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 the18th 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 Cambell, a Scottish Plantain 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, introduced to all the pageantries, of class, race, and power in 18th Century England. Cugoano 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) exploring 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

Absence Of Love (20 Mins) Narrative

Absence of Love is an intimate and 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 their father's death, 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.

Daddy’s Little Boy: Letters in Fragments

Early experimental work exploring male incarceration in America.

Projects in Development

Poetic Of Relations: The Open Boat

Poetics of Relation: The Open Boat is at once a poetic meta, auto-fictional film and historical accounts: a period in Glissant’s life (Paris in the 1960s), and allegory on contemporary migration, political, and socio-relational entanglements: France; England; Africa; Caribbean— The Atlantic Triangle. The Open Boat is a preamble to Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s philosophical and imaginary essay in which he redefines identity outside its traditional boundaries.  He challenges us to use his essays and imaginary as a vantage point, a base from which to view the world, postulating a fluid, changing network of exchanges and contacts with others.  In Glissant’s view, identity is neither static nor self-contained but shifting and rhizomatic: It is relational, multiple, and unpredictable; it eludes all cultural certainties, opposes all forms of rootedness and challenges the stability of communities from ethnic groups to nation-states that define themselves primarily in opposition to outsiders. “The Open Boat” is a complex text that aims both to remember and transcend the trauma of the Middle Passage by reinterpreting the hold of the slave ship as a womb from which a new humanity has emerged. The survivors of the Middle Passage are thrown into the “absolute unknown” of the “New World”, similar, to “the abyss,” the absolute unknown faced by refugees today who risk their lives daily to an uncertain reality on land and sea on the course of their migratory journey to Europe to escape war, famine, climate disaster, religious persecution and other calamities that threaten their existence.   

Through this lens, Poetics of Relation: The Open Boat (a 5-part film) weaves together multiple, errantry tales that illuminate the plights of disparate lives from different races and classes at a trajectory, caught in the maelstrom of migration, survival, love, resistance, and global political consternation. The tales take poetic liberty at expanding on Glissant's elusive prose Poetics of Relation as metaphor and framework to contest, de-construct, reimagine, and ruminate on themes of exile, migration, globalization, colonialism, and its aftermath — Urgent and political; experimental and poetic. 

“…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 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 rein, Rome, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert.