Before The Applause

Soundsystem culture injects this triumphant short with a rallying cry, calling on all Black boys and men who have been labelled “soft” to Wake Up! Filmmaker Daniel Bailey returns to our screens with a mission - to turn the derogatory accusation of softness on its head. In yardie culture, “yuh too soft” can mark you from childhood, the equivocation of gentleness and sensitivity with weakness and irrelevance. In this ensemble production, Soft Bwoi (2022) refuses such sentiment and Babylon itself, using folklore and imagery from Caribbean carnival culture and queerness to redefine this misconception. The concealment of emotion, embracing norms, and the repression of femininity are no longer signs of power and strength. Instead, it is in seeking the divine feminine, deep connections with one another and the rejection of toxicity that will unite Black men to find better ways to survive in this harsh but limitless world. Yes lawd!

In this episode, Daniel discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

Two siblings process their grief after the loss of their father and question if their already strained relationship can be saved. In a bereavement counsellor’s office, Noura and Faiz begin to unpack years of anger and conflict that, after the death of their father, has led them down a path of accusation and guilt. Writer and director Mohammedally Shushtari explores the role that therapy can play in diasporic Arab culture. In this unfamiliar environment the two siblings are confronted with each other, and their hidden feelings and truths. They must use their words to find a path back to one another, or risk a second, heartbreaking loss.

In this episode, Mohammedally discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

Using archival footage and poetry, Campbell X showcases the unstoppable force of Black people united across time and water. Still We Thrive (2021) was filmed at a time of renewed faith in protesting and screened during a global push-back against public disobedience. The film contains an invigorating blend of music and poetry, including A Negro Speaks of Rivers (Langston Hughes) and Yemoja: Mother of Waters (Olive Senior). Campbell X (Stud Life, DES!RE) presents a celebration of Black togetherness using archival footage and powerful performances by Martina Laird, Michelle Tiwo, Kim Tatum and Don Warrington. They, the oppressive forces operating throughout the world, may be an unrelenting force but the same remains true; together we will find ways to flourish, emboldened by ancestry, mythology and an enduring relationship to the waters.

In this episode, Campbell X discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

Looking for love, hopeless romantic Alie allows her friend to set her up with a mystery man, leading to an unforgettable night. After a series of unsuccessful dates and relationships, and with the encouragement of her best friend, Alie decides to get her love life back on track by trying something new. With the time and location of the date the only details at her disposal, she sets off to meet a complete stranger, but it does not take her long to realise that romance and connection can be just as spontaneous as they have been fleeting. Written and directed by Stephané Alexandre, romantic comedy The Perfect Knight (2022) conjures butterflies in stomachs and reignites the notion that love could be just around the corner.

In this episode, Stephané discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

The contradictions of home and belonging underlie this autobiographical and documentary-style exploration of the queer Chinese diaspora. For filmmaker Samuel Zhang, Shanghai represents one end of a long term relationship and a past home, but only in the sense of fading memories. In the place where we left and arrived (2022) shows a personal journey, presented through words and the use of digital mappings, as Zhang attempts to understand the possible definitions of home, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese lives, and the reality of being queer in and away from China. Offering a look at the wider context of these important issues, the film gathers shared experiences of other queer Chinese people living in the UK. We see how queer identities intertwined with diaspora are bound up by rejection from the home country and the struggle of ethnocultural transformation. In this way, the reality for people who are marginalised, either culturally, geographically, or socially, is always a state of exile.

In this episode, Samuel discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

A sharp interrogation of colonialism and its effects on our living environment and social world presented as a defiant poetry performance. How heavy are lungs, forced to draw in air toxified by war and degradation? In this poetry film, Palestinian filmmaker Reema Saad and Dominic Guerrera, a Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri poet, collaborate to envision a future of liberation, free from the violent legacies of oppression of Indigenous people. Shot around the site of an abandoned ship on Kaurna Land, otherwise known as Adelaide, Australia, Suffocation (2022) questions what sorts of changes Earth would undergo without relenting assaults on the natural world. As flags representing colonial states are removed and destroyed, we are left to wonder how easily air might pass through communities able to thrive with their cultural memories.

In this episode, Reema and Dominic discuss the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

A family retells their experience escaping the horrors of the Argentine dictatorship and 'La Junta Militar' in the 70s. It is 1976 and Argentina is experiencing a military coup d'état, led by Jorge Rafael Videla and backed by the US, that will grip the country for over six years. At this time, filmmaker Mourad Kourbaj’s family is enduring the greatest upheaval of their lives, the effects of which remain some fifty years later. Una Muerte y Un Nacimiento//A Death and A Birth (2022) recounts the family’s experience through their own words in a memoir that honours the journey and search for safety they and so many others took at this historical time. Blending together oral histories and collages of family photographs and found footage, the film demonstrates the losses and lives turned upside down by the Argentine military dictatorship.

