F-SIDES: ON INTERSECTIONS A discussion on film, sorority, and race with Be Manzini and Ioanida Costache

Supported by F-SIDES staples Georgiana Vrajitoru and Ioana Pelehatai

This article brings together the views expressed at the F-SIDES discussion provoked by Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’, which you can listen to in full here. 

The Cineclub’s closing theme for 2020 was ‘Sorority,’ an exploration in supporting each other, while acknowledging our differences. We wanted to learn how we could mobilize our energy to create collective strength, without it bringing along erasure; there is no one way to live gender or race, and no single correct artistic vision to represent people who live in strongly gendered or racialized bodies. How can we practice togetherness without turning our systems of support and affirmation into platitudes and monoliths? What can we learn about the intersections of gender, race, and their representations in Black and Roma contexts, up to where do these two movements for justice meet, and where do they digress? How does all this translate to allies and how does it translate to film?

We were aided in this exploration by Be Manzini -film-poet, facilitator, and Director of Caramel Film Club – and Ioanida Costache, ethnomusicologist and videographer exploring Roma cultural memory. In the process, we touched on systems of film production and distribution; on the power of stories and how urgently we need them; on documenting the systems of oppression that inform who we are but also the need to observe and archive how we exist beyond trauma; on solidarity, sisterhood, and lessons on seeing one another. 

Film as work: the systems of production and distribution- you break through the ceiling to find yourself in another box

[For a 2021 illustration on what will follow, you can read more here on Micaela Cole’s infuriating exclusion at the Golden Globes, after she gave us one of the best TV series perhaps ever]

It is quite astonishing that the first film created by a Black American woman to be distributed in US cinemas was made in 1991. But Daughters of the Dust has a longer list of achievements. Georgiana, F-SIDES programmer, starts us off with these:

But despite its achievements and the initial excitement of a Black woman breaking through Hollywood’s tempered-glass ceiling, Julie Dash’s career is still an example of exclusion. Despite commercial success, for the next 25 years she was unable to get her work on the cinema screen again, and was forgotten to the world until Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade, inspired by Daughters of the Dust, reminded us that this film exists. Julie Dash’s story is still representative for Black women filmmakers in the West today. 

Looking in our own backyard, the Roma community in Romania still experiences acute cultural marginalization. Up until recently, Roma actors were not hired to play Roma characters and few people would be surprised – in film or daily life – if someone took up Romani identity as a costume for mockery. 

Romani roles in film are rarely something more than demeaning stereotypes. Ioanida explains that with an infinitesimal amount of Roma directors and actors in the spotlight, the Roma don’t control the narratives around their own identity, both in media and public consciousness. There have been changes, but they are driven by the grit of individuals who’ve had enough, and who act largely on their own capacities, without much industry support. Alina Șerban started off with one-woman theatre shows and has now directed her first short, which she hopes to turn into a feature-length film about the story of a Roma slave. Mihaela Dragan and Zita Moldovan founded Giuvlipen, the first Roma feminist theatre company, where they partner with Roma creators to write, direct, and act in plays about their community. Giuvlipen encourages Roma ownership over the cultural products that are associated with their community, and provides an alternative to their demeaning portrayals on offer. However, it’s hard to picture an initiative like the Giuvlipen Theatre Company to activate in the film industry, where even being fringe costs so much more, and the politics of distribution networks are far more constraining. 

Zooming back out to narratives of race in the West and the people that produce them, even though we’re seeing an increasingly larger range of Black filmmakers and characters, the picture is still far from rosy. Be told us that, especially at conferences, she asks the room how many Black directors they know, and then how many Black British women directors; she can almost never get more than a name. There is an “industry machine”, supported by awards, that selects what is noteworthy and backs it up; without its backing, you can hardly make it. 

But with or without the support of the industry, what is much harder for Black filmmakers to obtain is a creative process that welcomes experimentation and failure. The quality of a Black artist’s product that gets into the mainstream needs to be excellent; make a mistake and you are likely to be written off, because there’s rarely space for more than one voice. Be strongly argues that growth is informed by mistakes, diamonds need to be polished, and no one will start their career knowing exactly what they want to say and how to say it. “How many shit movies by white directors go straight to VOD and people say Oh, they didn’t find themselves yet, but they didn’t get written off?” For a Black filmmaker, a less than excellent product is barely enough to get your foot in the door, never mind getting to VOD. 

