Black Mother (2018, Khalik Allah)

I was watching movies from last year’s Rotterdam and Sundance festivals, and now for a week on True/False movies. This is a transition film, premiering in last year’s True/False and showing up in this year’s Rotterdam (in Bright Future, with Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Manta Ray, Dead Horse Nebula). Opens with street scenes, talking with prostitutes, a squarish frame with v-hold issues and no sync sound, and I thought this might be a tough watch, then the editing sets it free – jumping around Jamaica meeting all sorts of people, beautiful photography and a vague structure around birth and death. It’s a poem of a movie, even less narrative than Hale County was, and at least as good.

The 16mm film full of light flares is interspersed with gliding HD. No subtitles and I can’t make out half the words, and zero sync sound, though sometimes we seem to be hearing the person we’re seeing speak, so it’s being shifted on purpose. So much Christianity – then an explanation for why that is, then an intro to rastafarianism and discussion of weed. I am an uncultured dummy who knows nothing about Jamaica or its culture, but there’s an echo effect on the end of sound clips and I wondered if this was dub-influenced. When the movie ended I was trying to remember how it started, watched the first half again before realizing that I was just going to keep playing it forever on a loop. Vikram Murthi saw it at T/F and notes that “the film is in direct conversation with the work by the Black Audio Film Collective.”