July 28 – Chicago Filmmakers: BEYOND The Black Panther: Afrofuturism Short Films

BEYOND The Black Panther: Afrofuturism Short Films

Beyond the Black Panther
Co-Presented by Black World Cinema and Chicago Filmmakers

Afrofuturism | ?afr??fyo?oCH?riz?m | noun
a movement in literature, music, art, etc., featuring futuristic or science fiction themes which incorporate elements of black history and culture: Afrofuturism has drawn adherents from across the whole spectrum of the arts.

This program of short award-winning films from Black World Cinema’s AfroFuturism Film Competition showcases the creative visions of filmmakers whose work captures the spirit and energy of AfroFuturism.

Screening are:

A Love Letter to the Ancestors from Chicago (Ytasha L. Womack, 2017, US, 14 min)
A love letter to the ancestors from the streets of the Windy City, this Afro-Futurist short film demonstrates that rhythm and dance bridge all times and spaces. A Love Letter is a serenade to the future past through the greatest technology of them all…the human body.

Sight (Janeen Talbott, 2017, US, 16 min)
Set in a parallel earth, Sight is about a nonbeliever named Naji who must make the ultimate sacrifice to save her tribe when supernatural forces bring a dark truth to light.

The Golden Chain (Adebukola Bodunrin and Ezra Claytan Daniels, 2016, US, 14 min)
Made by former Chicagoans animator Adebukola Bodunrin and graphic novelist Ezra Claytan Daniels, The Golden Chain is a speculative science fiction tale set in the distant future. A Nigerian space station in a remote corner of the galaxy orbits an artificial pinpoint of matter so dense it cannot exist in our solar system. It is a recreation of the birth of the universe itself, contained for the purpose of study, and overseen by Yetunde, sole crew member on the space station Eko.

Hasaki ya suda (Cédric Ido, 2010, France, 24 min)
It is 2100. In a world engulfed in chaos and war, whose residents are consumed by terrible hunger, the last fertile land becomes the subject of fierce battles. Three warriors—the noble Wurubenba, Shandaru, who wants to avenge his father’s death, and power-craving Kapkaru—will face one another in a fight for life and death.

Twagga (Cédric Ido, 2013, France, 30 min)
Burkina Faso, in 1985. Manu, an eight-year-old boy, has no friends. He clings to his older brother Albert and to his two friends, Kaboré and Ibou, non-stop . When Albert is marabouted to become invincible, Manu realizes that in real life there exists the powers which can compete with those of the super hero whose adventures he reads in comic strips every week.

The 2018 Walt Disney Black Panther film rode into existence on a 150+ years building tsunami of interest in the developing practice in Afrofuturism, a term adopted from what I consider black imagination, radical, amplified and transformative, to the point it impinges itself into reality.

The Black Panther was born in 1966 after the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, the middle of the Cold War and 7 years after the death of Patrice Lumumba, as a result Western supported secession of the mineral rich Congolese province of Kitanga. When some of were kids, comic book/science fiction fiends living in the projects launching model rockets(blerd alert!) and riding metal wheeled skate boards, we got the Wakanda/Kitanga connection right away.

In my world view, black speculative imagination in the Western Hemisphere has always existed and been concerned with physical and spiritual liberation. Afrofuturism is a continuity not a discovery.

Being in Chicago, more then a few of us grew up fascinated with musician/composer Herman Blount aka Sun Ra, aka LeSun Ra, aka Sunny Ray. Sunny was rumored to be a member of a gangster lead secret society styled on the fictional crew of writer George Schuylers’s 1930s newspaper serial(the equivalent of a print based written web-series), Black Empire mastermind, Dr Belsidus. Unlike Belsidus, they wanted more than just Africa, it was just a place for the launching pad into the stars. Back to where South African mystic Credo Mutwa’s said we came from in his book, Inadaba My Children, before we inhabited Atlantis.

This subversive imagination seeking freedom-thought was creating alter-universes from the moment a human being experienced captivity. In 1859, before the beginning of the Civil war, Martin Delany (1812–1885), one of the foremost U.S. black political leaders, began publishing “Blake, or the Huts of America “as a serial in the Anglo-American Magazine. The subject of the novel is a successful slave revolt in the Southern states and the founding of a new black country in Cuba. Samuel R. Delany described it as “about as close to an SF-style alternate history novel as you can get.”

