Black Mother

Lyrical and haunting, Black Mother is a film-poem to Jamaica, conjuring up the island in a polyphony of voices, textures and tales. Moving between different speakers, the film intertwines the prayers of priests with the accounts of cancer survivors, the oral histories of maroon descendants with the testimonies of sex workers, to capture the plurality and idiosyncrasy of its overlapping worlds.

 

With a photographer’s eye for detail, director Khalik Allah interweaves Jamaican’s stories into a complex tapestry of encounters which border on the sublime. Probing the line between imagination and history, the film renders the island landscape as a creative force, a space not only shaped by histories of slavery and colonialism but also continuously evolving through new webs of relation.

The film premiered in the UK as part of FRAMES of REPRESENTATION 2018.