From the same folks who brought you The Future Weird last month (which included a screening of Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s satirical sci-fi vampire film Les Saignantes), comes another screening series event titled The Future Weird: Black Atlantis, which will include the U.S. premiere of Simon Rittmeier’s Burkina Faso-shot, 30-minute 16mm sci-fi film Drexciya, as well as shorts from Akosua Adoma Owusu, Nikyatu Jusu, Barry Jenkins, Kibwe Tavares + more. All names I’m sure you’re familiar with.
According to Afrofuturist legend, Drexciya is a sunken land inhabited by the children of African women drowned during the Middle Passage. Since they were never born, these children continued to breathe underwater: first through amniotic fluid, then through lungs better suited to their aquatic world. Join us on Monday 26 August, at 8PM as we go in search of the “Black Atlantis”.
“Black Atlantis” is an evening of short films that treat water as a cleansing force through which our bodies may be reborn, and as a site of memory where disappeared and suppressed things resurface, wash up, or return to us as detritus. Through myths that traverse the Black diaspora we encounter a deep-sea leviathan and meet a beautiful and dangerous sea goddess named MamiWata. Following tourists and then refugees fleeing Europe, we consider stories of migration, slavery and commerce, high seas adventure, and the thrill and terror of being haunted by an unknown past.
WHEN: Monday, August 26 @ 8 PM
WHERE: Spectacle Theater, 124 South 3rd Street, Brooklyn, New York
WHAT: A 90 minute program of shorts. Includes the U.S. Premiere of Simon Rittmeier’s Drexciya (2012), a snippet from the colonial archive, and films by Nikyatu Jusu, Kibwe Tavares, Barry Jenkins, and Akosua Adoma Owusu’s award-winning short Drexciya (2010)
