Elete N-F

What is best communicated through dance? Perhaps the fragile but sturdy balance between humans and the natural word. Madeline Shann invites us to think as much through her sensorially stunning film The Spring, a visual and sonic unwrapping of spring through dance.

Vrinda Jagota

Mohammedally Shushtari’s film Can Be beautifully shows all of the emotional complexities of two siblings, a brother and sister, Noura and Faiz, grappling with their father’s death. Each embodies conflicting emotional responses, clearly feeling misunderstood by the other. But, as each character learns to accept the other’s feelings, they map a path towards not only empathy for their sibling, but also a more holistic healing experience for themselves.

Hayley Wu (胡禧怡)

“It feels like there’s no good place to be these days,” my friend tells me over lunch. We are in a quiet corner of Hong Kong, thinking about the dozens of friends and acquaintances who in the past year have left the city, looking for a new home. From what we hear, no one has found one elsewhere yet.

Radha Patel

The opening scene of Cecilia Lim’s audiovisual poem, Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know shows a care worker helping their elderly patient walk down a street. It is an image that feels hopeful; the future reflected in the present. Tenderly shot in Queens, New York, and captioned in three languages, Tagalog, Spanish and Bangla, the three and a half minutes that follow juxtaposes images of women from these communities cooking, caring and praying for each other.

Katie Goh

We Are Nature is not a pandemic film. There are no references to lockdown or to social distancing or to government-mandated once-a-day walks. Instead, it is a short film that captures People of Colour in nature during golden hour. Director of Photography Linda Wu roams with a camera, following people in trailing skirts and billowing dresses as they walk through fields and sit by trees. In voiceover, different people contemplate their personal relationships to the natural world.

Memuna Konteh

Journeying through dense forest into open fields, Mojereoma Ajayi-Egunjobi calls on Omolore, her mother’s mother who she never knew. She does not need a conversation partner, but a witness, an accomplice on a path paved with pain and promising freedom. Dear Omolore is testament to the power of poetry and film to distil otherwise indigestible emotions.

Ojo Taiye

I was a thirsty traveller in the bustling city of Benin, Nigeria, when I was sent Back on Home Soil to watch. At first, unable to wait, I skipped through the reel, and then finally home, sitting in my parlour after dinner, I settled to watch it.

Memuna Konteh

Michael Jenkins’s short film, Pickney, is a haunting yet uplifting story about the unifying power of grief and the complexities of mixed-race identity. It follows teenager Leon, a mixed-race Bristolian with few ties to his Caribbean heritage outside of a close relationship with his nan, Pam, the mother of his estranged father, David.

Andrés N. Ordorica responds to Batería, a film by Damián Sainz Edwards that captures the raw beauty of a disused military base just outside of Havana, a refuge for gay men for cruising, connection, and imagining better futures.

Eilidh Akilade

It is left unsaid: Drexciya. I clasp it in my hands and it is as if I have held it before.

Drexciya rests on the seabed, beneath the ripples and the tides. From ships, the pregnant Africans were thrown overboard, their children then birthed into the sea. The water babies swam down and made their world at the very bottom. Drexciya.

Georgina Quach

Still We Thrive, written and directed by Campbell X, ensures we never look away from the past. It brings together contemporary Black actors speaking to camera with archive footage of Black history from the Caribbean, United Kingdom, United States and the African continent. As poet Elizabeth Alexander said, for so long, communities of colour have had to “carry around knowledge and stories in our bodies,” because resources were not devoted to preserving the spaces that held those stories and culture.

Arusa Qureshi

Beyond the constructs and confines of gender, the divine feminine exists deep within us all. It’s the energy that allows for compassion, nurturing and devotion; an embracing of softness and stillness in all its varying guises. In Danny Bailey’s short film Soft Bwoi, the notion of the divine feminine is beautifully encapsulated through the use of folklore and imagery from Caribbean carnival culture and queerness.

Georgina Quach

In Suffocation, sunlight feels harsh. Harsh in the sense that we have been kept in the dark for too long. We, scarred by racism and empire, welcome the sun: it exposes “colonial dust” – what is left in the wake of the bombs, deforestation and destruction used to maintain the mythscape of colonialism.

Theophina Gabriel responds to GRIN by Mele Broomes, a digital fruition of performance, sound, visuals and choreography, subverting hyper-sexualised notions of African and Caribbean dance.

Fringe of Colour Founder and Director Jess Brough tentatively asks “What do you make, when the world is ending?” and lays out plans for the 2021 festival.

Hayley Wu (胡禧怡) responds to Thulani Rachia’s ixwa blue, a film that traces several colonial architectural sites in Cachoeira Brazil, investigating Rachia’s paternal line of ancestry. A Fringe of Colour 2021 commission.

Theophina Gabriel responds to black queer nature poem for khadijah (and all of us), a gentle performance film by Mae Diansangu and one of Fringe of Colour’s 2021 commissions.

Kieren-Paul Brown responds to The Elephant in the Room, a powerful mediation on colonialism and racism, written by Alix Harris and produced by Helen Bovey for Beyond Face CIC.

Xandra Robinson-Burns responds to Concept-tions, a film by Nicole Cyrus who explores connections to objects and to what makes them who they are, from both an outsider’s view and from within.

Memuna Konteh responds to schwarz (Black), a documentary by Amuna Wagner that intertwines poetry, photography and film to present a series of intimate and stimulating conversations between 17 young, Black Germans.