so afrofutures was a collaboration and a short film and brought together by four black artists bringing their different disciplines together to create a film for this commission they took on the simplified roles of a sound artist a visual artist a writer and an editor with each person laying on the film um with a focus on the past present and future um but yeah so i'm going to introduce everybody um so first off we have our sound artist for the film who is anna zanna is a poet composer and sound designer a multi-disciplinary artist sound artist and theater maker um often blending caribbean folklore magical realism and afrofuturism and light live sets zana's work presents revolution and the idea of building thing and building anew zana is also the co-organizer of afrotech fest and is also the instigator of soulcase collective a sound sound research inventor and music archive label for black african and caribbean people who invent new forms of music next up we have our visual artists at simisola akande a filmmaker who recently won best experimental film sorry so she recently won a best experimental film with her short film doo doo at this year's bf5 film beautify future film festival um doo doo is a beautifully poetic film which explores colorism through spoken word and visceral imagery and before that she also won the who we are competition um for 16 to 19 year olds which was run by we are parable in association with bfi um and then last but not least we have our editor nasa esaku working with both documentary and experimental film has worked on many exciting projects including um the alfred um alfred george bailey short film um i still breathe which was a response to george floyd's murder um and features a voice of young adults from across london she was also one of the primary editors on the award-winning life in a day 2020 documentary and in 2013 was nominated at sundance film festival for her work on editing the stuart hall project and the year before that she also worked on the unfinished conversation which revolved around hall and was part of a video art installation at tape britain and we are also missing keisha thompson who is our writer she's a writer and performer producer and also the chair of futures venture foundation based in manchester she's a brilliant talent she recently toured a solo show of man on the moon in 2020 which used poetry and loop sound to explore the impact of mental health on black families and she's also the senior manager of children young people and learning at arts council england and so this is our panel so the first thing that i kind of want to get into obviously the film was created in a very laid process so i don't know if you guys had all seen it before but i just wanted to get what your um what your reaction is to the final final coming together yeah i was really shocked because i'd never i'd not worked on something i'd not really seen before um i'd done the sound first and we had a conversation and he sent me some images but i'd never seen any of the cut footage so um and so it was really i actually really enjoyed working this way because even though you were focusing on like your central role as you're specifically doing sound you can experiment when it's so focused as well it doesn't have to be just because you're doing sound so that's um how you like should always just approach it you can approach it in so many different layers and i actually wanted to experiment more with it um and it was really nice being able to see like the colors that were chosen and the moments that you chose to edit to and i also like hadn't heard any of what keisha's um writing was going to be so it was like it was really nice way of experiencing something you worked on that you'd never seen but yeah i really enjoyed it yeah um i think for me it was so strange because um because i did the visuals and i think when you're sometimes because i knew that that was what i could focus on so there was definitely an effort in my part to force a narrative i think like i don't know if you guys did that as well because i was really focused on one bit it was like i would pass on to somebody else so there was an effort for me to like force my narrative in the story so that when i pass it on hopefully what i want to be there will be there and that didn't happen and when when i saw the footage used in in how it was which is beautiful i think i was i felt somehow like estranged from my own work it was like and i think that's because i'm i'm used to working by myself and like working with other people having other people talk like interact with your work and create something completely new out of your work is so strange to see but i think it's definitely an experience that i want more of and that collaboration and working with people something that i crave so much right now and i think this was a really fun way to jump into that you know starting that so thank you guys um let's say obviously you put the film together but um i guess you can react off their reactions i know you really wanted to know what they thought of the films you know it's interesting here in reactions because um like you said i just received the sound and um the images and the kind of text separately so i felt like even though we didn't have a communication the communication was via their art being expressed and so when i looked at it i i felt like that was the communication and that was what i was responding to um we'll get back into the film but first um i guess talking about the process um the brief that we gave you kind of focused on afrofuturism and but that is such a big word and such a