Friday 14th – Sunday 16th August 2020
Join us for a programme of films, live events and new writing, centred around Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage (1991), which documents the intertwined history and future of Black, feminist and queer radical politics in close conversations with and between Angela Davis, June Jordan and Alice Walker.
Between Us We Have Everything We Need responds to and with the necessary anger, grief and beauty of A Place of Rage, by placing the film in conversation with contemporary feminist film programmers, writers, artist-filmmakers and activists, including Maria Cabrera, Lola Olufemi, Irenosen Okojie, Grace Barber-Plentie, Javie Huxley, Ufuoma Essi, Rhea Storr, and Onyeka Igwe (part of B.O.S.S. Collective). The weekender takes its title from Igwe’s short film Collective Hum, which will screen in a free shorts programme with Essi’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind and Storr’s A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message, films that tune in to a ‘collective hum’ of performance, protest, pleasure and moving image practice. Join us as we re-imagine an intersectional feminist future rooted in BIPOC queer and feminist cultural histories and practices through new writing commissions, a live Zoom Q&A with Pratibha Parmar and Olufemi, and a live Zoom roundtable with the short filmmakers.
To learn more, please explore:
- bios for all participants
- new writing on the films –– on the shorts programme, by Grace Barber-Plentie and Javie Huxley, and on A Place of Rage, by Irenosen Okojie
- six CdF favourite readings on Black feminist media-making
We also recommend Silver Press’s Revolution is Not a One-Time Event, a programme of conversations focused on feminist abolitionism running on Monday nights in August and organised by Che Gossett, Lola Olufemi and Sarah Shin, as a complement to CdF x Between Us We Have Everything We Need. The events are fully booked, but information on how to access recordings and the reading list is here.
TICKETING INFORMATION
Thanks to funding from Film Feels, our live events and shorts programme are free. Please sign up via Eventbrite to receive Zoom links for our live events.
We would like to suggest, if you can, donating to and/or sharing the crowdfunder for Sistah Space, a Hackney-based charity dedicated to supporting African & Caribbean heritage woman and girls affected by domestic and sexual abuse. Please sign and share the petition asking the Mayor of Hackney to help Sistah Space stay in their current, safer building.
A Place of Rage is available to rent via Vimeo on Demand. It will remain available at a 50% discount for the foreseeable future, at £8.00/$9.99, with thanks to the filmmaker and Kali Films!
Watch A Place of Rage here, with closed captioning available: please click on (CC) on the player to see the subtitles.
A PLACE OF RAGE
Dir: Pratibha Parmar | USA | 1991 | 52 mins
Watch A Place of Rage here, with closed captioning available: please click on (CC) on the player to see the subtitles. And read Irenosen Okojie’s response to the film here.
And check out the added extra available free via the VOD link: the short film Angela: An Icon (no closed captions).
‘Tell me something,’ June Jordan says in Parmar’s urgent film that documents the lives and politics of three African-American women, ‘what you think would happen if everytime they kill a black boy then we kill a cop / everytime they kill a black man we kill a cop / you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?’ This is America 1991 and Jordan, the poet, educator and activist is speaking, in ‘A Poem About My Rights,’ about police brutality, carceral racism and the abuse of power, and her words carry a piercing resonance in the current moment and movement. In the film Alice Walker and Angela Davis join Jordan in one of the most richest and cherished interviews between the three artists, in which a collective conversation becomes a joyous, Prince and Janet Jackson-soundtracked hymn to a Black queer feminist politics that prizes and arises from joy, love and collectivity.
This lyrical film begins the much needed exploration of the African-American women who sustained and inspired the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s. By shining an intimate light on some of our best known artists / activists Parmar eloquently reveals the power and poetry of the hidden faces. Her film is a visual embrace of who black women really are.
—— Jewelle Gomez
Read Irenosen Okojie’s Culture Club post on A Place of Rage. And celebrate Okojie winning the 2020 Caine Prize by reading her winning story ‘Grace Jones’, [pdf] from her collection Nudibranch.
Content Note: the film contains discussion of racism & violence, and references to sexual assault. Further detailed content notes are available here.
Pratibha Parmar and Lola Olufemi Live Q&A
Friday 14th August, 7pm-8pm (BST), free.
The video of our Zoom Q&A with Pratibha Parmar and Lola Olufemi will be available soon, accompanied by a downloadable transcript; this will be followed by a subtitled video. The saved chat is available here with links to Parmar’s work and recommendations. And we have the interview with June Jordan as mentioned, which appeared in Feminist Review, available for download as a PDF.
SHORTS PROGRAMME
Available Friday 14th August 12pm-Sunday 16th August 12pm.
Watch the shorts programme via Vimeo here.
Read Grace Barber-Plentie and Javie Huxley’s response to the programme here.
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Dir: Ufuoma Essi | UK | 2019 | 14 mins
All That You Can’t Leave Behind is an experimental appropriated video archive film that explores the relationship between black women’s collective experience with music, history and the act of reclamation. The film was made for the Barbican Young Visual Artist exhibition Concrete Salon at the Barbican Centre in April 2019.
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message
Dir: Rhea Storr | UK | 2018 | 12 mins
Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message asks who is really performing. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces.
Content Note: contains flashing images at the start and end
Collective Hum by B.O.S.S.
Dir: B.O.S.S. Collective | UK | 2019 | 7 mins
A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound. Collective Hum documents a collective in practice through the operation of B.O.S.S using multiple narration, overlapping voices and the sound of group interviews, meetings and events to create a polyphonic score to soundtrack images of the ‘collective bodies, kinaesthetic experience and gestural language’ of sound system culture.
Collective Hum was made as part of Second Sight, an ICO touring project in association with LUX, with support from the BFI Audience Fund and Arts Council England awarding National Lottery Funding.
Read Grace Barber-Plentie’s and Javie Huxley’s Culture Club response to the shorts film programme. We also recommend Barber-Plentie’s response to Sistren Theatre Collective’s film Sweet Sugar Rage.
Between Us We Have Everything We Need Roundtable with Ufuoma Essi, Rhea Storr andOnyeka Igwe
Saturday 15th August 4pm-5pm (BST)
The video of our Zoom roundtable with filmmakers Onyeka Igwe, Rhea Storr and Ufuoma Essi, facilitated by programmer Maria Cabrera, will be available soon accompanied by a downloadable transcript; this will be followed by a subtitled video. The saved chat is available here with links to the filmmakers’ work and recommendations. And we have the two paywalled articles mentioned available for download as PDFs: Daphne A. Brooks’ “Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe” [pdf] and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics” [pdf].
This programme is part of Film FeelsConnected, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk
