Khalik Allah – Black Mother (2018)

The 2018 edition’s poster child for this stance is without a doubt the second feature by New York street photographer Khalik Allah, Black Mother, which was presented in a world premiere. True/False effectively made Allah’s name in the film world by selecting his extraordinary debut, Field Niggas (2015), the portrait documentary shot on a corner 125th Street in Harlem, from the artist’s YouTube and Vimeo pages and premiering it in Missouri, after which it traveled the world to much acclaim. (Between the two features, Allah worked on Beyoncé’s powerful album-film, Lemonade.) This kind of idiosyncratic scouting and (now by showing his second film) fostering of talent, is something readily apparent throughout the festival as guests one year return with a film the following, and festival alumni show up without a new work simply to see what’s new in their field.

Another portrait film but of considerably expanded scope, Black Mother sees the New York-based director returns to his mother’s home of Jamaica to make an impressionist combination of polyphonic character diary and concatenation of Jamaican identity as seen by a grandson of the island. As in his first film, Allah separates his images from his sounds, so that his portraits, which gravitate towards the downtrodden, the damaged, the veterans of life, and an effulgence of beautiful women, are seen out of sync with the soundtrack, which is predominantly interviews with and rhapsodies by the subjects we are watching. Allah’s talent for finding bodies and faces of profound soul and character has been easily transposed to Jamaica, and his photographic eye, using a hip combination of multiple shooting formats both celluloid and digital, is unfailing in its exaltation.

The story, such as it is, is divided into trimesters and structured around the birth of a child. In this way, Allah is able to quite loosely fly through a survey of a Jamaican character birthed from a complex combination of the texture of the streets, those who live hard or live fun on them, the hybrid importance of Christianity and Rastafarianism, slave history, black beauty, political protest, and the serene and healthful embrace of the island’s spiritual and sensual possibilities. Allah’s cinema is as exciting as ever: The sense of time in the picture is precisely in the now but also aged and ever-renewing. He seems to have picked up the gauntlet thrown by the contemporary cinema of Terrence Malick, which allows for a floating, ecstatic freedom of camera, of character, and of storytelling, and has re-invented it for the Vimeo era of gaspingly pretty, highly individualized art-filmmaking. One image, slow motion, of the director standing by a flowing river as he rewinds the film in his Bolex, the camera gliding towards these two flows, that of film and of water, epitomize the personal vision of this enthralling work.