Drawing inspiration from Baroque paintings, the team managed to build sets as stand-ins for a Soviet school, apartment, and prison, and then lit them dramatically to give all of the Russian scenes a theatrical feel.

“Because of limited budget, we couldn’t build as many full sets as we wanted, so [production designer Kristen Bonnalie] built one set that kind of tripled as three different sets…” Hurley shares. “She would line the layers and layers of material on top of each other, and the next day, we would just strip that layer, and then it would be a different set… it was just amazing.”

Hurley loves the challenge of scaling thing down creatively to make budgets work. In Potato Dreams of America, the minor concessions the team was forced to make ultimately led to independent film ingenuity. One example can be found in the Russian classroom scenes, which Hurley had originally written in a pretty straight-forward way. When financial considerations prohibited the production from making authentic “Soviet style desks” — which Hurley said he would have required — they opted for a more experimental approach instead. Drawing inspiration from a number of high school photos Hurley had held onto, all the classroom conversations took place during group photo shoots instead, with all the students lined up in tiered rows.

“In a way, it sort of makes it a little more presentational, theatrical, weird and a commentary on fitting in…” explains Hurley. “It started out as a budgetary constraint, but I’m actually much happier with the way it is now than if it were a regular classroom scene.”

Perhaps the film’s most grimace-worthy event takes place during one of these group photo scenes — when the entire class moves from one offensive behavior to another. Their casual slew of homophobic comments eventually snowballs into everyone chating a Jewish slur in unison. The teacher only fans the flames.

“I remember that one was a turning point,” recalls Hurley. “I came home that day and I told my mom, ‘I don’t wanna live in this country at all. I don’t wanna grow up in this country.'”

Potato Dreams of America contains plenty of moments that reflect that age-old adage of “truth is stranger than fiction” — but as Hurley explains with a giggle, its events are “99% reality.” From Potato’s mother becoming a mail order bride to secrets about his new father (Dan Lauria) in America, the film’s many twists and turns are presented in both adorably lovable and darkly comedic fashion. And though the nature of semi-autobiographical works required Hurley to condense certain characters and omit certain events, he stresses that nothing was made up.

One of Hurley’s favorite moments revolves around a misguided liberal teacher who condescendingly encourages Potato to celebrate his Russian heritage, and thus, transfers him to ESL even after he expresses his deep desire to learn English. She even introduces him to a fellow Russian student so they can speak Russian together. The only catch? That student isn’t actually Russian at all; he’s Georgian.

“That was one of my favorite moments, especially the transition of the teacher to the student,” laughs Hurley. “She thinks that they’re going to be best friends, but it’s actually everything that Potato is trying to escape.”

Hurley’s use of accents throughout the film is notably symbolic. While in Russia, every character in the film speaks with typical American accents because they inhabit the same world. Once they reach America, American Potato, played by Tyler Bocock, and his mother, played by Marya Sea Kaminski, become the lone characters with Russian accents.

“The crux of the story is coming to America and being an immigrant… it’s almost like a second childhood; you’re reborn again when you come to a different country, and you have to learn a different language…” explains Hurley, who also cites the fact that his original ID card said “permanent alien” on it. “It was really important to me to impress on American audiences that sense of: suddenly, you’re child-like; suddenly, you’re alien; suddenly, you don’t fit in, or you’re struggling to communicate and people don’t understand you.”

“To me, the superficial quality of language is not as important as what it stands for,” he adds.

Yet while Potato Dreams of America is an immigration story, it is also a story of Potato learning to embrace his sexuality. American Potato discovers gay films through Seattle’s famous Scarecrow Video store, and ultimately finds liberation by sharing his truth with his family and discovering other gay people in Seattle. The city itself also serves as a character, in a way.

“Coming from Russia anywhere to America would have been an improvement, but coming from Vladivostok to Seattle was especially an improvement, in terms of beautiful people and people being more open,” reflects Hurley. “It really exaggerated the whole experience of this Cinderella story wonderland of coming to a better place.”

