Where the Archive Fails, These Filmmakers Begin
In light of Black Experimental Cinema and the Unwritten Histories They Refuse to Forget
Sometimes the record skips. Sometimes history forgets on purpose. And when it does, these filmmakers pick up the pieces and make something else: part memory, part vision, part refusal. They aren’t chasing Hollywood. They’re building something truer. Stories that don’t ask for permission to be told.
Jenn Nkiru’s Rebirth Is Necessary (2017) is a rhythmic loop of archive and prophecy. It pulses like a mixtape, folding history, sound, and spirit into one.
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This isn’t explanation. It’s invocation.
Kahlil Joseph, in PROCESS (2017), blends home footage, dreams, and surreal vignettes. His films feel overheard, like waking up inside someone else’s memory. A new visual grammar of Black interiority. home footage, dreams, and surreal vignettes. His films feel overheard, like waking up inside someone else’s memory. A new visual grammar of Black interiority.
Ayo Akingbade's Tower XYZ (2016) and Dear Babylon (2019) trace London’s shifting landscapes through youth voices and concrete geometry. Her lens is quiet but radical—like walking through a city that’s already half erased.
Tanya Fear, in her indie short Shoot Your Shot (2020), uses minimal sci-fi and comedy to shift how we imagine love, place, and possibility. A tiny universe folded into the everyday.
Nuotama Bodomo's Afronauts (2014) reimagines Zambia’s 1960s space race through Black cosmic dreaming. Myth and history blur. It’s not just what might have happened—it’s what should have.
Jahmil X.T. Qubeka pushes genre to its edges in Sew the Winter to My Skin (2018) and Of Good Report (2013). His films are raw, ghosted, nonlinear—folk horror meets ancestral memory.
And Zina Saro-Wiwa, in Phyllis (2010), tells grief through taste, performance, and oil-soaked history. Her work isn’t just visual—it’s tactile.
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