in the interval

Both an intimate family portrait & cinematic collage of Black and trans collective memory and (be)longing, meditating on themes of safety, bodily autonomy and generations of compounding loss across time and media.
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Taking the form of a diptych, the first act interrogates the convergence of Black confrontations with police brutality and the annually increasing disparities of homicidal violence experienced by Black trans women and femmes, while the second act non-linearly traces the respective origins and evolutions of a Black non-binary trans femme scholar-artist and her late father who died unexpectedly ten years prior to filming. Organized around family VHS footage, viral media and found footage, present-day video diary using digital as well as Bolex 16mm cameras, performance, and other artifacts of an inherited personal and public archive, the film explores the continuities and cleavages of the filmmaker and her father's corresponding lived experiences, amidst the backdrop of unrelenting anti-Black, queer- and trans-antagonistic acts of violence, both state-sanctioned and otherwise and the aftermath of a deadly global pandemic. The film stands as an open-ended inquiry into what Frantz Fanon once called “the problem of time” for figuring Black life, collectivity and struggle—where past, present, blood kin and queer kin kaleidoscopically collide.