This transition is best portrayed through a musical number featuring performer Lady Rizo as the Virgin Mary, complete with glittery robes, background dancers dressed in furry angel wings, and a soulful song about freedom. Likewise, a who’s who of trans and queer artists from Seattle also make guest appearances throughout the film, and their presence also serves as a strong indicator of the local support which was necessary to pull off a feat like Potato Dreams of America.

“This is my community; I could only make this movie because so many people rallied behind me and were willing to help out for free or work for very little money, and give everything they have to help to make it happen,” says Hurley.

The process from writing to releasing Potato Dreams of America was an arduous eight year process. Yet Potato Dreams of America is a small film which feels huge. Wes Hurley has told a story that no one else can tell — and even if they could, it would look nothing like this. That much is blissfully evident.

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fevaporate

Mother is a shelter.
 

Photography by Olga Rabetskaya

From afar, I see two large black circles drawn on the ground. The larger one fills up nearly a third of the width of the room and sits smack dab in the center. Akinyki moves gracefully within it.

At any other show, I might have felt awkward for arriving late — but this performance is part of Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival, and its long-lasting nature pre-supposes such unpredictability. I am encouraged to move freely about the space. I’ll even become part of the piece if I stay long enough, I am told. So I move to the back of the room and settle in quite close to the circle, symmetrical to Akinyi.

Subtle movements bring her out of the larger circle to cross a 15-foot gap into a smaller circle, which contains a pair of shoes, a chair, and fabric draped on the back of the chair. Yet that crossing is no simple quick movement; it takes place over an extended, non-linear period — and as she moves from nothing into something, the anticipation heightens. Her movements gradually transform from subtlety into a great flow: they remind me of Afro Caribbean dance; they remind me of Capoeira; they remind me of Oschun, the river-goddess of Yoruban mythology.

When Akinyi finally enters the smaller circle, her flowy movements become humbled, turning nearly still. She gradually removes the fabric draped on the back of the chair and dons it like a loose hijab, leaving the clogs untouched. I catch glimpses of her bare feet; they are edged in pure black, like the thick borders of the circles, carefully crafted from dirt. The recurring audio loop becomes an echo, playing tricks on my mind, devoid of all logic.

On the far opposite side of the room are two audience members. One has raised hands and dances in tiny alternating steps. The other hums and whoops on occasion, and though it feels unscripted, her voice is too trained and her presence too felt to be complete happenstance. She erupts into a dynamic melody which reminds me of an Islamic call to prayer, and I recall my trip to Turkey, where I first fell in love with those sounds. I’m simultaneously transported to a nondenominational worship service, existing somewhere between Latin America and the Middle East.

Soon, Akinyi approaches the woman with the raised hands and raises her own. Draped in flowy black, the two become mirrors of one another. I think of a funerary procession as Akinyi removes the scarf and drapes it gently over the head of the other woman.

Immediately and unexpectedly, I am moved.
Tears begin to well in my eyes.

Maybe it’s because I know something about this other woman and the deep grief that she has been feeling about the recent loss of her grandmother. Maybe it’s the otherworldly feeling of being transported to Turkey and the fact that this woman and her grandmother are from Turkey. Somehow, I feel it. Akinyi tenderly takes the other woman in a full embrace, and it is evident: transmutation and healing are taking place. It’s perfect magic.

Not too long after, the performance ends with Akinyi walking over to a sound station and unceremoniously decreasing the volume on the audio recording. She then retreats into a back room, no longer a performer or an otherworldly entity. The multicultural atmosphere evaporates along with her.

Having just witnessed what feels like a vague yet powerful something, I am curious to receive confirmation. I walk to the friend upon whom the fabric was draped. Her name is Rana San, and she is one of the curators of this year’s Yellow Fish.

“Did you just have a moment?” I ask, still incredulous, as I give her a hug.

“Yup,” she replies, hugging me back, teary-eyed. “My grandma was all up in here.”

She then explains how her Muslim grandmother never wore a scarf unless they went to a graveyard. On those occurrences, a scarf was also draped over Rana San’s head — but it was never tied.

A few moments after, Akinyi emerges from the back room, and I learn that none of her seven performances at Yellow Fish are planned. She merely feels the energy in the room and moves with the actions that intuitively come to mind. Tonight, when she looked over at the scarf on the chair, she knew what she had to do. Set against a backdrop of what felt like an impromptu call to prayer, Akinyi replicated the same loose draping of the scarf that Rana San’s grandmother once did — and for that instant, the transference of those actions meant everything.

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Night Heron – “Dreamz” Music Video

First off, you all met on a concert tour and were working across country lines! Can you speak a bit about your collaborative process for this particular project?

Human beings blend in and out of natural space in the music video, and visual effects are employed to convey a subtle effect that seems to pair nicely with the opening Joseph Campbell quote, which says, “For the dream and the dreamer are ultimately one.” Can you elaborate more on that concept and how it was used to shape the visual language?

Instructions for the Night is the name of the album; this track is called “Dreamz.” Some of you also speak openly of psychedelics. Whether in the process of making the record or the music video, do you have any processes or rituals to help you tap into liminal states as a generative space?

Sometimes when I go to other countries — including Latin American ones — I think about how the relationship to the spiritual plane feels closer and more in the general consciousness than in the United States. Do you feel there is anything particular about Mexican culture and the landscape in Mexico which helps heighten the concepts of this track, in particular?

Wardrobe and style obviously played a huge role in this piece, but interacts deeply with the landscape. How did you arrive at the aesthetic that you did, and why did it feel so important to center human beings in nature in such a way?

Hanna-Katarina (Art Director & Wardrobe):
For me, the aesthetic was birthed from this lush landscape and the plants themselves. Truly, first came the song “Dreamz,” [with] its entrancing, colorful and sensual rhythm.

I hear the song and I see certain colors, certain movements.

We talked of the concept of using human characters to depict plants, transforming them into creatures that are neither human, animal, or plant.

For the aesthetic, I was very inspired by many visionary and surreal paintings from all over the world, in which there are human depictions of states of consciousness, dreams and interaction with natural and celestial worlds.

These surreal, majestic realms I deeply longed to see in movement!

I was moved by the storytelling in these paintings I admire, the blurring of lines between humans, animals and nature.
It was this blur I wanted to attempt to achieve.

Mythology and human story telling of time through narrative, craft and costume perpetually plays a big role of inspiration for me.

A lot of the material we used for these costumes was from found materials from nature and Jules’ garden.

With certain ideas and concepts in mind, we used what we found and what was hearty and durable enough to be worn and manipulated.

I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be a very diverse set of characters, like a moving painting of stories and spaces through time,through dreams.

I long to play in a place of interconnectivity, where we humans are open to the consciousness of the plants and animals, that we see no borders between.

I like to think of these characters that way, somewhere suspended between species.

In totality I feel this video piece about losing time, losing reference of what we are; be it a piece of sand, a plant, a human, energy, the dreamer or the dream. Are we the visuals or the sound? In collaboration, the statement is even bolder, because we lose the borders of ownership over a piece and definition of genre. This is really powerful. For me, this is where a piece of art can totally come to life on its own. This [Joseph Campbell] quote, though wildly simple, is utterly profound. We are the dream, baby.

What kind of budget did you work with to pull off such ambitious looks?

With the twangy plucks of a fiddle and the histrionic moaning of the word, “Daddy,” is our opening shot: in the background, out of focus, a man and woman have sex on a couch. In the foreground, a vibrating cell phone shows that Mom is calling. Shortly after the man comes, the young woman, Danielle, dismounts and steps into focus as she approaches her phone. Immediately after establishing Danielle as a sexual being, her mother’s voicemail rears her back into a place of childishness.

“Hi, it’s me, Mommy. Are you coming to the funeral today? We gotta leave soon,” says the voice on the phone.

After an exchange of money and a bracelet, the man is revealed to be a client of Danielle’s. Danielle is a sugar baby — a young woman who exchanges company and sex to older men for financial gifts — but this is just part of where the film’s title comes from.

In an interview with Alma, writer and director Emma Seligman talks about “sugaring” which is common among New York University students, where she studied film. Having tried it herself, Seligman imagined how a scenario would play out where a sugar baby runs into her sugar daddy at a shiva, a Jewish ceremony for mourning following funerals. Moving into an era that gives voice to sex workers feels empowering, but as we see throughout the movie, Danielle’s decisions lead her to feeling trapped and confused due to her own immaturity. As Danielle inches toward her self-made degree in Business and Feminism, we see why she might be drawn to something like sugaring. She can be her own boss, create relationships on her own terms, and most of all, make money from doing so. But when she finds herself under the same roof as her parents, her sugar daddy, and even her ex-girlfriend, Danielle is reminded that in creating certain identities for oneself, you’re still under risk of scrutiny.

Seligman takes a moment of sorrow, at a shiva, and turns it into a script about relationships within a tight-knit Jewish community. Danielle’s reliance on her parent’s payroll keeps her under the thumbs of both mommy and daddy as well as her sugar daddy, Max. Her fabrication that she is a babysitter only gives way to more humorous wordplay and problems throughout the movie.

There is a stereotype about Ashkenazim — part of the Jewish diaspora who settled in the Holy Roman Empire, what is now Eastern Europe — as being neurotic and nagging. Seligman uses this as a tool in her script as both world and character-building. Danielle is constantly meleed by the other guests of the shiva. Does she have a boyfriend? How much does she weigh? What does she plan to do with her degree in Business and Gender Studies? Seligman’s dialogue paired with close-ups of Danielle perfectly exhibits the claustrophobic pecking endured at a shiva.

With more room in the feature film Seligman also chooses to include Maya, Danielle’s ex-girlfriend and childhood friend. Maya is on a path to become a lawyer and is, in general, just a Nice Jewish Girl; conversely, Danielle struggles to hold a conversation or eye contact with her elders. Danielle is not the most likable protagonist there is, but her struggle is certainly relatable. She is sneering and avoidant, even when speaking to Maya. The word, nebbishe—pitifully timid, comes to mind when it comes to Danielle. Her inability to be in control of the situation is what makes her struggle for independence so much more painful to watch.

Shiva Baby Film Trailer

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Photo by Tammy Nguyen

“Growing up, I used music as a way to process my emotions a lot of the time,” says Gonzalez, who hints that she had a difficult and tumultuous upbringing. “I used music as a way to calm my nerves and have an outlet for how I was feeling… for a lot of women — and women of color, especially — we are taught to be really tough through whatever we’re going through, because we have to survive. It’s like a survival instinct, you know?”

This survival instinct inevitably crept into the music of Nite Jewel, which Gonzalez admits was especially guarded and cryptic in its earlier years.

“The music was really hazy or you weren’t really able to really know me, because I felt like presenting my tragedy to the public was really a cheap shot…” Gonzalez recalls. “People like me aren’t really afforded the chance to be vulnerable.”

With No Sun however, Gonzalez was left without a choice; the sheer emotional devastation she felt demanded a more vulnerable album.

“I was in such a down and out place… there was nothing I really could do to not present my pain,” she explains. “I was just surrounded by it, and I just went back to the method of when I was a child by using music to process my emotions… this craft that I had honed over a really long time to deal with the way I was feeling.”

The album’s timing fell into lockstep with the sociopolitical climate. COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns heightened public exposure to the sorrows of marginalized people, especially around issues of police brutality and violence against women or transgender individuals.

“I had this sort of painful process that I was trying to externalize,” Gonzalez explains. “I felt like the world would be able to grasp that — [that] they would be able to hear it moreso than in the past because of all the exposure of grief in society.”

No Sun is titled in part after “When There is No Sun,” a song released on Sun Ra Quartet’s 1978 album, New Steps. Gonzalez presents a sparse cover of it as the album’s closing track, following in Ra’s footsteps as she repeats the lyrics:

The sky is a sea of darkness
When there is no sun
The sky is a sea of darkness
When there is no sun to light the way
There is no day
There is no day
There’s only darkness
Eternal sea of darkness

“When I heard that track and I covered it just for fun in my house, it became the song that truly made me realize that [No Sun] was going to come together as an album, because the lyrics were very evocative of the state of mind that I was in at that time…” Gonzalez recalls. “What I gather from [Sun Ra’s] belief system was that he believed outerspace and the galactic universe was a space of possible freedom and liberation, but the song is also a little bit foreboding…”

The tension between the freedom found in darkness and the frightening nature of that same darkness is a paradox that defines the entirety of No Sun. In parallel, Gonzalez believes that the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic helped make listeners more receptive to the album.

