Resources

The film features June Jordan reading her poem ‘A Poem About My Rights’, which features references to sexual assault, rape & violence. The poem can be read here.

Time codes for the two references to sexual assault are: 

• 22:29 – 23:29 
• 25:10 – 26:42 

the time code for references to racist violence is: 

• 27:57 – 30:38

Please get in touch if you would like more details: our Instagram DMs are open!

Six Readings on Black Feminist Media-Making

Readings to accompany the screenings of A Place of Rage and Black British feminist shorts, summer 2020.

1. Karen Alexander, ‘Mothers, Lovers and Others: Films by Black British Female Directors’, Monthly Film Bulletin (October 1989). Read it here.

As Alexander writes in her article:

Over the last 18 months, the work of four Black women directors bears witness to an advance: Dreaming Rivers by Martina Attille, Coffee Coloured Children by Ngozi Onwurah, I’m British But… by Gurinder Chadha and Perfect Image? by Maureen Blackwood… These four powerful films both challenge existing representations and open up possibilities for changing them. Beyond this, however, their very existence points to the suppressed potential of Black women’s creativity and should provide an inspiration, both to those who have been excluded from the means of representation and to those educational and funding institutions responsible for that exclusion.

—— Karen Alexander

2. Jacqueline Bobo, ed. Black Women Film and Video Artists(Routledge, 1998). (Paperback and ebook currently available from Routledge at 20% off)

A comprehensive and conversational compendium, a passion project and a love letter, an archive and an instigation: Bobo’s book is legendary not only for the history and practice it covers, but for its communitarian approach. As Gwendolyn Audrey Foster writes in her review [pdf] for Film Quarterly, “This anthology is notable for its contextualization of these artists within a framework of black feminist cultural critical methodologies, and for the inclusion of black women film and video artists in their own words in essays and interviews.”

3. Martha Gever, John Greyson and Pratibha Parmar, eds. Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (Psychology Press, 1993)

Queer Looks, co-edited by filmmakers Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar and John Greyson, blew apart the borders between practice and theory, art and activism, experimenta and porn – with an essay by Barbara Hammer that covers them all. It puts (as Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s recent book is titled) “queer cinema in the world”. It’s a community action (dedicated to Stuart Marshall) that hearts theory that has practice at its heart, where Michelle Parkerson’s salute to black LGBT video brushes up against Patricia White’s fanfare for Madame X, under Donna Evans and Jean Carlomusto’s “lesbian visibility lampshade.” (Text taken from Club des Femmes, “Six Essential Books on Lesbian Cinema,” BFI Online).

4. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). Read the introduction here [pdf].

Keeling’s book is an astonishing example of how to do things with film and feminism, including the visual iconography of the women of the Black Panthers. Working with the philosophies of Angela Davis and Antonio Gramsci as much as the canon of film theory, Keeling traces the rare and potent image of the black femme – which is all too often absent from cinema itself – through the visual field, noting how it shapes African American politics and lived experience.

5. Rabz Lansiquot, ‘Some meandering personal reflections on Dreaming Rivers, language and Hostile Environment’, Second Sight: Celebrating the UK’s Black Film Workshop Movement, now and then (19 February 2020). Read it here.

As Lansiquot writes in their article:

I have no conclusion to this piece because there is no conclusion to this work – to Dreaming Rivers’ work in affecting viewers. To Judah’s work in supporting and inspiring new generations of filmmakers and practitioners like myself. To the work of fighting against a system that produces the loss felt by Miss T, her three children, and the violence of racist deportations. Dreaming Rivers is a work that I hope will endure beyond its representational value, as form, as content, as politics and as a work in the tradition of Sankofa. A looking back towards the future.

—— Rabz Lansiquot

6. Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, eds. Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making (Duke University Press, 2018). Read the introduction here [pdf].

Like a VIP invitation to the coolest party, Sisters in the Lifeprovides access to long-off-limits company in the trenches of cultural production and exhibition and reveals how queer filmmakers of color came to prominence and how friendship networks nurtured creativity and access. Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz are the perfect guides—for their expertise, knowledge of the archive, and first-hand involvement in the history. For anyone who still thinks that great films appear magically out of thin air, this truth-telling volume will be a revelation.

—— B. Ruby Rich, back cover blurb

Participant bios

Grace Barber-Plentie is a London-based freelance film writer and programmer with a focus on the works of Black women directors, representations of the fat body and, whenever possible, the oeuvre of Barbra Streisand.

Maria Cabrera is a film programmer dedicated to celebrating the stories of Black and Latin American people, using film as a tool for creating spaces of discussion within communities and to unearth personal identities and histories. Maria is the co-founder of Reel Good Film Club (no longer active) and has coordinated programming and filmmaking initiatives with Barbican, Creative Skillset, LAWRS, and has delivered talks and hosted discussions at The Whitechapel Gallery, British Film Institute, Queen Mary University and ICA London.

Ufuoma Essi is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound.

Her work explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class and sexuality. The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of the historical narrative. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of black women. Drawing from a range of influences including black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne A Brooks.  Within Ufuoma’s work she  seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and she is particularly interested in exploring the production of Black images and interrogating how they are presented.

Ufuoma’s films have been screened and exhibited at institutions, galleries and film festivals in the UK and abroad such as the Barbican Centre, South London Gallery, MOCA Los Angeles, Croydon Art Store, Chisenhale Studios, Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival and Black Star Film Festival.

She is also member of the Black and POC women and non-binary artist collective Narration Group based at the South London Gallery.

Javie Huxley is a  British-Chilean illustrator based in London, and a campaigner and trustee for Save Latin Village. Following her MA in Children’s Literature & Illustration, she has been an editorial illustrator for magazines such as gal-dem and Shado.  She loves using art as advocacy, regularly exploring themes like identity and social justice in her work.

Onyeka Igwe (part of B.O.S.S. Collective) is an artist filmmaker, programmer and researcher. She is born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction, video work, Onyeka uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives. The work explores the physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning.

B.O.S.S. Collective are: Adae, Deborah Findlater, Evan Ifekoya, Gin Resis’Dance, Jlte, Hakeem Kazeem, Marcus Macdonald, Mellowdramatics, Mwen, Naeem Davis, Natasha Nkonde, Onyeka Igwe, Shenece Oretha, Phoebe Collings-James, Shy One, Sad Queers Club (sqc) and Shamica.

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian British writer. Her debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask award and was shortlisted for an Edinburgh International First Book Award. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Observer, The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally including Salt’s Best British Short Stories 2017, Kwani? and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri as a dynamic talent and featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London’s exciting new authors. Her short story collection Speak Gigantular, published by Jacaranda Books was shortlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new collection of stories, Nudibranch, published by Little Brown’s Dialogue Books was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and the story, Grace Jones, won the 2020 AKO Caine Prize For Fiction. www.irenosenokojie.com. Find her on Twitter: @IrenosenOkojie.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, organiser and Stuart Hall Foundation scholar from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.