Yace Sula
Yace Sula
“A lot of Nollywood horror is quite experimental,” says first-generation Gambian-American Yace Sula of the formative films of their childhood. In those films, “women are used as cautionary tales. Growing up, I always identified with those women—the sex workers, the women that didn’t listen to their husbands, the women that just did whatever they wanted. Rewatching a lot of these films that I grew up on, I’m like, ‘I never saw the issue with this.’ But as an adult, you can see that there’s a lesson, and that’s a big inspiration for me—this Black body of mine, and what may be perceived by some folks as being immoral just by existing as myself.”
Sula’s first two short films, 2022’s Ele of the Dark and this year’s As Told by a Corpse, are experimental works made alone in their Philadelphia apartment that tackle these issues indirectly. The latter premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival before making its North American premiere in Currents, the experimental section of NYFF. Drawing upon influences including Barbara Hammer and Ja’Tovia Gary, both films aggressively pile layers of images on top of each other. One such base in Corpse is a home movie from 2000 of Sula as an infant at their birth naming ceremony (an important Gambian tradition) and 16mm footage of the present-day filmmaker in their apartment holding a hand up against the light of footage being projected onto them. An electronic outline of a moving hand is another layer, present-day images added over archival material that sometimes fragment into alarming and unpredictable patterns of glitches. “I love layering stuff because I like being overwhelmed by imagery,” Sula notes. Offscreen voices question the filmmaker’s identity and appearance, adding another layer of textural and thematic friction.
Sula started screenwriting in middle school, then made a short film as a class project in their sophomore year of high school, “this horror film about something haunting the household, and my brother walking through the house. It was really terrible, but it was my first time where I was holding a camera and using Premiere, and I fell in love with being able to create my own narrative.” During the pandemic, Sula had time to reflect on their identity and realized the feature screenplay they were currently working on wasn’t realizable. So, instead, they got to work on Ele. “I was using my phone and my computer camera. I rented a Blackmagic for two days to film some of that. It was just like, ‘Let me position my camera here. Let me pose here, let me position this light here.’ I was in my apartment—a totally self-contained movie.” Drawing on their teenage experience using GarageBand on the family iPad, Sula also scored and did the sound design for both films. As Told by a Corpse was shot on film: “I have a Kodak K-100. It’s a non-reflex 16mm camera, so it was very difficult to stage all of that. I got my tape measure. It was me again in my apartment, moving through film I captured on my phone and trying to blend it with the analog footage that I also captured on a Super 8 camera.”
Now in post-production, ICKTB! (which stands for “I can’t kill the beast!”) will be Sula’s “last film I’ll make for a while about the relationship between a queer child and their parents, a film accepting the tragedy of not being accepted for who you are. It’s probably my most personal film to date, even though all of my work is personal.” Feature narratives are still a goal: “How one navigates shame is such a big part of my work, so a lot of my scripts that deal with that are interrogating the way shame and violence inform how [people] move through the world. I just finished one tied to my own experiences with violence and wanting to be become a filmmaker in a precarious industry. After 2022, I was throwing myself into experimental work, but I write more frequently now, and that’s the aim. But I do write in a way where there is a very explicit experimental element.”—Vadim Rizov/Image: self