“I feel incredibly grateful that that happened,” she shares. “I just wish that the circumstance had been different, but this record had been made for people to process pain and all the different emotions that go with that — joy, anger, sadness, freedom, whatever it is. I hope that that provides some sort of comfort for some people,” she says. “That’s all I can hope for.”

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Yet Dos Santos is adamant to never make the same record twice. For City of Mirrors, they enlisted the help of Chicago-based musician Elliot Bergman — best known for his involvement in projects such as the experimental Afrobeat project, Nomo, and an indie duo with his sister Natalie Bergman, called Wild Belle — and recorded in Bergman’s Los Angeles studio. The added perspective, they thought, would encourage them to step outside of their own songwriting process and introduce an element of experimentation.

Bergman’s presence allowed for Dos Santos to essentially add a sixth band member, who could help them distill and rethink material that they had previously written or bring new ideas for them to build on together. As a producer, Bergman also helped the band discover the recording studio as a different kind of creative space, rather than a space to simply document.

“For instance, we improvise quite a bit in our live setting, but we’ve never taken that energy within the context of the studio,” Chavez explains. “There were moments when we would just come together, and [Bergman] was facilitating these contexts of improvisation that we used to create in the moment. To have his perspective was really key in helping us do something different or grow in a different way, etc., and that was what we wanted.”

Improvising Love Song for Mournings

Improvisation made its way onto numerous tracks of the album, including the album’s title track, “City of Mirrors,” which was built upon a warm-up session between percussionist Peter “Maestro” Vale, drummer Daniel Villarreal, and bassist Jaime Garza. Under Bergman’s guidance, it grew bit by bit, with Bergman, Chavez and guitarist Nathan Karagianis progressively layering on elements until a musical form emerged. The final version also guest-features Martín Perna on baritone saxophone, which rounds out the robust, melodically-memorable track.

“There’s an aspect of [“City of Mirrors”] that is very melancholic or sounds a bit like a lament,” explains Chavez, who was then challenged to find a suitable lyrical counterpart.

Thus, “City of Mirrors” came to be named after Macondo, a fictional city found in Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s landmark novel, 100 Years of Solitude. As Chavez describes, Macondo is a central character throughout the book — “this sort of magical city which is at once this place of both beauty and dread; mourning and hope,” referred often by Márquez as the City of Mirages or City of Mirrors.

Dos Santos hails from Chicago, where nearly 30% of the population identified as Hispanics-Latinos in the 2020 census. They are the city’s second largest racial or ethnic group, with its largest populations coming from Mexico and Puerto Rico. Conversations between Chavez and Vale, who is Puerto Rican, helped inspired the track’s subject matter.

“I found myself getting these images of what I soon realized were these flashes of the island of Puerto Rico…” Chavez recalls. “[With] everything that [was] going on with the post-Hurricane Maria moment, the political moment and uprising that summer prior, and all of the earthquakes… I think this song is about the island, and it really was kind of a love song to the island, but it’s this very melancholic message about loss; about mourning.”

“I just kept thinking, that in some ways, Puerto Rico is this sort of place like that: Ground Zero for colonial encounters; this place of trauma and dread and violence, and a lot of beauty, as well,” he adds.

Reflecting Back the Tensions

Throughout its 13-track duration, City of Mirrors presents many musical and percussive ideas. Depending on a listener’s intentions, state of mind, or understanding of the subject matter, the same track may feel as though it is transmuting dark themes into a more positive output, just as it may wallow in a state of heavy, introspective reality. Album opener “A Shot in the Dark” and “Glorieta (Roundabout)” hold a sense of tender wonder, while numerous tracks, including “Alma Cósmica (Cosmic Soul)” and “A Tu Lado (By Your Side)” jump across or contemplate the fundamental nature of time. Perhaps most present are themes of loneliness and isolation, as found on”Palo Santo,” “Ghost. Me.,” and “Cages of Palaces,” which could be applicable at both individual and societal levels. All the same, the colorful dynamics of the music, rich with keyboards, guitars, and various kinds of wind and percussive instruments, doesn’t quite allow the lyrical heaviness to remain stagnant for exceptionally long.

