BLACK MOTHER - Film Preview and Q&A With Director, Khalik Allah.

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BACKGROUND:
I had the privilege of attending one of the few preview screenings and Q&A of Khalik Allah’s documentary Black Mother, at The Ritzy in Brixton, London on Mon 29 October 2018. The film pieces together poignant oral testimonies and cinematography of some of Jamaica’s poorest inhabitants and juxtaposes their stories against the often brutal story, history and cinematography of Jamaica the Island.

Just as the Island had been raped by slavery and colonialism, it’s resulting Children, the people of the land, born into poverty because of this continual rape, are also vulnerable to exploitation to escape destitution, as the result of capitalism.

The film draws parallels between Jamaica, the mother of its people, and the black woman, head of the family, mother of creation, and strong matriarch in Black conscious communities.

The black mother is the source and root, and just as pregnancy has 3 trimesters plus birth, we are taken through 3 plus one final chamber, as the film unfolds layer by layer.

Jamaica is the source of natural resources, and Ancient African traditions and spirituality fashioned into a new Caribbean’s culture, but some of Jamaica’s children have veered away from this towards artificial processes foods, religion instead of spirituality, and a break from family values.

Themes explored therefore, include, life, death, Jamaican History, pride, spirituality, poverty, the breakdown of community and community values, nature versus artificial and a desire to return to nature and traditional values.

VERDICT:
I found the film very raw, dense, visceral and intense while simultaneously poetic, spiritual and rhythmic. It is a feast of visual and audio art, which provide a portal to bear witness to the pain, desperation and destitution of Jamaica’s poor. Because of its rawness and intensity the film feels at once both heavy and yet very beautifully poignant. I felt some context was needed to frame the fact, that the reality of those featured in the film is not the reality of the whole island and you do have the upper working classes and middle classes for whom life is not so bleak. This would have added balance to a very bleak piece.

Q&A
@chrystalgenesis appears curtesy of award winning @stancepodcast.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Q&A which followed the film, where Khalik provides insight and interpretation of his art, and we get to know the artist behind the work, get a glimpse into what makes this creative genius tick, and also the plethora of layers evident in both the film and Khalik’s mindset and general spiritual outlook on life itself.

BIO (Source: KhalikAllah.com ).

”Khalik Allah (b.1985) is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker whose work has been described as "street opera" simultaneously visceral, hauntingly beautiful and penetrative.
Khalik's passion for photography was sparked when he began photographing members of the Wu-Tang Clan with a camera he borrowed from his dad.
Real and raw, his profoundly personal work goes beyond street photography.  His eye for daring portraiture and bold aesthetics takes us into an entire world.
While the people he photographs on the corner of 125th and Lexington Avenue in Harlem have been his central inspiration, his work also extends to documentary film with “Field Niggas”, a chronicle of summer of nights spent at the intersection of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue. The film takes its name from Malcolm X’s famous lecture, “Message to the Grassroots.”
Khalik shoots with a manual, analogue film camera, as photography and film-making form a venn diagram in his work. “ His filmography also includes Beyoncé’s Lemonade.

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