Black Mother

Khalik Allah's 2018 documentary was shot in Jamaica. The director travels the island and records the people he meets; city centres, countryside and church gatherings sit in the same flow. The formal decision is to separate sound from image. The person speaking is usually not in frame; the narrative shows faces as portraits while the voices overlap and who is talking becomes unclear. The film uses different recording formats together, with sixteen millimetre, video and digital following one another. The structure is divided by the stages of a pregnancy. Religion, the colonial past and sex work are treated inside the same narrative. Who it's for: those who like experimental documentary and portrait cinema. Who it's not for: viewers expecting informative reporting; the film neither explains nor cites.