Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea and Memories (23 Mins)
Premiered at the 59th International La Biennale di Venezia (2022) in the Grenada National Pavilion, Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea and Memories explores fragments of Ottobah Cugoano’s life, who was a major figure in the abolitionist movement in England towards the end of the 18th century. He was kidnapped in Ghana and brought to Grenada as a slave before he was brought to England as the personal servant of Alexander Campbell, a Scottish plantation owner in Grenada. His book Thoughts and Sentiments On The Evils of Slavery... played a seminal role in the abolitionist movement. He was one of the first Afro-Britons to have written a book in English, while employed as a servant for the Royalist Artist, Richard Cosway, who introduced to all the pageantries of class, race, and power in 18th-century England. Cugoano's life ended in obscurity.
“Rich and vibrant in visuals as it is compelling in its several narratives.”
—Kaitlin Anne Veroort, Art Spiel
Second Eulogy: Mind The Gap (40 Mins)
Second Eulogy: Mind The Gap (premiered at the Venice Biennale 2019, Grenada National Pavilion) explores personal and collective memories of colonialism, exile, queerness, and identity in Grenada. The film spurns personal tales of loss, longings, memories, and phantasmagoria by interweaving fiction and non-fiction to conjure an abstract story of interconnected lives. The central tale narrates the lives of Nelson, a fisherman and father; his Gay son James coming of age in a verdantly charged landscape; Antoinette, Nelson’s wife who embodies the island’s colonial past and Mother Country; and their maid, Josephine.
“For his incredible film 2nd Eulogy (Mind the Gap)—you must watch all 40 minutes!—in the Grenada Pavilion, the New York-based artist Billy Gerard Frank had difficulty finding gay actors in his Grenada homeland, so he turned to the app Grindr. The lead actor in the film is terrific. “
—Sarah Douglas, Editor-In-Chief, Art News
“A tender and emotionally wrenching filmic installation, which paid tribute broadly to queerness, Derek Walcott, and a relentlessly cold father.”
Rashayla Marie Brown - THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art
Installation View - The Butler Museum Of American Art (2023)
Absence Of Love (20 Mins) Narrative
Absence of Love is an intimate, taut portrait of three lives: James and Michael, on the far side of a once-passionate romance, and James and Samuel, estranged brothers, coming to terms with the death of their father, a Baptist minister in the Deep South. The film plays with time: the present, in which the story follows these characters as they form a complex love triangle; the past, through the window of childhood memory; and the love story, out of time and place. A richly textured film, Absence of Love viscerally captures the deep-rooted alienation of gay youth in the African American experience.
“Absence of Love is an arresting and deeply affecting short film that resonated powerfully with audiences…”
— Variety, Palm Springs International Short Film Festival
Projects in Development
Poetics of Errantries
“We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”
—Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation
Poetics of Errantries is a poetic, historical, and fictional film and at once an intimate portrait and a contemporary allegory on migration. At its center is an imaginative retelling of the formative years of French Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, during his exile in Paris from his native Martinique for political reasons. Set in the crucible of the late 1950s and 1960s, amid the global Black liberation movements, the Algerian War, and contemporary migration. The narrative unfolds through five interwoven “errantry” tales, spanning Martinique, France, England, and Africa, that illuminate the intersecting lives and plights of individuals from different races and classes, each caught in the maelstrom of migration, survival, love, resistance, and political upheaval.
Drawing loosely from the elusive rhythms of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, the film converges into a cinematic tapestry that reimagines Glissant’s Parisian years in exile; his nostalgic connection to his homeland, refracted through a vortex of fragmented memories and dreams, while reflecting the urgency of today’s world: mass migration, displacement, and the resurgent tide of nationalism.
“…but the ocean kept turning blank pages, looking for History.”
— Derek Walcott, The Sea Is History
My Heart Laid Bare (Narrative Feature)
My Heart Laid Bare is a hyperrealist portrait of an African American family and the cast of people in their interconnected lives, all yearning for fame and connections, playing out their fate and chances in a world governed by their weighted pasts. Set in Hollywood during the 1970s Blaxploitation era, tumultuous times of the Nixon administration, Rome, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert.
