Black Mother, Khalik Allah’s follow-up to Field Niggas, finds the photographer/filmmaker in Jamaica, examining his family’s story and his relationship to the island as a whole. Structured as three “trimesters,” the film takes root in Allah’s complex relationship to Jamaica and his love for the land and its people, which unavoidably meets concerns over its colonial past and neocolonial present. A mixture of Super 8, 16mm, old family films and shiny new digital, Black Mother is a first-person stream-of-visual-consciousness tone poem, drawing intuitive connections across an entire country’s history and culture. While shooting, Allah didn’t take any photos, but his […]

The trailer for this year’s Third Horizon Film Festival—the third Third Horizon, as time would have it—was beautiful, because the films comprising it are beautiful: wide-eyed children, skin aglow with flames, the massive, lime-green expanse of sugarcane fields, a sea coursing like blood. The preview’s song begins with a dissonant, bell-like din, stretched like sinew over the rest of the track, which moves a lot like, actually, waves: steel drums clanging like a ticking clock; keys that progress upward, then down, till the whole song heads somewhere melancholic, toward a wisp of its former self. Third Horizon Film Festival is […]

In 1976, German screenwriter/producer Peter Märthesheimer wrote the punchily titled essay “What Can the Hero Do? He Can Change the World! A Few Problems Concerning Drama Production.” He began: Many television plays, good and bad, have come about because a drama producer or script-writer has said at some time or other, ‘Something ought to be made about…’ Then a so-called ‘theme’ usually follows, a ‘problem’ which the person who thought it so serious that he wanted to ‘make something about it’ considers relevant […] Now there would be nothing against this approach, which cautiously and discerningly commits itself to the […]