The prolific writer and editor Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) gave us Of One Blood (1902), describing the discovery of a hidden civilization with advanced technology in Ethiopia, the first Lost Race novel by an African-American author.

In 1919, W.E.B. Dubois wrote a speculative short story titled The Comet,about the relationship between Jim Davis (a black man) and Julia (a wealthy white woman) after a comet hits New York and unleashes toxic gases that kill everyone except them. The idea is adapted 40 years later into a film produced by and starring Harry Belafonte, The World The Flesh and The Devil (1959).

In 1927, during the negrophile movement in France, the son of the painter Renoir, surrealist Jean Renoir was aided by the African American dancer, Johnny Hudgins to Shot in three days, Sur Air Un Charleston. It is a surreal, erotic silent short that shows a save native white girl in the post apocalyptic ruins of Paris teaching a futuristic African Scientist(albeit a black man in Blackface, the most surreal of statements) an ancient kinetic code called the Charleston.

In 1931 the black bantamweight boxer “Panama “Al Brown held an exhibition match in Paris to finance the research of Anthropologist Marcel Griaule with members of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. This research lead to his life-long occupation with the cosmology of the Dogon people and his groundbreaking and influential book “Conversations with Ogotemmeli.”

In 1983 Luc de Heusch produces a documentary film on the 1931 expedition, Tracking the Pale Fox – 1983. This film gained an underground following throughout the 1990s as did Mark Kidel’s 1989 BBC documentary on Robert Ferris Thompson(Flash of the Spirit), New York: The Secret African City. They were works that removed the deficit model of blackness, diving deep into it’s cultural cosmologies.

In 1992, Derrick Bell wrote the short story Space Traders, whose subject is the arrival of extraterrestrials that offer the United States a wide range of benefits such as gold, clean nuclear power and other technological advances, in exchange for one thing: handing over all black people in the U.S. to the aliens. The story posits that the people and political establishment of the U.S. are willing to make this deal, passing a referendum to enable it.

That same year 1992, Moonlight Films a small production company in the UK that produced “Black Sci-Fi,” produced and directed by Terrence Francis. It profiles African American SF writers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Steven Barnes and Mike Sargent, and actress, Nichelle Nichols.
Following Self Proclaimed Saturian/Musican/Composers Sun Ra’s death in 1993, his band, the Arkestra, continues to perform and the seeds from the tree of black radical transformative imagination are planted and a new springling emerges as “Afrofuturism,” a mass movement of a “collective black-imaging NATION.”

Since 1994, when an early writer on technoculture, Mark Dery, helped inaugurate cyberstudies as a field of serious inquiry with the anthology “Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture” (1994), he kick-started the academic interest in cyberfeminism and Afrofuturism, a term Dery coined in his 1993 essay “Black to the Future” (included in Flame Wars) and a key theoretical concept driving the now-established study of black technoculture. .– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Dery

In that same period, in 1994, Ghanian-British filmmaker John Akomfrah started a short documentary on black science fiction, The Last Anger of History. Written and researched by Edward George of Black Audio Film Collective, it a 45-minute documentary that deals with concepts of Afrofuturism as a metaphor for the displacement of black culture and roots. The film is a hybrid documentary and fictional narrative. Documentary segments include traditional talking-head clips from musicians, writers, and social critics, as well as archival video footage and photographs.

Described as “A truly masterful film essay about Black aesthetics that traces the deployments of science fiction within pan-African culture”,[1] it has also been called “one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels and exhibitions”.

Academia has hosted innumerable conferences on Afrofuturism around the world and courses in the subject are offered in the USDurban, the UK , all over Europe and South Africa.

Black World Cinema and Chicago filmmakers collaborate to present the works of independent filmmakers who take up the challenge to create alternative visions with limited resources and raw talent. We present this work from a small sample of Chicago bred filmmakers Ytasha Womack, Adebukola Bodunrin, Ezra Claytan Daniels. Bronx NY filmmaker Janeen Talbott and Burkinabe-French filmmaker Cedric Ido.