In this episode, Mourad discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

Hidden in the undergrowth of a disused military base just outside of Havana lies a refuge for gay men, for cruising, connection and imagining better futures. In this important documentary, filmmaker Dami Sainz Edwards is interested in two subjects: the physical land of a clandestine cruising spot and the unnamed gay Cuban men who visit it. We meet several people who use the space for sex and socialisation and, through their own voices, learn about the rules, expectations and experiences that take place between these walls. To what extent is gay culture affected, when it is forced to exist in anonymity, away from the embrace of the cishet population? Batería (2016) speaks to the oppression and homophobia still present in Cuba today, and the continued culture of resistance that turns rubble into shelter.

In this episode, Michael discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more.

A trio of dancers explore tidal cycles of repair, loss, joy and intimacy, expressed through movement and digital imagery. In Yewande 103’s latest offering, Fountain (2022) speaks to the tides that shape our world and exist within our bodies. Guided by choreographer Alexandrina Hemsley’s tightly woven movement score and filmed in a darkened theatre space, the film explores the ways in which Blackness is contained in water. It is a spectrum of great magnitude, from the playfulness of splashing through a fountain in the summertime, to the oceanic passages forced upon those who were stolen from their homes. We are motivated to consider the inescapable tides of life and death and our watery bodies’ simultaneous existence as oceans, tombs and sanctuaries.

In this episode, Rudzani & Rickay discuss the film, their performances and the film's inspirations.

What is left of family ties when our elders have passed? Michael Jenkins explores loss and new beginnings in this touching short. Leon wakes from an unsettling dream, calling him to go straight to his grandmother’s house where he discovers that she has passed on. Turned away by his estranged extended family during the Nine Night proceedings, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery, guided by a mysterious figure. Filmed against the backdrop of Bristol’s hills, Pickney (2021), written and directed by Michael Jenkins, traces a young mixed-race boy’s grief and yearning for connection to a family he feels only partially related to. Does the loss of his nan sever the last remaining ties to his Caribbean family, or present an opportunity to reflect and act on the aspects of his life and identity that he feels has been missing?

In this episode, Michael discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

Outdoor activists discuss their experiences of working with their communities to foster a sense of connection and belonging to the natural world. When People of Colour make up only 1% of visitors to UK National Parks (according to The Campaign to Protect Rural England), is it true to say that the British outdoors are for everyone? In We Are Nature (2022), directors and producers Jaha Browne and Olivia Martin McGuire speak to those currently working to dispel myths of exclusivity associated with visiting rural landscapes. The film centres on the gentle activism that is involved in taking Communities of Colour into nature, to walk, exercise, exist within and find inspiration from. Following lockdown restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are reminded that a real relationship to our outside world is a pertinent issue in the struggle for liberation.

In this episode, Jaha discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

April Lin 林森 presents a dream-like journey across parallel dimensions in their speculative film that imagines a world without capitalism. One protagonist grapples with the reality of living in a capitalist world lacking in meaning. The other, living in a utopian world guided by cosmic entity Ta, reveals the possibilities of a life unbound by Western constructs of race, gender and class. The film’s title comes from ‘tā’, the monosyllabic sound which, in Mandarin, encompasses all third person pronouns: 他 (third person male), 她 (third person female), and 它 (more-than-human lifeforms and objects). As these multiple genders and modes of being are all pronounced ‘tā’, the word ‘ta’ has in recent years been reconfigured and adopted as a gender neutral pronoun. Communicating through a series of letters, the protagonists must face the realities of each others’ dimensions, shaking their understanding of their own world in the process.

In this episode, April discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

Poems become photographs that become moving images in this poignant exploration of family, memory and loss, as an artist finally returns home. In Ikom, Cross River State, Nigeria, filmmaker and artist Ofem Ubi interrogates what can be brought back when an artist has left home to develop their craft, and which forces inevitably call them home. His grandfather reflects on his precious handwritten records of wives, children and grandchildren, as the space left by Ubi’s grandmother leaves a hole in the community’s consciousness. Back on Home Soil (2023) began as a poetry and photography project, tracing the filmmaker’s family history through ruminations and photographs shared with his community. It takes its latest form as a touching film that archives this process, continuing its pursuit to find how memory, family and time can cope in the search for normalcy, after having been seared by loss.

In this episode, Ofem discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

A visual poem inspired by Akwaeke Emezi’s memoir Dear Senthuran, tracing stories of elders through a present-day journey across the British countryside. Mojereoma Ajayi-Egunjobi contains the memories of her ancestors, bearing both a lingering trauma passed down through generations and a sense of shared resilience. While moving through a woodland setting, Mojere, on crutches, reflects on the burdens that weigh her down - a relenting permanence, grief, an overwhelming sense of emotional fragility more delicate than the thinnest thread. She is joined in her thoughts by her grandmother, who remains an important figure in the artist’s spiritual life. Dear Omolere (2022) is a powerful performance that speaks to disability, spirituality and the strength that can be found when you allow yourself to be guided by the will of those who came before you; those who overcame and continued their journeys.