massive genre um filled with so many things um so you could go octavia butler and time traveling or you could go janelle monae and like androids and of course black panther um when did you like before this process have any of you kind of had an experience with afrofuturism and if so what was that and has it fed into your work at all that's a big question um i i believe i try to embody afrofuturism every day because black people will exist in the future so for me how i approach my work is not just to speculate but really to be active and be a participant in what i want to change and not really dismantle foundations is like completely [Music] yeah i want to take things completely apart i want to burn down i don't want to fix a broken up the system's not broken it's designed to work the way it is so i'm not going to go into places and try to fix them i'm going to go in to burn them down so so for me that that's futurism and i think that's how i've always approached my work and also the people that have come before have also laid the foundations for blueprints on how to give us maybe instructions ideas provocations on how to think about tomorrow and how to access yesterday and how you can feel present in today and i think of like the different films like sankofa and actually the actual concept of some kof like going back and get it and yes maybe the archive won't completely restore you but it will place you in certain aspects of the world [Music] and i think as well in approaching the music for this i looked at because i was given the prompt past and i started looking at what past actually means and how i've always interacted with past through maybe family members through like the metaphors that they give you before you leave the house and the different types of sayings and all these stories so i started looking at jamaican folklore songs and i found oh she found me dr olive lewin she died in 2013 so like eight years ago and she was a social anthropologist musicologist teacher and author and this woman in olive is basically so instrumental in being the reason why jamaican folklores folk songs um are like we still have access to them she spent her entire lifetime archiving them she even created the jamaican folk singers so that the songs would continue to have life and i used i was i was listening to one of the albums that they made i think in 1969 called authentic jamaican folk songs and this group of people their voices were just so beautiful and i live loop as well so i do a lot of things with like layering and i just spent an evening just singing along to the songs until i found something that really struck me and then um it was only five songs in and i was like this is this is the one um and i just started uh singing along to it and layering my v my voice along and just feeling really full from the experience of um almost feeling like i was there with them in a way and i use that as the kind of platform too that's why there's like singing at the beginning and then singing at the end and stuff um it's been inspired by yeah like how somebody has approached in how somebody like olive has approached archive in the past so me in the future now um can continue to build upon it and um yeah create an experience not just for myself but everybody else um who is absorbing it as well at the same time so i think yeah afrofuturism for me is always going to be completely present in my life um it's the teacher um it's the co-conspirator it's the person the entity the energy that's like gets me up and makes me want to go okay like what can i build today that i've not seen before so if that answers the question yes i think um i came across afrofuturism like through literature um not i don't do a deep dive i do i study literature but i hate reading so it's really stupid it's just we have working for us but um but i think it was it was more in kind of like seeing the lack of um like black bodies in a lot of like sci-fi like movies and stuff like that and then me also getting interested in looking at like specifically like nigerian folklore anything to do with time and space i was like obsessed with the last like three years um and i think in in finding afrofuturism as a concept in and of itself of of black bodies black culture black people like daring to imagine a future um it was just it was a wow like we did that and we can do that i think a lot of the black narrative for so long is often trying to kind of put together the past again because we've been lied to our histories have been erased our identities have been deformed and denatured and we are constantly trying to reconfigure these images of ourselves that we've been given um so like people using the like the what do you you know when you find things on the ground like archaeologists where they what they call that you know the things you find on the ground and using that to build like a spaceship to the future i think is what afrofuturism is about for me i think concepts of futurity in general can feel like a privileged space to be in to the luxury of thinking forward um takes time and black people work black people are constantly doing um so um yeah it was just it's a field that i wish was being pushed more into i think it is i think it has been pushed more into and i'm really excited for what people kind of like bring to that and using their like their ancestries and their cultures to tell the future instead of using kind of a white narrative of what the future looks like would be really cool and i'm quite excited for that yeah can i say do you have any thoughts um i guess in this in its purest form i i edited a short film