Screening and discussion, Sun. March 6, 3pm at Watchbeem.com
with Alain Bidard from live on-line from Martinique, West Indies
Sun March 20, 3pm CST, Blacknuss Network presents award-winning Caribbean animator Alain Bidard in a conversation about Animation and Afrofuturist Cinema.
https://app.beem.xyz/e/afrofuturism-shorts–animation-with-alain-bidard
Alan Bidard is an award-winning animation film director from the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean. During the last two decades, he has produced and directed animated features and short films, animated series, documentaries and live-action films which won more than 60 awards and 250 nominations in festivals worldwide.
In 2015, Alan Bidard made history by releasing the first animated feature film ever made in Martinique — “Battledream Chronicle”, awarded 24 awards and 70 nominations worldwide. Then, in 2018, he created the first Caribbean animated TV series awarded with 25 awards and 105 nominations worldwide.
As for now, Alan Bidard is the only Caribbean animation film director who has won that many recognitions. In love with the animation medium, in 2021, Alan Bidard released his second animated feature film, “Opal”.AlainMartinque
Screening and discussion, Sun. March 6, 3pm at Watchbeem.com
with Jean Pierre-Bekolo live on-line from Cameroon, West Africa
How have African filmmakers approached the subject and context of Afrofuturism in cinema? In this event we will review clips of Sci-Fi/Afrofuturist films made in Africa and engage in a discussion with filmmaker/Afrofuturist filmmaker.
Jean-Pierre Bekolo is a noted African film director from Cameroon. He is one of the pioneer Afrofuturist artist/filmmakers. His films have always dealt with the intersection of myth, magic and it’s intersection with reality.
With his film Aristotle’s Plot (1996), Africa’s entry in the British Film Institute’s series on 100 Years of Cinema, a series of films commemorating the centenary of cinema that has included the participation of artists such as Scorsese, Bertolucci, Frears, Miller, Reitz, and Godard, he effectively hijacks their original idea and transforms it into an Afrofuturtist manifesto on the heritage of an African Cinema. An official selection at Sundance, Bekolo was considered to be an “increasingly fearless trickster.”
His avant-garde political thriller Les Saignantes(The Bloodettes) (2005)premiered at the Toronto film festival was nominated in two categories at the French Césars in 2009 and is now considered to be the first African sci-fi movie. Les Saignantes won the Silver Stallion and Best Actress Awards at FESPACO (Pan African Film and Television Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) in 2007.
Bekolo has also created in 2008, a video installation called An African Woman in Space that was on display at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, as part of the Diaspora exhibition curated by Claire Denis. Banned in Cameroon in 2013, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s controversial film Le President questions the phenomenon of Africa’s “perpetual governments”. His other works include, a 4 hour documentary Les Choses et Les Mots de Mudimbe, a portrait of the Congolese intellectual V-Y Mudimbe, one of the most important living African philosophers and writers, was part of the official selection of the 2015 Berlinale. “An unusual film, as fascinating as its object/subject, opulent, sensitive, clever, and radical. Another station of delightful postcolonial, cosmopolitan filmmaking”.
Free Admission at WatchBeem.com.
$10 suggested Donation or sign up for a 3.99 subscription to our streaming channel, blacknuss.tv
Focus: Women in Afrofuturist Cinema, Audrey King Lewis, Ytasha Womack and Ayoka Chenzira in conversation and Screening
Ytasha Womack
Bar Star City, 2016, 15 min, Ytasha Womack
What happens when seemingly ordinary people are quite extraordinary? This film follows several not so ordinary regulars of a bar that’s become a home for the galactic and well-traveled. A sci fi film with Afrofuturist themes, Bar Star City looks at love, deception, memory and alienation among a group of bar regulars who just want a place to call home. Think the TV classic Cheers meets Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain meets the Southside of Chicago.
Ayoka Chenzira
Her Adventure by Ayoka Chenzira,
2014, 11 min
HERadventure is the brainchild of Ayoka Chenzira, Ph. D. (Spelman College & Ayomentary Productions) and Ayoka’s daughter and longtime collaborator, HaJ (Urban Chameleon Media). Ayoka and HaJ’s creative approach on the HERadventure project combines live action filmmaking with interaction through gameplay. At the heart of HERadventure is a coming-of-age story that features a reluctant young woman who accidently falls to earth and ends up a superhero. The twist is that right in the middle of the story the YOU become HER (the main character) and have to navigate through the virtual environment to perform simple tasks in order to find out what happens in the end.