In both cases, there needs to be a way around these deeply entrenched systems that hold the money, the networks, the networking, and the mechanisms that proclaim what is valuable and not valuable. One strategy is for artists to come together as a group—building collectives, organizations, hiring each other and experimenting together, when the mainstream won’t offer this space. Be is part of an organization that strives for gender parity in film crews, saying that it’s something you actively have to pursue. Now for example, she’s trying hard to find a Black woman DOP for her next project; in our interviews with the local industry, we also found that a woman DOP is hard to find, because women have been consistently discouraged from taking such a “technical” role. But if there is demand, eventually there will be a supply, and “we have to bring the ladder down and bring sisters with us as much as we can, because if you put all those pebbles in a pond, those ripples will have an effect and that’s the sisterhood I’m working towards.” By coming together in organizations, projects, platforming one another, marginalized creators can make some space for more than one Black voice, gaze, and story.  

Stories, representation, and power: reckoning with trauma and looking beyond it – portraying safety, innocence, relaxation.

During the discussion, Be said something that really stuck with us: “Blackness is not a monolith.” 

Looking beyond actors and directors, if the commissioners and producers don’t have varied understandings of race or ethnicity, they will think that the stories that don’t conform to the allotted archetypes are unrealistic and unsellable. This is why we’re stuck with the ever-revolving image of the poverty porn ghetto and have no mental image of, let’s say, a person of colour in a British rural area. 

We need to access and see the work of more Black artists because we want more detail, nuance, and richness in the stories about our world at large. It’s in the same spirit that we want to see more films made by women; bringing one or two exceptions into the mainstream (and then washing your hands off the diversity box) is simply not enough to capture how much there is to be observed about the world through their lens. 

On the one hand, no Black filmmaker should be burdened with the responsibility of representing “all” Blackness; at best, that would yield an incomplete picture, likely to strain artistic drive. “Being African born in the UK is a very different lived experience from being a woman in the US,” Be exemplifies. 

On the other hand, we, as allies, need more reference points than the ghetto or the fight for equal rights, more insight into the complex topography of how Black lives exist. And film does that for us—it makes us see the previously unseen, it adds pieces to our map of how we understand the world. 

When there is a very limited number of slots for a woman or a Black creator to tell a story, they prioritize what is urgent, perhaps to the detriment of their full artistic vision. Activist film is fantastic and necessary, but we need more than just activism. We need normality too. A Black woman is more than a politicized subject and “if they want to film a woman on a bicycle, with wind blowing through their hair, that’s just as valid.” We very much agree with Be on this, and on when she says that characters of colour also deserve some poetry. 

“I had not seen a Black woman as the ingenue, treated with kindness on the big screen. You can’t unsee an image. All the images that we see imbue how we perceive and relate to other people, even if we haven’t met. It gives a cultural reference point. If you allow people to have experiences that feel authentic, they are able to understand that they had a blind-spot.” Film can therefore serve as a tool for all of us to fill in our blind-spots. As a Black person, “if you can see it you can be it,” and, as an ally, “if you see it”… you can embrace the full humanity of your peers and stop being a nasty person, even if you weren’t aware you were one. 

This logic is applicable to any marginalized group, including the Roma. Ioanida told us of her dissertation, where she looked at how Roma musicians are represented in communist-era films. In her own words, “in those scenes they are acting as a foil to whiteness, a caricature that simply serves to reinforce the power of the white man. Roma culture is often portrayed as vulnerable, it is divorced from Roma bodies—others take it on or off as a costume, and when Roma are saying You can’t divorce that from where they are embodied, that is great.” Filmic representations of Roma women are particularly devoid of nuances, subjectivities, specificities. Personally, I can’t think of a single fictional Romanian work that rejects Roma archetypes, and the only example I can find that illustrates the complex inner world of a Roma girl – with daily routines, thought processes, emotions – is to be found in the documentary Toto and His Sisters.

