Femspectives 2021: Dreaming While Black
Dreaming While Black: can Black people finally chill?
Dreaming While Black, the short film programme curated by Tanatsei Gambura featured at Femspectives 2021 and there's just one word to describe what went down and that word is dreamy. The week-long screening of selected films was a beyond refreshing collection of short movies tackling the themes of dreams, identity, culture and history, all from a Black perspective.
Can the future actually be dreamt into existence? The Dreaming While Black collection gave a positive answer to the question while masterfully using an array of media and feelings ranging from experimental, imaginative, futuristic and historical. The weekend closed up with a discussion-based event with curator Tanatsei Gambura and poet and spoken word artist Be Manzini, where attention landed on the theme of dreams and how the same idea can be found in completely different circumstances, on the idea of a future where the main problem is mending people that were wronged in the past and the omnipresent question: can Black people finally get a rest?
Content Guidance: rape
The concept of trauma itself got questioned as well, distinctively related to Émergence, directed by Clarissa Rebouças and Julie Bernier and filmed in Haiti, where we get to see glimpses of a cleansing ritual performance and listen to how a trauma is created, lived and eventually dealt with, in a slow motion short that feels both like a daydream and a poem. The short movie depicts a young Haitian woman at first covered in sand and very calmly describing what her youth was like in a country like Haiti, how she wasn’t allowed to do certain things just because of her sex, how her life was always controlled by someone else but never by herself and how she had to deal with her own family not willing to protect her from harm. All of these themes are touched while she’s slowly uncovering herself from white sand and walking into the sea in a sort of cleansing ritual. The short ends with the same girl transporting two buckets full of water into the centre of the city and sort of concluding her ritual in front of a small crowd leading to the inevitable question: do we need witnesses in order to get past our personal trauma? If so how many? And if not, would it still mean something? The protagonist is reclaiming her body and in some way getting rid of her past trauma while explaining how her life changed since she took control over it. Émergence sees water and sand masterfully intertwined with spoken word and poetry and the slowness of the film ensures the creation of a dreamlike state.
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Black Man, directed by Jyoty Mistry (already famous for her striking experimental style), is yet another brilliant short that skilfully uses mixed media like spoken word and animation in a contrast created by two different screens one next to each other projecting at the same time. The poem recited throughout the entirety of the movie is an alphabetarian, which allows Mistry to really dig into every single aspect of racism and how Black people are perceived in society: the words pariah/police and prison/police are showed on the two opposed screens at the same time making the viewer really think about the split-screen more and also showing two different views of the world, potentially one black against a white one; the notion of a dual view could also be interpreted as an oppressor/ oppressed dynamic. When I Grow Up is also a circular short, we can see the footage from the beginning appearing at the end as well as some of the words used throughout. Despite the experimental style chosen for the movie, there is definitely nothing experimental about the themes examined by Mistry, making the short a cut through analysis of society as we know it, or better as Black people know it.
What resonated most with the festival theme of dreams was probably the short What Did You Dream by director Karabo Lediga, where we find 11 years old Boipelo back home at her aunts in Pretoria. Boipelo will soon go to a multiracial school but in the meantime, she has to deal with her two cousins constantly bullying her for being the ‘favourite’ of the family and for not being able to dream. See, in What Did You Dream we get to have a look at the ancient tradition of dreaming and then translating those dreams into numbers in order to play at the local Chinese lottery. Boipelo worries she might not be able to dream or remember her dreams ever again and all she wants to do is win the lottery and prove to her family she can do it, together with helping her grandparents financially, since her grandpa Simon is stuck in bed coughing all day. Although Boipelo is just eleven years old, the emotions she goes through during the short are rooted deep in tradition and Indigenous knowledge. For centuries, different cultures around the world have studied and examined dreams, trying to find a meaning behind them and What Did You Dream does exactly the same thing, only through the lens of young people and simultaneously sets the ground for something bigger, as hope is also an underlying theme that we can mostly find in Boipelo’s eyes throughout the whole movie.
Shifting slightly from the concept of dreams, it only feels natural to think about the future that’s waiting for us and how could we, as Black people, be part of it and I think Black Lady Goddess by director Chelsea Odufu absolutely captured the theme and closed the festival flawlessly. While Black Lady Goddess in an ongoing TV series, the first chapter pretty much sets up the premise of the story: it’s 2040 and the world has just discovered that yes, God actually exists and it’s not only a Black woman but it’s ALWAYS been a Black woman. While the news circulates around the globe, we get to know Ifeoma, who’s busy dealing with racist and privileged university classmates and also collecting money in her neighbourhood for reparations in her spare time. Despite being set in the future, Ifeoma is dealing with the same problems we are dealing with now, the only major difference is the change in technology really, which is in itself a criticism to both present and future white-centric societies. The language used in Black lady goddess is worth mentioning as well, since Black people are not called so anymore, but they’re now referred to as originators, while their white counterparts are called colonizers and appropriators. The desire and consumption of Blackness seen in White people is at the centre of the series, and while this is absolutely a current (and past) problem, the way Odufu uses Afrofuturism makes it even more relevant and calls us to ask ourselves if there really is an end to this? Is there ever going to be a time when Black people can finally let their hair down and get some rest?
For more info on Femspectives and the Dreaming While Black programme visit here.