In this episode, Mojere discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

A meditation on the work of the trailblazing Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter and an interrogation of the politics of artistic memory. maud. (2022) demands answers as to why Sulter's legacy and impact has been so well-hidden from the wider Scottish artistic landscape. Released fourteen years after her death, the film explores the politics of memory and how this intersects with art; who do we celebrate and who goes largely unrecognised? Filmed in Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews, four Black artists currently making art in Scotland - Adebusola Ramsay, Sekai Machache, Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie and Camara Taylor - discuss how learning about Maud Sulter has affected them and their practice. We are called upon to explore Sulter’s impressive body of work ourselves, including her writing, visual art and collaborations with other artists such as Lubaina Himid and Ingrid Pollard. Directed by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona.

In this episode, Chizu & Xavier discuss the film and its inspirations.

Throughout the borough of Queens, New York, Women and Femmes of Colour practice reciprocity in support of their communities. Through an audiovisual poem, Cecilia Lim provides snapshots of the many ways in which this reciprocal relationship manifests, from caring for elders and preparing food, to protests for workers’ rights and standing firm against hate. Pagpapa(-)alam: To Wish You Well, So You Know (2022) beautifully frames the multiplicity of Queens through a joining together of different languages, both spoken and subtitled in layers. The film, which is accompanied by a zine, positions community care in the sharing and receiving of resources and in the honouring of our ancestors.

In this episode, Cecilia discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

Human and non-human bodies are brought together to explore and celebrate the complexity of the natural world and our place in it. In this screendance film, director and environmental activist Madeline Shann interrogates the presence of Black people and People of Colour in the British Countryside. Through her collaboration with dancer Rudzani Moleya, a Black figure is situated in a landscape brimming with luscious green flora and constant movement, where she may represent an avatar or perhaps even the embodiment of nature itself. The Spring (2022) combines delicate close-ups and impressive aerial shots to remind us of the expansive possibilities of belonging to nature. What would we gain and what would we save, if we created more distance between ourselves and the anthropocene?

In this episode, Madeline discusses the inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

Two friends prepare the dishes of their grandmothers and consider how, as generational migrants, they stay connected to their cultures. Filmmakers Noah Berhitu and Alejandra Rogghé Pérez present a touching discussion where they seek to share their experiences of migration. Their grandmothers represent a familial memory of the cultures and places they are now physically separated from. However, it is in honouring their elders who have passed on, through the imagery of clothing and use of language, that together the friends find their way back to their cultures. Violeta & Sofia (2021) centres on the preparation of a meal that will be shared communally, beautifully positioning the ritualistic role of cooking and the food we eat as a comforting means of connection for members of the diaspora.

In this episode, Noah & Alejandra discuss their inspirations and influences behind the film and more. 

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to multi-awarding winning writer, researcher and Founder of Fringe of Colour Jess Brough about this year's festival and also director, choreographer, performer, and creative producer Mele Broomes and her film A Service in Committing to Love Manifestations of Love and Solidarity #2.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to award winning performance storyteller Mara Menzies about her film Consequence.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to British stand-up comedian and radio presenter Nish Kumar about his film Nish Kumar In Trouserless Conversation.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to queer Zimbabwean writer, performer and curator Mandla Rae about Mandla’s film Category Mistake.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In the second of our specials, Briana Pegado journeys through some of the themes which have threaded through the Fringe of Colour Films festival. Exploration surrounding stories of lived experience through humour, queerness, sexual and gender expression as well as identities of people of colour and Blackness globally are some of the core aspects and inspirations for our creators. The work they create from these various themes is astounding and continues to show how immeasurable the imagination is.

This episode features interview excerpts from A.T., Mandla Rae, Esme Allman and Jess Brough. 

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In the first of two specials, Briana Pegado journeys through some of the themes which have threaded through the Fringe of Colour Films festival. Exploration surrounding stories of lived experience through humour, queerness, sexual and gender expression as well as identities of people of colour and Blackness globally are some of the core aspects and inspirations for our creators. The work they create from these various themes is astounding and continues to show how immeasurable the imagination is.

This episode features interview excerpts from Hannah Lavery, Mara Menzies, Nish Kumar and Athena Kugblenu. 

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to queer Kenyan artist and pole dancer A.T. about their film Bloom.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to poet, playwright, performer and director Hannah Lavery about her film The Drift.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to poet, writer, theatre-maker and facilitator Esme Allman about her film CLUB.

Last year Fringe of Colour launched an online film festival and as part of that programme, we commissioned a collection of new work by some talented artists. To celebrate those films, we are revisiting conversations with the filmmakers.

In this episode, Briana Pegado chats to Athena Kugblenu British standup comedian, filmmaker, and writer about her film WPAU (White People Are Unreasonable).