In association with LUX, the ICO’s 2020 national film tour Second Sight explores the legacy, methods, aesthetic strategies and histories of the UK’s Black Film Workshop Movement.
The Black Film Workshop Movement developed throughout the 1980s, a pivotal decade in UK culture and society. Against a backdrop of divisive national politics and civil unrest, a series of radical filmmaking collectives sprung up.
Their films explored the Black community’s relationship to Britain’s colonial past; whilst also looking to the Civil Rights movement in America, Black feminism, Pan-Africanism, the struggle of apartheid, and the emergent fields of postcolonial and cultural studies.
This screening presents 3 newly commissioned works by contemporary film artists Ayo Akingbade, Rehana Zaman and B.O.S.S. Collective inspired by and reflecting upon the works of the Black Film Workshop Movement.
An ICO touring project in association with LUX, with support from the BFI Audience Fund and Arts Council England awarding National Lottery funding.
Programme
Ayo Akingbade: Claudette’s Star (2019, 6 mins)
Acting as part ode and through a series of interpretations, Claudette’s Star depicts young artists considering with sheer wonder who is given a voice.
Read Irenosen Okojie’s response to Claudette’s Star here.
Rehana Zaman: Your Ecstatic Self (2019, 33 mins)
Your Ecstatic Self is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency.
Read Chandra Frank’s reflection on Your Ecstatic Self here.
B.O.S.S. Collective: Collective Hum (2019, 7 mins)
A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound. Collective Hum documents a collective in practice through the operation of B.O.S.S using multiple narration, overlapping voices and the sound of group interviews, meetings and events to create a polyphonic score to soundtrack images of the ‘collective bodies, kinaesthetic experience and gestural language’ of sound system culture.
Image credit: Your Ecstatic Self, dir. Rehana Zaman, 2019