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"I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
Contemporary African and Afrodiasporic filmmakers explore ancestral roots, cultural and familial memory, and delve into the haunting mystics and social politics of connection, yearning, immigration, Western hegemony, and hopes of return throughout the Global South. Afro-descendants live everywhere on the globe, speaking multiple languages, while negotiating relationships that simultaneously reveal differences and unexpected similarities of Black people worldwide. While making new lives, friendships, and communities, the characters in these films also negotiate what it is to remember who they are or where they come from, by reconciling struggle and loss into resonant connections.
LEAVE THE EDGES blurs narrative boundaries of portraiture, vérité and performance to evoke an abstracted fluidity of cultural exchange which ripple beyond temporal horizons of our lifetimes. From the African origins of flamenco in southern Spain to the prevalence of Christianity and commemorations of slave rebellions in Guadeloupe, LEAVE THE EDGES hones in on ritual, movement and performance. The film meditates on the evolution of Black cultures, which are indelibly marked simultaneously by colonialism, and act as an agent of resistance to colonisers. This film is cyclical in themes concerning heritage, plurality and identity, and is influenced by Édouard Glissant's poignant theories on "globality" and "opacity" that recognize our vast diversity inherent to Black and African cultural inheritance.
"I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
Contemporary African and Afrodiasporic filmmakers explore ancestral roots, cultural and familial memory, and delve into the haunting mystics and social politics of connection, yearning, immigration, Western hegemony, and hopes of return throughout the Global South. Afro-descendants live everywhere on the globe, speaking multiple languages, while negotiating relationships that simultaneously reveal differences and unexpected similarities of Black people worldwide. While making new lives, friendships, and communities, the characters in these films also negotiate what it is to remember who they are or where they come from, by reconciling struggle and loss into resonant connections.
LEAVE THE EDGES blurs narrative boundaries of portraiture, vérité and performance to evoke an abstracted fluidity of cultural exchange which ripple beyond temporal horizons of our lifetimes. From the African origins of flamenco in southern Spain to the prevalence of Christianity and commemorations of slave rebellions in Guadeloupe, LEAVE THE EDGES hones in on ritual, movement and performance. The film meditates on the evolution of Black cultures, which are indelibly marked simultaneously by colonialism, and act as an agent of resistance to colonisers. This film is cyclical in themes concerning heritage, plurality and identity, and is influenced by Édouard Glissant's poignant theories on "globality" and "opacity" that recognize our vast diversity inherent to Black and African cultural inheritance.