As part of Open City Doc Festival; Curated and introduced by Jennifer Lauren Martin, this screening features a selection of works by black artists and filmmakers engaging with analogue film not simply as a medium, but as a deliberate aesthetic and political strategy.
Programme:
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)
Cauleen Smith, 1992, 6 min, 16mm
Cauleen Smith employs her alter ego Kelly Gabron and a collage of images, text, and voices in order to fabricate a history in which the presence of Black women is reinserted into histories that often render them invisible.
Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors
Sable Elyse Smith, 2017, 8 min
“In this eight-minute video work, we are given nonnarrative footage sutured together to form a fragmented, hallucinatory sensation. Storefronts zoom by as captured in grainy footage out of the passenger seat of a car, two unseen men undergo tactical training that involves shooting ice with handguns, and kaleidoscopic images of cops swirl in red and blue hues. The entire work migrates between a Black conceptualist dérive and an exposé on the mundane ways that violence meets the affective realms of everyday Black life.” – Sampada Aranke
Wide Open in the Shape of an Enormous Fan (work-in-progress)
Jennifer Lauren Martin, 2026, 5 min
“This16mm film is a frenetic exploration of contemporary Marseille. The soundtrack, a hyperreal fiction, is paired with the languid footage of the city, creating a sensory overload that mirrors the city itself. Foley signals beyond what is visible in each frame. A handheld POV leads us through these public and private spaces. The title adapts the opening lines of Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Romance in Marseille.” – Jennifer Lauren Martin
Cette Maison
Miryam Charles, 2022, 75 min
“Cette Maison weaves documentary and reenactment into a luminous meditation on loss. Inspired by the life of Charles’ late cousin, the film reimagines her as Tessa, eternally on the threshold between life and afterlife. Moving between Montreal, Quebec, and imagined visions of Haiti, the film follows Tessa and her mother across spaces that blur memory, theatre, and dream. Through incantatory voiceover and ornate imagery, Charles conjures a ghost story that is also a reflection on mourning, inheritance, and the afterlives of colonial violence.” – Union Docs