Fringe of Colour Films 2021 - Our Statement
Fringe of Colour Films returns this year on 1st August for its second online arts festival, exploring what it’s like to be a performance artist making and creating work in the digital age. With restrictions still in place on our freedom of movement and a pandemic still very present in our physical lives, Fringe of Colour Films invites Black artists and Artists of Colour to explore their practice through film.
We are not a traditional film festival. Fringe of Colour Films was created in response to a huge number of artists losing their income and opportunities due to the necessary shutting-down of a number of summer festivals in Edinburgh as a result of COVID-19. Our festival will continue to adapt to the times over the coming years, which means our main medium and format may change over time.
But, for now, we know what we want. We want to get money into the hands of artists that have lost their income and are even more marginalised due to their identities. We want to push the boundaries of what art is, how we can talk about it and how we can make it. We will continue to commission new work and are over the moon to be working with our in-house Film Editor Tao-Anas Le Thanh and our Subtitler and Captioner Sarya Wu again. Our Responses project, led by Editorial Director Paula Akpan and Sub-editor Tomiwa Folorunso, will continue to give space to writers to consider performance art beyond reviews.
We want to have care at the heart of our festival. We will be having conversations about trauma in art and are committing to a trauma-led and informed processes to support our artists through the festival, which will be facilitated by our new Healing Consultant and Assistant Programmer, Skye Tinevimbo Chirape.
We hope to be even more deliberate with our programme this time round. Natasha Ruwona also joins us this year as our Assistant Curator, bringing their experience from Glasgow Short Film Festival and Africa In Motion Film Festival to Fringe of Colour Films. Their interests in multimedia, Afro-futurist storytelling alongside their own creative practice informs their curatorial decisions.
In recognising that we are not the only online arts festival out here looking to work with exciting artists who have been inaccurately labelled as “on the margins” (because whose margins are we talking about?), we hope to connect with others like us. Esme Allman has joined the team with the role of Festival Relations and will be looking to connect with Black, POC and QTIPOC arts festivals around the world. Esme’s own work explores Blackness and memory, and her film ‘CLUB’ featured in last year’s Fringe of Colour Films festival.
Last year we were fortunate enough to be able to host and co-host some truly inspiring events. This year, Kaleb D’Aguilar joins us as our Marketing and Events Coordinator and will be working to ensure our festival reaches as many people as it can, both inside and outside of the August festival period. Kaleb is a multidisciplinary Jamican filmmaker and writer whose work explores the realities of Black and Caribbean people. As our continuing Social Media Manager, Katie Goh will ensure that you are hearing about all of our events and opportunities. If you’re engaging with us via Twitter or Instagram this summer, it will likely be Katie you’re speaking to!
Our team will be working together to provide learning opportunities across the mediums of publishing, film-making and healing through our Fringe of Colour Saturday School programme.
And lastly, our Creative Director Briana Pegado and Technical Director Jess Brough will be working together to bring you the best of everyone’s work, from our commissioned artists, to the films submitted to the festival, the essays from the writers on our Responses project and the expertise of our individual team members.
Being Edinburgh-based has introduced us to some truly incredible creatives and it has also allowed us to see where conversations can be connected between Scotland and the rest of the world. As before, we welcome audiences and artists from all over the globe. We hope you’ll join us again in what is still such an uncertain year, for a festival that continues to connect with people across borders, with intention and with hope of a better artistic landscape to come.
Explore the notion of liminal, digital space through the work of our film-makers and writers as they help us to capture, to reimagine, and to envision our collective future.
In solidarity,
The Fringe of Colour Team