which i think is actually at the vessel here which is under the umbrella of afro futurism but the thing that really grabs me about the whole movement is the black lens um because i worked a lot in the past with um john ocomphra and i learned so much about uh meaning the me the things that we the meaning that we put into archive for example um i remember there was a session when we were in the edit suite and there's an archive um like in the 60s of black and asian workers and it was filmed to show oh you know immigrants are coming over and taking death but when we looked at the archive we could see you know people who could be our parents or you know a friend and you could see in their faces they're thinking i'm at work who are these people bothering me at work i'm trying to you know i'm trying to get on with what i'm doing and it's just seeing how you can you can even if something has not been shot from by a black person the value that you can get from that piece of footage is immense because it's it's the only thing that's tangible that's been shot really and i was privileged to to listen to things that people were saying and if you hear what they were saying this is black folk it's like their present day or they're in the future it is i mean it really opened my eyes because a lot of things that we think are new or revolutionary now it's like no people you know saying exact same things very eloquently and very sort of with a real understanding and just because we haven't heard it doesn't mean it didn't exist and it made me realize how sometimes if things are not said or written about people think that it didn't happen and so that was so for me it's more about the black lens and really framing something not as a reaction but just as an expression a pure expression from a real place that's very specific so how it informed me with this film was that i wanted to edit something where you didn't feel like you are observing somebody but you are being let into a space and being able to just focus on sort of sensuality and not reaction but to somebody who's in their state of being and so that's how i think yeah i think that's how i think it affected the way that i responded to um what i received and how i proceeded to edit um i love all those answers [Applause] i think um what's so beautiful about afrofuturism is that you can look at the future but you don't have to forget the past or the present you can work in all those spaces and so um i think what i love about all your answers is that it's very much about taking space in like every single space you can um so that's great um this is more so towards uh to see me so now but if you can all jump in but um i think talking about um zanna you obviously talked about your prompt of like having the past how did you work with um working with the present but still making it afro-futurist um i think one of the really interesting things about the footage that you took was a lot of it was very like disorientating um and a lot of it was very much like i recognize this but it kind of looks a bit off um so yeah tell me about the process um yeah i'm so when i was given the prompt of like the present i wanted to take like the present as the future that we had imagined us for ourselves in the past um but looking at it as a future that is not as utopic as we had once conceived and instead had actually been distorted into something quite um like violent and um uninviting um so i wanted to look at london and um the spaces of london and london as an emblem of kind of like futurity in and of itself of like modernity and prosperity but look at how these are also sites of black trauma and sites of erased timelines that exist in these spaces uh so that's kind of like how the angle i took it in um i wanted to use like a variety of different kind of like image textures um looking at how social media some of the stuff i shot on like on my instagram when i just saved it um how social media like is being used as a new way of constructing a timeline now it's not as easy for stories to go unheard because people are empowered by their phones and the videos of injustices that we are able to access because of um that technology so like all of these like fat ideas um were what i was thinking of um whether that actually translated but it was fun it was really fun to try and pretend to be smart and press record and hope that you know what happened would happen well um but yeah so like in terms of the process i got two dancers i was like i want um black bodies um in movement in space that was like the things i wanted and i got you know my beautiful dancer over there and cara that she's big [Applause] [Music] the other dancer and it was amazing working with them because it was like i was telling them all these ridiculous things and then they were like yeah we'll pass them live so like you're really understanding what i'm saying and you're creating something completely you know you're birthing something new out of that i think that's been a really key part of this creative process of giving something to somebody and then making it something i didn't even know i didn't know you know kind of energy so yeah and i think this is also also kind of a futuristic way of working um the the taking of archives from each other and trying to translate that into something we can all understand and make into something yeah for ourselves as well and if that's yeah it was really cool it was fun process so thank you for letting me do it thank you thank you um okay i guess moving on to the way that we worked um i think um having such a like siloed space you've kind of all touched on