the experiences that built us? Food, music, technology, and more work to define our culture, and our culture is what we leave behind. Featuring experimental films by Charlotte Brathwaite, Curtis Essel, Jenn Nkiru, Joseph Douglas Elmhirst, and Luis Arnías.
Post-screening discussion with filmmaker Luis Arnías and Maori Karmael Holmes, Chief Executive and Artistic Officer of BlackStar.
Where
Boston Institute for Contemporary Art
25 Harbor Shore Drive
Boston MA 02210
When
Thursday, January 16
7 PM ET
What
Short film block
Film Program
- Bisagras
Directed by Luis Arnías
Bisagras is a film that triangulates the journey of African slaves to America and draws a line that goes through my brown skin.
Allumuah
Directed by Curtis Essel
Allumuah explores the way the internet enables a lineage of aesthetics passed between African diaspora artists. Expounding on the concept of African identity and the influence technology has had on it over the decades.
Burnt Milk
Directed by Joseph Douglas Elmhirst
Una, an isolated Jamaican woman living in 1985 suburban London, works as a nurse on a maternity ward. As she takes a moment of solace to make her traditional condensed milk pudding, burnt milk, she is flooded with visions that take her home. - Forgotten Paradise: Dream the Other Side of the River
Directed by Charlotte Brathwaite
Energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed. Director Charlotte Brathwaite in collaboration with Photographer Malick Welli imagine the dreams and nightmares of forcibly enslaved Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said. Transforming the darkness of captivity into the light of freedom and love.
Black to Techno
Directed by Jenn Nkiru
Black to Techno is a music documentary charting the anthropological, socio-economical, geopolitical roots of techno from Detroit and how it travelled and translated into becoming the soundtrack to the fall of the wall in Berlin.