BFI Southbank announce ‘In The Black Fantastic’, visionary films from the African diaspora

This July BFI Southbank presents In The Black Fantastic, an exciting new season of features and shorts by visionary filmmakers from the African diaspora who draw on elements of fantasy to address racial injustice and explore alternative realities.

Programmed by writer and curator Ekow Eshun, whose previous publications include Africa State of Mind (2018), Africa Modern (2017) and Black Gold of the Sun (2005), the season showcases films that inventively recycle and reconfigure aspects of myth, speculative fiction, spiritual traditions and legacies of Afrofuturism. In The Black Fantastic includes celebrated titles by Djibril Diop Mambety (Touki Bouki, 1973), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991) Haile Gerima (Sankofa, 1993), Souleymanne Cisse (Yeleen, 1987), John Sayles (The Brother from Another Planet, 1984) and Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, 1987) as well as recent films by Mati Diop (Atlantics, 2019) and Samuel ‘Blitz’ Bazawule (The Burial of Kojo, 2018).

In The Black Fantastic is presented in partnership with the Hayward Gallery who are opening a major new exhibition of the same name, also curated by Ekow Eshun, running from 29 June – 18 September. Bringing together a group of contemporary artists from the African diaspora In The Black Fantastic explores the creative possibilities of the fantastic as a bold space between the imagined and the real to express ideas and make cultural connections. These artists reimagine the ways in which we represent the past and think about the future, whilst engaging with the challenges and conflicts in the present day.

The parallel exhibition and film season features work by artists and filmmakers, from across different mediums and genres. These Black and post-colonial narratives of the speculative and the spiritual are revealed as invaluable sources of cultural knowledge and artistic inspiration. The embrace of the fantastical has nothing to do with escapism; instead it suggests alternative ways of being, confronting socially constructed ideas about race for a more expansive outlook.

Writer and curator Ekow Eshun said; “My aim in programming this season is to highlight the key role that film has played, alongside visual art, in establishing the terrain of the Black fantastic. The movies I’ve selected blur boundaries between the present and the past, the supernatural and the spiritual, the realist and the dreamlike. These are lyrical, thought-provoking and thrillingly imaginative works that grapple with the inequities of racialized society by conjuring bold new visions of Black possibility.”