this um before but um what were the challenges in kind of not forcing a certain like narrative and i'm kind of being able to just make something and be like okay i'm just gonna let it go and it might not turn out how i pictured it in my head but that's like that's fine um what how did you kind of cope with um resisting the urge to completely force the vision um at first mine involved a lot of yelling because i was really frustrated that i couldn't get things out because i think when you have a structure and you're used to working with a brief um you're like oh this is what i follow and this is where i can pull from and yes i will continue to make it experimental um but you kind of have to allow yourself yourself to kind of um not reshape but like kind of just flow it's like yeah like really letting go and just allowing yourself to really inhibit lots of different spaces and go everywhere so even when we had our conversation i remember we would zoom in and we were asking each other so what should we do like i don't know something black and amazing and i remember asking you like for like pictures of um where what you saw and everything and the images were really beautiful but i was like okay what if i don't just use these as my prompts and i'm thinking about the past and um considering what are other ways in which people have told me about the past through books that i've read or like through the way that they've reframed things like um in music for example um i'm really i'm a really big listener of um techno because most people don't know have evil invented techno and um there's a band like there was a band at the time um a group called drexia and they'd created this album um that was basically framed around the idea that um the mothers who were violently thrown over slave ships who were pregnant they'd they'd their babies were born under the atlantic india atlantic ocean and there's like uh entire civilization of black atlanteans living there and um it was sparked from an idea from i believe a book that was written by yeah the black atlantic by paul gilroy and um they linked all together so like having that in mind and being like yes our history is steeped in violence but you can also create a framework around it that i think we're always told that our history stem stems from trauma which isn't true um so then reframing it in this way is like how do you take on the past and make it into something that's um like one of liberation one of um balance and yeah like it just doesn't just exist in this place of darkness actually that there's so much light and i thought about how to create how to create that with the different types of instruments that i use like there's some sounds of like talking drums and a gem bae the different type of singing um that i was doing as well um and try to bring that all together as uh something that felt whole and less fragmented um but i i really did yeah it does feel like the future working this way like after i had this experience i was like i want to do this again i do i actually do i want i want to have like just one word one prompt and then a bunch of artists and we all do different aspects maybe we take not i don't like takeovers because that's an invitation to me and anarchists and actually um more like yeah like one person's a set one person is done in art direction and we just have a prompt and everybody just puts everything in it and then we don't know what happens until we appear i love that idea i think it's i think it has so much ability for free form and less room for people to be able to be like oh you have it could you make it a bit more like could it touch more on this thing that's happened that we feel like you should reference and it's like no it exists as it is and you take it as it is and if you don't understand it maybe it's not for you um so yeah like if i yeah that wasn't the question i really really am thrilled like by having had the chance to work with you both and keisha as well and just speak to you without having met you you know yeah and now like meeting you now it's like yeah let's do this again yeah um i think like working on this project in this way was just a big call to my insecurities as like a creator i think like we all hope that our work is speaking for itself such that i wouldn't have to be here and explain what's happening um and giving my work to these accredited people who are just doing a lot i genuinely felt quite like a bit of a small fish in a big pond and i think i think trusting myself was a was a really important thing and as like a creator that's just starting out babes i do not have that trust because i was stressing out a lot and when you're talking about how you wanted to let go and be free i was clenched all muscles were on intention and i think that showed me a lot about sometimes how creativity is not always freeing for me and it can sometimes feel like i there's a standard i'm setting for myself that i have to get and sometimes i forget to enjoy myself through it and so hearing you talk about that i'm like damn you're really you really messed up like but it it gives me it gives me security and and hope that there are creatives such as yourselves who have come to a point in your in your in your relationship with your work that you can breathe and that you can trust that yeah i'm a creative i feel like i'm still at the stage where i'm just trying to convince myself that yeah like you're a filmmaker and like that's a legitimate title to go home with um so yeah this this this yeah this work was definitely a simi you have a lot of growing to do but it was also a thing you're growing