Khalik Allah
-
True/False Film Fest 2020: The Value of the Theatrical Experience (Coronavirus Remix)
“You guys are going to spend the next year stuck quarantined with buskers,” a friend wrote on my way to True/False, which seemed to be sliding just under the wire of possibility even before I got there–a foreboding confirmed by day two, when SXSW became the first film festival to cancel. Onscreen, every handshake and hug was charged with an unintended jolt; in the theaters, elbow bumps were exchanged, nervous jokes made and telltale pools of soapy foam collected at the bottom of bathroom sinks. On its last day, True/False added one of SXSW’s now-homeless premieres, a special by (noted […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 25, 2020 -
Trailer Watch: Khalik Allah’s IWOW (I Walk on Water)
“The path of the math is to go fast” — not even a year after the release of Khalik Allah’s second feature, Black Mother, the filmmaker has just released the first trailer of his new feature, IWOW (I Walk on Water). The film is said to be three hours long, and the trailer length — seven minutes — is thus appropriately relational. Here’s Allah’s statement accompanying the video: Peace. From the most illest iambic pentameter visual photographer. Allah’s 5% student doctor. I’m around the 85% again. Straight up Ren & Stimpy. The pitiful situation of my people is the person […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 12, 2020 -
Memories of Jamaica
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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 14, 2019 -
“We’re Using the Caribbean as a Lens Through Which to Explore Intersectionality”: The 2018 Third Horizon Film Festival
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 […]
by Monica Uszerowicz on Oct 8, 2018 -
True/False 2018: What Can the Documentarian Do?
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 14, 2018 -
“A Documentarian Needs to be Disarming”: Khalik Allah on Field Niggas
Filmed throughout the summer of 2014 on the warm, sweat-drenched streets of Harlem (between 125th Street and Lexington Avenue to be exact), Khalik Allah’s Field Niggas is an all-out sensory experience, gonzo journalism that’s a visceral call-to-action. Placing himself amongst the socially ignored and maligned inhabitants of Harlem’s famous cross streets, Allah takes a nonlugubrious approach to documenting the men and women who frequent the area and suffer from poverty, addiction and a hunger to have their voices heard. Both stylistically and narratively innovative — the subjects’ stories often told via non-sync sound and invasive close-ups — Field Niggas’ attention-getting title is only the tip of the […]
by Erik Luers on Oct 16, 2015 -
Khalik Allah and Kevin B. Lee on Online Platforms vs. Festival Programming
Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake and Khalik Allah’s Field Niggas are radically different films. Lee assembles footage of the making of Transformers: Age of Extinction and related materials to delve into how Michael Bay’s hyper-blockbuster took over cities all over the globe and made deals with their governments to save money; Allah’s film is an hour-long piece of street portraiture from 125th and Park in Harlem, giving voice to the routinely marginalized. What they have in common is that they both initially launched online before receiving festival play. Lee’s film is still online, while Allah has pulled his movie […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 12, 2015 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015