Audrey King Lewis
The Gifted, 1991, US, 101 minutes
Psychic descendants of an African tribe reunite to save Earth. 5000 years ago certain members of the Dogon tribe in West Africa were granted psychic powers by good aliens to counterbalance the effects of Ogo, a bad alien intent on taking over Earth and killing all life to remake the planet for his own purposes. Descendants of the tribe who inherit the psychic powers are given an ancient book to read and pass on. Every 32 years, in connection with the orbiting of the star Sirius B, Ogo returns to kill a few more of the psychics in his ongoing bid for power.
During the Blaxploitation era of American cinema in Audrey King Lewis decided to do a film that grew out of childhood experiences with the mystical, and became very interested in the story of the Dogan Tribe in the Bandigagra Cliffs of Mali.
Free Admission at WatchBeem.com.
$10 suggested Donation or sign up for a 3.99 subscription to our streaming channel, blacknuss.tv
Program 1: The Black Image in Science Fiction Cinema
This program will examine how the Black image has been portrayed in images of the future in global cinema from the silent film era through the first portrayals in 1960s movies and television to present day. Film clips from these periods will be discussed by a panel of cultural writers, critics and filmmakers
Daryle Lockhart – Sci-Fi Generation.com
Daryle loves art, music, and the way it all comes together to impact culture. He is a co-founder and Vice President of the African American Film Critics Association, co-founder of media publisher Sci Fi Generation, and a Vice President at an international advertising agency.
For over 25 years, Daryle has remained “tuned into tomorrow”, providing content direction and actionable insight for brands and agencies brave enough to listen, in industries ranging from financial services to auto to media and entertainment.
As founding editor of the award-winning website Black Box Office, Daryle helped change the way studios worked with multicultural digital outlets, fighting for competitive advertising rates to support independent publishers, inclusion of influential publishers in marketing strategies, and the coverage of international cinema scenes like Nollywood in American media.
Dr Edson Burton -Watershed Cinema, Bristol, UK
Dr Burton is a writer, historian, programme-curator and performer based in Bristol. His academic interests include: Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Black History in the USA, cultural continuities between Africa and the New World. He has been a consultant and coordinator for a range of history projects in Bristol including most recently a study of Bristol’s Old Market Ward, Vice Virtue (2014) and Black South West Network’s Race Through the Generations (2017)
Writing across mediums his work includes poetry (Seasoned 2008) theater (Anansi & the Big Adventure 2021) radio dramas including R4 listening highlights Armor of Immanuel (2007), the Chosen One (2009), Deacon (2017)&(2019).
Between, 1998-2003 Edson was the lead curator for Black History Month Bristol as part of his role as Kuumba Center librarian. He has curated the Arnolfini take over Afrometropolis 2017, The Late Night Blues for the Architecture Center (2018) & Bristol’s Got Soul forColston Hall.
A long standing associate of Bristol’s Watershed Cinema Edson has curated the highly regarded Afrofuturist season (2014) . Since then he has become an active member of the programming and collective Come the Revolution supported by Watershed Cinema.
Vagabond Beaumont – Filmmaker
Vagabond Beaumont is director of the award-winning films, Machetero (2008), No Way Home (2014), Coney Island Dreaming (2016), and the Afrofuturist short Aftermath: Seeds of Armagedeon (2017 Brooklyn born and borough raised, Vagabond graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & the Arts and dropped out of The School of Visual Arts. He began his career in film early on, working on independent black films such as Spikes Lee’s “Do The Right Thing”, where he quickly learned all aspects of filmmaking and forged his own artistic and ideological aesthetic.
JEFF STANLEY is jack of all trades in print and digital, life long gamer and fan of science fiction. He has more than 20 years of experience in advertising and design, Jeff has worked with clients such as Sears, Toyota, AARP, and McDonald’s. He has a wealth of knowledge in strategy and branding and is very happy to be a part of this “small and mighty” team.
DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE is a writer, critic, actor, and filmmaker from Queens, born to a Black, Indian & Indigenous Trinidadian couple. An eternal outsider, Kangalee – an Arawak patois which literally means “the dispossessed” – was one of the youngest and most dynamic radical theater directors in NYC upon leaving Juilliard in 1997. Best known for his controversial 2001 cult film As an Act of Protest, he is now an essayist & critic embracing a radical media ecology and a Marxist-Fanonian interpretation of socially conscious black films in particular.