and i'm like proud of you um kind of moment so thank you again for that um i think one of the things that keisha talked about um that you've kind of brought up was that there was a lot of trust um in the process than just having to like rewrite um and not be too precious about her ideas and so i think she said that she kind of had come up with some ideas beforehand and then was like no way i need to wait until i've actually seen like or listened to the sound and seen um the visuals um so i just wanted to talk about trust um nessie like how did it feel knowing that everyone was kind of just relying on you to piece everything together um it's kind of editors kind of do that anyway [Music] um when this particular project um i think the biggest thing i was confronted with was time constraint because um it's working and then i got everything and then this and then when i got everything then i was worried about obviously i didn't want to offend and i wanted it to feel cohesive not just different things thrown together and so um i just kind of approached it as building blocks so i started off with um the soundscape and just laid that down and i laid uh the poem down and as soon as i laid the poem down i realized that um i wasn't going to be able to use all of the poem as is because um it was fighting against the the soundscape and so it was just um thinking about how to let things breathe and retain their kind of identity and then um [Music] i just had all the footage just put in one big long timeline and just scroll through and then it's funny talking about it in hindsight because i'm making it sound very logical but some of the things that happened when it was not premeditated it was just okay things were put down and then it kind of worked so then i kind of went along with that and then threw some stuff down and then moved things around and just sort of kind of molded and then i think the time constraint was really good actually because sometimes i can go a little bit over and over and over and i didn't have time to do that essentially um yeah um i think also another thing um with the unesa was you were basically that we didn't have a director to kind of impose a vision so how did you um balance um having all of this like work and like you've kind of already talked about it but just how did you put together like a final vision of what you wanted um to bring together especially with what struck me about the film was like the part um where keisha opens where this is a meditation and kind of having that throughout the film um is that something that you kind of had that line and was like okay that's going to be the anchor or was there a different process no so basically so from the sound it felt very sort of grounding and such effect very sort of something you hear or something you something that you get in touch with when you're being very still and when you're really trying to access something and then when i heard the poem it felt like through those words and the delivery was guiding us so something that needed to feel like we're being guided and then when i saw the images and i saw lots of um long held shots and the dancers sometimes looked like they were in they were inside their heads so they weren't they didn't feel to me like they were reacting to stimuli that was in front of them but that something internal was happening and so when you put all those together it feel you it's it's sort of to me it kind of spoke of an interior world and and then when you put life experience and i know just from experience sometimes when you're trying to meditate your mind is rushing it's all busy but you're still and so that juxtaposition it's almost all if you see maybe like a swan it's gliding but if you look at these legs it's like paddling like that so the sound um because i remember i showed it to someone and they said why didn't you cut to the music and i said because it didn't feel like um these people in the images were responding to an external soundscape it felt like it was an internal kind of process does that answer your question yeah yeah um um something that struck struck me about like kind of picking all of you is that you all have i mean every black person has a different black experience but um was there anything about the being part of like i suppose the black british diaspora that kind of fed into um the film and particularly when you were looking at it from um like the perspective of past future present and was there any like specific experiences or um yeah um i think for me uh language so like i when when i do improvisational performances i deconstruct different types of words from english or patois and this time around i just started i don't even know it's not even a real language but it's like um it's something i do when i'm looping and maybe when i'm freestyling there isn't a word because english is so limiting like it's just it's kind of a language in terms of like how expression um and so uh sometimes i just end up singing in like like the the phrase i just started singing it and um sometimes like imaginary tones and like forms and stuff just come out whilst i'm singing and i don't know where they're coming from i just i'm just like i just allow it it's there like obviously it's a thing so just embody it and just go with it um and maybe that is a part of like being a part of black diaspora is like your language is always you're always being told like that you have a corrective way of speaking um or there's a standard way of expressing your yourself your love your hatred all of those different things um and i decide to um instead pull from like when i listen