Perhaps it’s difficult to get to this point in cinema, of illustrating relaxation, safety, the minutiae of daily life, whatever else, if we don’t first acknowledge and deal with trauma. It is shocking that Roma enslavement in Romania is so little acknowledged in literature, the media, and the educational system. One filmic exception is Radu Jude’s Aferim, and all his work that prompts us to look back at our past. This is a publicly suppressed and ignored trauma, so its effects on the present are poorly understood as well. As Ioanida explains, Roma identities are silently constituted by genocide, forced assimilation, and censorship, and they need to be reclaimed. She herself wants to reconnect to a past history, heritage, and community. That is done by acknowledging oppression, but then also moving beyond it and asking: Who were these people beyond their intersection with white oppression?, “What does it really mean to be a marginalised racialized person, in terms of the shared knowledge of a diaspora consciousness, of a past historical injustice—but also what does it mean in the future sense, imagining what your future will be?”

What Julie Dash does exceptionally well in Daughters of the Dust is to explore trauma – of sexual abuse, slavery, marginalization -, but not through the lens of white encounter. Instead, she achieves this by digging deeper into cultural memory. This approach sets a new reference point beyond oppression. Through references to West African deities and a creole language that has largely disappeared, it talks about both individuals and a community, about a sense of Africanness before enslavement. All of this gives us a glimpse into what the world was, or could have been, before slavery, and is in effect decolonial. Even in its portrayal of slavery, Dash tries to use new imagery and new mythologies—for example, by replacing the stereotypical image of whiplashes with stained hands from the indigo fields. It’s important to explore and archive what lies beyond trauma, and that itself might help us understand trauma better. Julie Dash created an African-American universe that shows spirituality, cultural connectedness, rootedness, and safety. As Be says, we can observe a “relaxation of the battle” that we rarely see in cinema with Black subjects—and we then rarely notice in our encounters with real people.  

Solidarity in difference: practicing sorority, learning more ways to see one another

This discussion took place between four women whose lived experiences and backpack of heritage were to a certain degree similar, but also incredibly different. Womanhood can unify, it can set a tone for understanding and support. But womanhood is also experienced differently and we need to listen in on that diversity with care and curiosity. In this discussion about film, we wanted to learn how we can better see and support one another. We had much to learn. 

On the surface, racism towards Black and Roma people is similar. In both cases we are talking of centuries of enslavement and dispossession, subsequent entrapment in poverty, exclusion from formal and informal institutions, intense hatred, violence, and persisting stereotypes. If you add the historical dispossession faced by women, and what centuries of patriarchy did to our psyche, the situation for women of colour is significantly worse. We should act against this with one strong voice, but we should not think this is one story. 

On the one hand, we could say that advances in Roma rights lag far behind the civil rights movement in Western countries; we can see it in the exclusion of Roma from formal institutions, rights to the city, positions of power, representation in the media, etc. A project like Be’s Caramel Film Club that platforms young Black voices is still pretty utopic in the Balkans, where young Roma still face prejudice in being admitted to university, never mind accessing resources for filmmaking. In Romania – and in Eastern Europe at large – we need to start having debates that the UK has been having for decades. 

On the other hand, as Be explains, while slavery existed for many ethnic groups around the globe, the sheer size and uprootedness of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade as a “global system to build up the West” cannot be minimalized. Moreover, as anti-Blackness is global, the dehumanization that comes with living in a Black body cannot be put on pause. “There is no real country in the world where you can’t feel anti-Blackness, there’s no off-switch, there’s no holiday, it’s there and it’s everywhere, and that experience can be devastating.” 

Ioanida told us it was uncomfortable for her to see the BLM slogan co-opted as an analogy for Roma rights (Roma lives matter). It felt like an attempt to legitimize local fights by using someone else’s story. This is not uncommon for the feminist movement, or more generally for how we empathise as human beings. When we make ourselves believe that we experience the same things helps us care for someone else. However, we can learn how to be better in our personal interactions, and as allies. Ioanida believes that although the two groups share a common fight against white supremacy, instead of treating it as the same fight, they should be having an intersectional and collaborative dialogue about it. We can make space for more than one conversation. And by making space for each other, platforming, campaigning for each other, we can get a hint of what sisterhood looks like.