It is often said that representations that pertain to discriminated or marginal peoples, the absent subjects wiped by the agency of historical encounters as colonialism or lop-sided economic development, are marked by a militancy akin to radicalism. The histories accorded to such peoples resonate with the common mantras of retribution, the voicing of injustices and raising of different concerns.
Indeed, the voice of marginal peoples has a place in its own location as well as beyond, say, in the first world, that is increasingly awakening to the realities of cultural difference. However, if radicalism be the sole occupation, a rich and textured territory of engagement shall be foreclosed for those who view the cultural history of our times, as not arising solely from unequal relations between peoples, but as the manifestation of dialogue between competing and evolving cultural and philosophical systems.
The International Black Welsh Film Festival has just concluded its fourth edition. This year, it has very clearly exposited its motivations, which have taken time to crystallize within the space of the festival that was inaugurated in 2001.
The festival posits itself with and beyond what its title suggests. ‘Black’ and ‘Welsh’ are key terms that guide the festival in a looser geographical sense. The festival is not only of Black filmmakers in Wales, or Black and Welsh filmmakers. The festival is at and for the margins. And in this, it privileges no particular grouping, construct, language or culture.
Previously, the festival gathered films from ethnic minority communities across the UK and occasionally indigenous cinema from Africa and the Caribbean. This year the spread spanned from Barbados and Burkina Faso, to the fringe of Bombay and the Welsh Valleys. The festival opened with British black filmmaker, Amma Asante’s highly acclaimed, A Way of Life. There was more than the film’s location that contributed to it being the festival’s opening presentation.
A Way of Life is a human document. That comes close to the world of a woman – a gang-leader and an unwed teenage mother, stressed by the poverty destined in an impoverished Welsh valley, in the United Kingdom. It is a difficult subject to situate in context, especially when there is enough temptation to obscure and overlook. Poverty in the first world not only shatters stereotypes but threatens the status quo. It is to the film’s credit that the subject is presented to us provokingly, yet in no clearly negotiable terms.
The festival abounded with very complex cinema. A cinema that raises issue with both content and form of representation. The festival invited fiction, documentary and experimental films. While the documentaries at this year’s festival raised very historical subjects examined from alternative and competing indigenist viewpoints, the fiction category of the festival was dotted with some rare and critically acclaimed classics such as Senegalese, Moussa Sene Absa’s Madame Brouette and Algerian Med Hondo’s Sarraounia.
One of the most insightful and revisionist historicization surfaced in Owen Ali Shahadah’s seminal 500 years later. Besides a deep and comprehensive chronicling of slavery, the importance of this documentary rests on two other counts. One, its engagement with key native and overseas African historians and scholars, speaking very much within the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’; but bringing to their commentary not blame for colonialism, but a rigour to invigorate the variegated African subject in the contemporary ‘global’ context that is decidedly partial. Two, the use of rhetoric and prescription, which formally sounds rather patronizing and limited, is poignant and finely executed extending neatly from the debates the film sets up.
Another documentary worthy of mention is African-American woman filmmaker, Rhondda L Haynes’ Bringin’ da Spirit, which maps the contribution of African-American midwives. While most of the film enjoys the benefit of an anthropologically emic perspective, it is commendable how the film leads the audience from an historical account touching upon racism into a wider discussion on the state of reproductive care in contemporary society.
The ability of the film to engage a culturally disparate audience was evident when the film, screened in collaboration with the Black and Ethnic minority Film Club, Wales, was followed by a charged exchange among audience and filmmaker raising concerns around available reproductive choices for women across continents.
The fiction and experimental categories displayed a fertile mix of storytelling forms. Some aggressively indigenist, disturbing and resisting reading for culturally variegated sections of the audience at the festival; while others employing and appropriating modernist impetuses that compel intimate experiences beyond the bounds of the personal. Here, award-winning British artist, Rachel Davies’ We got old, and Bombay-based Bejoy Nambiar’s directorial debut, Reflections, come to mind. Rachel’s piece is a finely choreographed evocation of an inter-cultural encounter, filmed in Hong Kong in collaboration with London-based choreographer, Annie Lok.
Bejoy’s short comprises surreal and romantic detours of a man dislocated and grappling with the Indian urban. Reflections employs a curious aesthetic strategy -- its elaborate technical execution disavows the indeterminate encounter of the film’s central character who, along with supporting characters, maintains an endearing sense of commonplace-ness and triviality. It is commendable for Bejoy to pull off a rather non-mainstream narrative produced within and utilizing Bombay’s institutionalized, industrial resources. In both Bejoy’s and Rachel’s pieces, there is no dialogue or direct exposition of any kind. Both are experiential and evocative. Sincere and uncompromising towards their locations, they display a level of aesthetic possibility and accomplishment that only merits appreciation.
If there is one feature that marks most films at the festival, it is unequivocally the complexity implicit in each. In a blatantly visual medium, and at a moment when societies across the world are cluttered with visual imagery, exploring and honouring the complex social conditions that marginal subjects encounter is arduous. In no film at the festival was the local undermined in order for communication. Its integrity and the textures it maintained, the local, regional or provincial was contextualised in a manner to claim ideologically, assert and reach beyond physical territory and linguistic or cultural barrier.
I am left wondering if it is the complexity and mixing, near complication of voices in the films that make for the festival’s distinction. The festival has employed Black and Welsh terminology very strategically to claim the space of the margin, wherever that might be geographically positioned.
In this it has exceeded commonplace and hackneyed ethnic minority, race and issues of Black and Welsh identity. It provided a more nuanced exposure to marginal subjects that is at once urgent, ironical and aesthetically dialogic, in a manner that catapults the margin or the provincial beyond geographical bounds. And throws a gauntlet before anyone positing to provide ‘solution’ or ‘voice’.
The voice of the margin is complicated for articulation, and by indicating its complexity and the impossibility of its deliverance, the festival has left audiences more informed and stripped of essentialisms around marginal subjects.