to dancehall music and ragam music like some of the words are just they're from them like i remember growing up and hearing a ziggy zagara and stuff and i like what does that really mean like um like all of that stuff it's like sounds you know but they are instruments as well like they made their voices into into instruments so therefore it's a note but it's also a language so it's a sound language that like forms together so that's how i also when i approach music when i'm looping i will bring in yeah yeah give me that kind of sound in and i just like allow myself to feed it and and i pull from those kind of places and you see a lot in like um um within black diaspora genres that i've formed here in the uk like in in drill and grime in drum and bass um like in a lot of that sound like people are just creating new forms of dialoguing with each other and um like it i think that's why when i when like when you're working with like the drums and stuff like that sometimes i feel like my music sounds like or the sound that i make sounds like i'm coming for you like and and i learned from this like sometimes you need to take a breath like when you're also burning things down you need to take a breath and a break um but like it was really nice seeing how there was like a that it wasn't actually cut completely to the music and stuff because i was expecting a frenzy and what i got was stillness and calm which is something i didn't know that i needed actually because i'd been creating from a place of just go get it go back and get it and like be in the now be in tomorrow come back again and like just feel it and stuff and then the the the visual language was saying yeah but settle yourself as well you know um and i think yeah it's like that amalgamation that that like um yeah amalgamation of like a black diaspora genres from here languages like that all brought it together for me um i think for me um so to shoot i i tried really hard to find like a location so i traveled up and down like london for like a week traveling in london is not cheap i don't know what this is about but it's not cheap um but um when i was traveling and like kind of like looking around all these spaces like canary wharf and like even just the underground and seeing i met like i even met so many builders um construction workers that were building the next apartment the next office and they were all people of color literally like holding the city together and making the city run and that's something that i really wanted to touch on and that's something that i thought about a lot during the process and like looking at black bodies like against futuristic landscapes like and it's very much an against um image that i often see um one of the prompts i gave one of my dancers was like essentially i want you to look like trash on the street and like although that sounds really negative it is it was kind of looking at how yeah like black bodies um stories and culture are discarded in these spaces and are instead like cemented over with clean transparent like fake transparency like all the buildings are made out of like glass but like the shady stuff and like also the principle of like london being one of the most surveyed cities in the world but like almost everything goes unseen in terms of the injustices that people face so i think trash is something that is not supposed to be there um it's something that disrupts beauty and beauty is often what hides um violence and truth sometimes so that was one of the prompts i gave to the dancer and i think yeah that came from so many thoughts of seeing how the people were scrubbing the streets and then i would go back to wembley and like the streets were not clean and i was like this is the same london but this is not the same london not for the same people it's not and i think yeah and i literally moved to london like a couple of weeks ago so this is a really good way to like explore the city as well and like to see it for what it really is dirty place but also good very nice i would recommend supervisor yeah i think i'm going to head to questions soon but ernest do you just have any last thoughts on that question yes because it's who i am i mean i'm not anybody else so um i guess the way it manifests itself in projects that i do is that i mean i've worked on lots of projects about black folk but not made by a black boy and i've been the only black person there and i've seen i've been privy to how people misunderstand what they're doing and it's been really painful but nobody's understood my pain but um i didn't know that that was what it was it's only looking back and trying to dissect why i was why was i so upset or why and so um i mean that's the general view of it um it it's it's within me so it's yeah i don't know any other way [Music] yeah does anyone have any questions i don't think we have a mic so you can literally just shout from wherever you are yeah i think definitely for me filmmaking is a very spiritual like the only things i've ever made the two pieces of work i've ever made were very much made because they had to be made because i needed an outlet i needed something to help me like understand like where i was in life or something like that so i think for me yeah yeah definitely filmmaking is a very spiritual process and i think especially for like black people or seeing yourself on screen can actually be a very like uncomfortable situation so being able to wield the instrument and showing your body as you see it and that's not always in a beautiful way is like incredibly important and i wish like everybody would do that outside of like selfies and