Using Godard’s La chinoise as an inspired jumping-off point, Ephraim Asili’s electrifying debut feature draws on his experiences in collective living and political struggle to explore the legacies of Black activism. An innovative meta-cinematic collage of radical ideas and formal experimentation.
The last film in the “Diaspora Suite,” Fluid Frontiers places readings of radical texts from the Black Arts Movement, like those of Audre Lorde and Sonia Sanchez, in the middle of present-day Detroit. A vibrant portrait of a place and its people, tracing how ideas continue to live and breathe.
Shifting between color and B&W 16mm film, Kindah also crosses borders to connect diasporic communities in New York with those of the freed slave-town of Accompong, Jamaica. Ephraim Asili’s hypnotic, observational short celebrates the unifying power of music to bring people together.
Ephraim Asili captures joyful expressions of leisure time alongside work, performance, and protest in New York and Salvador. Musician Joe McPhee’s wild, free-jazz score was created in a real-time encounter with a silent version of the film, contributing to the film’s loose, syncopated rhythms.
From a street festival in Philly to the vibrant colors of Ghana’s street markets, Ephraim Asili’s atmospheric trip involves a personal reckoning with his perception of African-ness. As an intertitle reminds us: “the traveler often finds himself in a location that only exists in the mind.”
