Experiencing Interruptions?

A New England Document

Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the perspective of its suppressed stories. The filmmaker, a black international student at Harvard, and their daughter, New-York-Times-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint upon sounds of archival ghosts. The film asks, after an Indigenous boy named /Gaishay, what would he have said about the Marshalls if he studied them too?

  • Che Applewhaite
    Director
  • Che Applewhaite
    Writer
  • Che Applewhaite
    Producer
  • Che Applewhaite
    Key Cast
  • Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
    Key Cast
  • Pavel Lebedev
    Music
  • Che Applewhaite
    Sound Design
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short, Student
  • Genres:
    ethnography, essay, portrait, history, archival, found footage, Black film, documentary, non-fiction, experimental, short film, haptic aesthetics
  • Runtime:
    15 minutes 47 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 1, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Black & White and Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - Harvard University
  • Sheffield Doc/Fest
    Sheffield
    United Kingdom
    June 10, 2020
    World Premiere
    Official Selection
  • 28th New York African Film Festival
    New York
    United States
    February 4, 2021
    North American Premiere
    Official Selection
  • 19th Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival
    Virtual
    United Kingdom
    March 19, 2021
    Official Selection
  • Prismatic Ground Festival of Experimental Documentary
    New York
    United States
    April 8, 2021
    Official Selection
  • Screening Scholarship Media Festival at University of Pennsylvania’s CAMRA (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts)
    Philadelphia
    United States
    April 18, 2021
    Official Selection
  • Dislocated.Blackness
    Virtual
    United States
    April 24, 2021
    Curated Film Program
  • Harvard University
    Cambridge, MA
    United States
    May 5, 2021
    Harvard College Premiere
    2021 Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work or research by final year undergraduate students
  • Akademie der Kunst, UNEXPECTED LESSONS - Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge
    Berlin
    Germany
    June 11, 2021
    German Premiere
    Curated Film Program
  • Third Horizon Film Festival
    Miami, FL
    United Arab Emirates
    June 28, 2021
    Official Selection
  • Mimesis Documentary Festival at CU Boulder
    Boulder, CO
    United States
    August 7, 2021
    Jury Award: Best Emerging Artist
  • Sentient.Art.Film OMNIBUS
    Virtual, Global
    August 15, 2021
    Curated Film Program
  • Regarding Museums, Barazani.Berlin + Cultural Workers Against Humboldt Forum
    Berlin
    Germany
    September 12, 2021
    Curated Film Program
  • New Renaissance Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    September 24, 2021
    Official Selection
  • Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM)
    Cologne
    Germany
    October 26, 2021
    Class Visit, Black Arts Movements
  • Anthology Film Archives
    New York
    United States
    March 10, 2022
    Curated Film Program
  • Cubitt Gallery
    London
    United Kingdom
    March 10, 2022
    Group Gallery Show
Distribution Information
  • Canyon Cinema
    Sales Agent
    Country: United States
    Rights: Internet, Video on Demand, Theatrical
Director Biography - Che Applewhaite

Che Applewhaite is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and organizer. He facilitates critical engagement with ongoing histories by remaking the specific forms that displace us. His student short film, A New England Document (Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020), screened at international film festivals and conferences in the USA, UK and Germany, and won the Best Emerging Artist jury award at Mimesis Documentary Festival at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has written for outlets including Harvard Magazine, Open City Documentary Festival, and Millennium Film Journal, and was a 2021 Seminar Fellow of Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. He is from London and Trinidad & Tobago, and received a B.A. (Hons) from Harvard University.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

It might as well have been a mirror. As I looked at the archival photo of a dark-skinned Ju’/hoansi boy standing behind a camera in the Kalahari Desert, I listened to what he would have wanted to know about his ethnographers—had he been able to study them too.
A New England Document refuses the relations of material inequivalency that premise documentary. Its cinematic imagination calls upon Chris Marker’s oeuvre, Black cinema and Caribbean theory to expose what the archive didn’t intend. Few of the over 40,000 photos taken during the four decades of Lorna and Laurence Marshall’s expeditions to the Kalahari Desert in present-day Namibia were of their family, much less of its patriarch— main expedition funder and co-founder of modern day defense company Raytheon. Working with and against the silences in the archive required a polyphonic palimpsest of archival found footage, photographs and documents paired with my own shooting in the Peabody Museum, wider Cambridge, Massachusetts and Peterborough, New Hampshire. These disjunctively edited images and sounds reflect how no full story is possible from the photographic subject’s perspective, yet the archive’s haunting atmosphere required a visual poetry embodying emotions and arguments expansively adequate to what it may have been.
A New England Document tarries with the boy in the picture from my own perspective as a Black queer cisgendered-male international student at Harvard. Inhabiting the boy’s gaze enacts an afro-fabulative performance that connects him to intersectional truths of my educational experiences —as a first time filmmaker, as curious of untold stories, as haunted by an institution’s colonial present. His gaze held me accountable to the task available to my hands: discomforting how Harvard’s project of training the noblesse oblige prevents the dismantling a system that requires any elite. Unsettling the Marshalls’ discourses of objectivity and access they gained from the South West African apartheid government, the film’s narrative makes particular the ruins of embodied and institutional whiteness.
A New England Document ruminates on legacy with a critical and compassionate formalism. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas changed the course of her life’s work after she joined the first stage of her parents’ engagement in 1952. Her New-York-Times-bestselling books advocated for understanding and making kin with non-human animates before critical theory caught up with what the Ju/’hoansi tribespeople knew for centuries. Her brother, the famed ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall, sustained a 40-year practice in the region. My telling of her parents’ story calls upon these reverberations by making images move rather than relying upon the time-insensitive and Othering photographic gaze attempted by them.
A New England Document develops an aesthetic language for reparative perspectives on stories once known. Archives like the one I investigated, and the descendants of people that made them, are everywhere in locations imprisoned by Euro-American imaginaries of cultural production. In keeping with the etymology of the essay—from the French essayer—in which my thoughts find form, this film is my first try at reframing—reckoning with and against—the afterlives of colonialism in order to generate possibilities for new futures.