stuff to try and explore representing their body in a not aesthetically pleasing way yes yes i try to really be intentional about what i say yes to so if it's not nourishing me it has to go like i don't for me i wouldn't understand working on something that is going to harm me and i've tried to be really particularly like in our year of panoramic um to be more less afraid of how people can create this atmosphere like if you choose to create a boundary or being difficult well i'd rather be difficult like i'd rather be able to establish the framework in which i can work and who i can collaborate with how i treat people how i treat myself and that is healing for me it's like all of those abilities to be able to make the choices to say this is who i want to be in rooms with and i want to actively cultivate being in rooms with and sometimes that is really tricky to work out because we live in a conglomerate institutional society um that has found out about the world where decolonized all of a sudden and um now is trying to establish like using a lot of black creatives like queer creatives in so many different ways um so i think how i approach it to make sure that like i'm not harming others i i don't recommend people to go into certain spaces or for certain pieces of work i pull them into with me different pieces of work and share the opportunity and share the space because it can't be about a singular person it has to also it has to come from a collective mindset so i think yeah they they balance themselves out in different ways i think sometimes i've had experiences that have been amazing and i've continued to collaborate and work with those people and other experiences that weren't as like healing but i don't intentionally go to do the work because i want that specific work to heal me i'm doing that every day with like so many different things in and like sound for me i don't leave my house without my headphones and because it's like it's my healing thing from the like morning until i'm sleeping it's like it's that thing that is nourishing me at all all the time um if that answers your question yeah yeah i think for me because a lot of the work i i i've done so far is i was looking at like trauma and i think there's definitely this like romanticization of art as like therapy and i went into them my little old self thinking yeah like when i make a film about it like i'm gonna be okay and it's gonna be like the therapy i need but art is not therapy and i think we should all get therapy is not it is a way to like help you realize what is wrong but i don't think that it in its own self can save you from yourself in any way and that's something that i've had to like realize and but it's very good at exposing a lot of stuff you'd be surprised what comes up when you thought you were pointing your lens at a tree but it was really yourself healing and i think um i don't know if this is going to answer a question but i think because i've worked a lot on documentaries a lot of things have come up which have been quite traumatic for me and it's to do with sort of ethics and documentary and representation and story and because i know the power of images i know how you can how images can be manipulated and how if you haven't and if you have an image if you're the first person to make the image you can even make the people that you're making the image about believe that image above what they believe about themselves and um i'll give you an example like in a there's a kind of a stereotype black people in watermelons and how that came about was i think when um at the end of slavery one of the um the biggest businesses that former enslaved people had was um watermelon business and they were making a lot of money and people didn't like it and so they create a narrative to a negative narrative around that and today even today some people still think that it's a negative stereotype but it didn't come from that and the people who created that image it is more powerful than what it what actually happened and so something even just something like that you can see the repercussions and if you think about advertisements you know companies spend millions and millions of pounds on a three-minute advert because they know how powerful that is and so if you think they do that and you think of the images that are portrayed and then if you have something that says documentary which has sort of like a connotation of oh this is you know this is truth this is real all of that kind of yeah i've been dealing with a lot of that and it's and it's just trying to make sense of it and trying to articulate um why things are not why things are unethical um so i think i'm going through that very deeply at the moment um yeah trying to to to figure things out in that sense so i'm kind of not really interested in editing films about black people where black people are not involved anymore i can't i can't do that anymore in terms of healing i think very specifically so my dad he passed away last year from covid and i was like in the middle of you know the depths of kovid and so i was away from my family and i was just because i live alone and but i had a fs7 with me and so i just made a film sort of like to try and express you know what i was feeling and so that was healing for me i mean it's not really to show anyone but that was that was a documentation of a particular time and it was it was really good for me to do that yeah um i'm gonna end it there i feel which is a shame because i feel like i could talk to you guys all day um but thank you so much for joining us and thank you to our panelists let's just give
