business as usual: hostile environment: a REMIX
(Alberta Whittle, 2021)
Towards A Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace
(Languid Hands, 2019)
These two moving image works interrogate institutional anti-blackness and Black people’s continued resistance and persistence in the face of it. They open up ideas of film as praxis, and help us to think about the role of documentary, of documenting, in enacting systemic change. They are fluid and evolving projects that bring to the fore the perpetual nature of the struggle, both bearing witness to Black testimonies, but at the same time forcing us to question how effective they can be when they are continually sidelined and ignored.
All films in this programme are fully captioned.
We Persist is part of our nationwide programme TESTIMONIES
Celebrating the work of Black British women and non-binary documentary filmmakers,
made possible with support of BFI Doc Society
PROGRAMME SCHEDULE:
WE PERSIST
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business as usual: hostile environment: a REMIX (Alberta Whittle, 2021, 33m)
Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle presents a new working iteration of her film, business as usual: hostile environment (2020). Originally an exploration of the Windrush scandal, the film has been updated, the opening title card notes, to include ‘the horrors of Covid-19 overshadowing the everyday’. But while Covid-19 may be an exceptional crisis, the inequalities it has exposed are not. In her film, Whittle identifies the racial politics of the pandemic – exemplified by the disproportionate number of BAME deaths – and places it in a longer lineage of the UK’s history.
Towards A Black Testimony: Prayer/Protest/Peace (Languid Hands, 2019, 30m)
Drawing on archival imagery, Black geographies, and the dying declarations of Black Martyrs, the 40-minute film examines Black Testimony as obscured, ignored and undermined. This work borrows its subtitle - Prayer/Protest/Peace - from the third track on jazz drummer and composer Max Roach's 1960 album We Insist! which features jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Using this composition as the underlying structure for the film itself, Languid Hands presents three chapters or mediations on death and dying and consider the im/possibility of Black Testimony. The script draws from a variety of well and lesser known Black texts, weaving the audience through a performative lecture written and delivered by Imani Mason Jordan (fka Robinson) and carefully annotated by Rabz Lansiquot's archival exploration.