Kareem Jamaal Baholzer

This film, released more than 50 years ago, questions the whitewashing of art and history in a form that is both essay and intervention - as the small crew, including the director, uses the one-day timeframe they are formally allowed to stay in an archive of looted artifacts in the basement of the British Museum, to visibilize the injustice of colonial power in relation to art and to add images to an irrefutably clear demand of justice.

Technically four short films in one, this trippy and relentlessly inventive omnibus film by Japanese punk director Gakuryu Ishii showcases his wide range of cinematic language, somehow cohesively stacked into around half an hour. At turns odd, meditative, existential and angsty, the images move in-between stillness and drive with ease, capturing the whiplash and multifaceted nature of lives and minds in the city.

Marlon Riggs’ manifesto on the black gay male experience expanded my horizons of what is possible in cinema as a tool of self-expression and self-perception. With collective input from peers, such as the poet Essex Hemphill, whose words reverberate through many passages of the work, Riggs reflects on the many essences of black masculinity and the challenges of queerness as a black person, aswell as blackness as a queer person. Interviews, performance, movement and archive recenter the gaze and are not afraid to face an audience that might not resonate.

The face of a woman dis/appearing behind her hands reverbarates through the hallways of a building at night. Lights and sounds haunt every image. Out of all of the films of visionary Takashi Ito, this is the most haunting one and the five minutes one spends with it are hard to forget.

A hedgehog encounters a white horse in the heavy fog that it traverses while trying to meet a friend, the bear. The journey haunts the hedgehog deeply and the most beautiful moment of Norstein’s work comes, when it reminds itself of the presence of the friend. Even in the feeling of terror that has come over him, community endures. The layered animation technique and the music creates an atmosphere like no other.

In this remarkable short film, visions of darkness are interwoven with screens, projections and light. Stunning sound and images flow through binaries of race and gender and release themselves from their hold, not by detaching from them, but by dealing with their many facets and approaching them in the dark.

As this beautifully rendered film traces the connection between ancestry and movement, it puts a young female black protagonist at the forefront. Channeling this journey through an experience in ballet, an art form that is often centered around an arduous performance of white binary femininity, brilliantly builds to a moment of liberation, in which the main character understands her power.

Created in response to the passing of a friend, this haunting ambient mood piece, set in the 3D rendered space of the GTA video games and filtered through capturing details of textures and surreal compositions, evocates melancholy, grief, loneliness and somehow beauty.

Masculinity, both in performance, innocence and affect is at the center of this film. Brown, arab and in this specific instance Palestinian men, who are often dehumanized by the gaze projected onto them and the narratives of desire and violence spun around them, are approached by the filmmaker, who creates a collage inspired by Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising that captures details of rituals of masculinity, snippets of conversation and finally expression, as the music plays.

A film that lives up and alludes to its title in many ways and a multifaceted reflection on the medium of cinema in America, the institution of Hollywood and the ways in which it has been built on the presence and labor of blackness, while leaving the same creatives and workers that have contributed to the projections on the silver screen, in the dark. Julie Dash’s uncompromising and stunning vision strikes particularly hard in the moment when the tension between the surface and the process is manifested; in a scene of a dark-skinned character in the film dubbing the song for a studio film, over the lip-sync of a white actress.