Free Admission at WatchBeem.com.
$10 suggested Donation or sign up for a 3.99 subscription to our streaming channel, blacknuss.tv
Focus: Music in Afrofuturist Cinema, David Boykin and Jayve Montgomery in conversation and screening
David Boykin
African-American musics, in the context of the immoral captivity and forced labor in the making of the new world, has always reflected the desires of changing the material conditions and transcending its masses to a state of self-reliance and freedom.
From the encryption of messages within “field hollers” and spirituals to “steal away,” to great big wheels, “way up in the middle of the air,” to the traditional Nyanibingi chant, sang by Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rasta-far-I and popularized by Bob Marley in this song Rastaman Chant,
“Fly away home to Zion, fly away home
One bright morning when my work is over
Man will fly away home”
Sun Ra spoke of “Isotope Teleportation,” thatleaving this world of whiteness behind and that “Space is the Place”. Jamaican composer/producer/musician Lee Scratch Perry wrote, invoking the “closed body” of African Religions expressed in Maji-Maji, Mau Mau and Candomle by way of Chinese internal art.
I’m going put on my iron shirt and chase Lucifer from Earth
I’m gonna send him to outer space/
To find another race.
How has music as a futurist form been used? How can it be used in the context of an Afrofuturist Cinema. In this session we will screen works that answer some of these questions and will no doubt raise many more.
Admission to the screening is free with a suggested donation of $10, or you can purchase a one month subscription to our blacknuss,tv streaming channel.
Panelist
David Boykin [davidboykin.com]
Jazz Saxophonist, composer, rapper, and electronic musician, David Boykin made his filmmaking debut with the premier of his short, “What The Afrofuture Say”, at the 2021 Black Harvest Film Festival.
Like an invisible force upsetting master equations of the jazz universe, David Boykin has quietly been one of Chicago’s most important and enigmatic musicians of the recent era.
He is a revolutionary storyteller working in multiple mediums: music composition, band leading, saxophone shamanism, afro electronic soul singing, rapping, beat producing, conceptual art, and filmmaking.
He has released over 20 album length recordings while performing in venues large and small from Hong Kong, to Dakar, to Moscow, to Paris, to St Louis in the last 24 years. He has exhibited artwork at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Art Department.
Among his most recent storytelling efforts are the following: @Government Waste” (2020) – a short film made in collaboration with filmmaker Rob Christopher using footage from Chicago Film Archives; “Who Is Dr. Belsidus@ (2021) – an audio documentary of his beat maker performance persona; “What The Afrofuture Say” – a short film critical analysis of Afrofuturism; We Are Sunlight (2021) – a short film meditation in sound and light on Blackness set in a Chicago Lakefront nature preserve.
Jayve Montgomery
Jayve Montgomery [jayvemontgomery.com]
Jayve (JV/42) says, “I grew up on army bases from California to Berlin and the southeast US. I come from Jamaican and Louisiana Creole folks. My epigenetic listening memory begins in the cargo hold of a transatlantic slave ship. I studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for one year. I am an improvising composer from the creative sessions of David Boykin’s Sonic Healing Ministries. I ran a Chicago Park District mobile recording studio for 8 years. I currently reside in what I call Outer Music City, hovering around Nashville, TN, home of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. I make work that reveals the American Apartheid and honors the experiences of Black folks.”
JEFF STANLEY is jack of all trades in print and digital, life long gamer and fan of science fiction. He has more than 20 years of experience in advertising and design, Jeff has worked with clients such as Sears, Toyota, AARP, and McDonald’s. He has a wealth of knowledge in strategy and branding and is very happy to be a part of this “small and mighty” team.
DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE is a writer, critic, actor, and filmmaker from Queens, born to a Black, Indian & Indigenous Trinidadian couple. An eternal outsider, Kangalee – an Arawak patois which literally means “the dispossessed” – was one of the youngest and most dynamic radical theater directors in NYC upon leaving Juilliard in 1997. Best known for his controversial 2001 cult film As an Act of Protest, he is now an essayist & critic embracing a radical media ecology and a Marxist-Fanonian interpretation of socially conscious black films in particular.
Floyd Webb
founder/curator
Imani Davis
Admiinistrator
The Blacknuss Network Team
Jeff Stanley
Graphic Design
Deah Barber
Social Media/Content
Leroy Kangalee
writer
Whitney Barber
technology