“You can feel elation while at the same time, you’re experiencing trauma or loss,” says Chavez. “And I think the record has both, all the time, all the way through it… It can feel uplifting, while at the same time, you still kind of feel a lump in your throat. I think it’s both.”

First conceived in 2019 but released in late 2021, the album’s hard-to-pinpoint emotional state feels appropriate for pandemic times. Chavez believes the setting may have resulted in some positive surprises.

“This last year-and-a-half, the pandemic and all the rest have really forced a lot of us to reflect, because we had to,” says Chavez. “[We are] reflecting on ourselves and reflecting on the society that we live in; reflecting on our connections to other people… and so, I think the idea of mirror and reflection has the potential to resonate in ways that we didn’t really anticipate clearly, fully, when we were first making this record.”

Such resonance may also be indicative of changing attitudes towards multicultural music. Chavez intuits that the new media age has “cultivated within people a greater openness to different kinds of music from everywhere.” Perhaps it is a sign that listeners are finally understanding that American music inspired by Latin American musical traditions is not only a fad of the moment, but here to stay.

“Having kind of been active in the music industry now for about 20 years, I do recall in previous projects that I had in the early 2000s, where I would get really strange questions from journalists around language or crossover or things like that, which didn’t compute with me,” Chavez shares. “Being Latino from the United States, we’re all bicultural, or we have to grapple with both English and Spanish, or we have to grapple with thinking about issues of being mixed status, particularly within families and with citizenship. We’re all dial-surfers… That’s just our experience of the world in this country.”

“To be able to make music… that draws upon a well of broad influences… we’re not doing anything unique,” he concludes. “That’s just… of course. Of course that’s what we would do.”

Dos Santos‘ latest album is out now on Chicago-based label, International Anthem.

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Initially, the Mohawks’ blockade of a road running through The Pines is an opportunity for electrifying camaraderie. Shots of kids roving around and collecting firewood give the protest an almost summer camp-ish feel. For Ruby (Violah Beauvai), Beans’ enthusiastic younger sister, even an armed stand-off between law enforcement and protesters feels like an action movie. “There are a lot of policemen. This is cool,” she exclaims.

Beans, for her part, tries to keep this sense of magic alive for her, even amidst mounting deprivation. When Ruby complains about having oatmeal for the umpteenth time, a consequence of grocery store closures, Beans inspires her to pretend she’s eating ice cream. Through such moments of levity, Beans captures the perennial resourcefulness of kids, especially in times of crisis. The actors have an easy, lived-in chemistry, and the tensions between wary parents and their curious children play out across their facial expressions.

But interactions with the outside world reveal the futility of playing nice. At a grocery store in the upscale southern part of Montreal, a clerk who knows the family abruptly tells them, “You’re gonna have to leave.” Beans’ mom leans on the counter, whispering, “Adam, please,” but he only adjusts his glasses. This moment is one of Beans’ first clues that the categories of friendly acquaintance, ally, and hostile stranger have begun to blur.

The film is also interspersed with news broadcasts from 1990 documenting such resentments. In one, a woman fumes, “We’re not allowed to eat because of Indians,” referencing the Mohawks’ blockade of the Mercier Bridge connecting Mohawk land with the southern part of the city. In another, a man proposes cutting off power to Mohawk homes. By elegantly weaving together its protagonist’s journey with archival footage, Beans powerfully evokes the destabilizing experience of finding strangers turned against you.

Having encountered first-hand how quickly grudging acceptance can curdle into outright prejudice, Beans abandons her identity as a rule-follower by falling in with an older, rougher crowd of kids. April (Paulina Alexis), the apparent leader who wears large hoop earrings and a permanent glare, oscillates between the roles of bully and mentor. In one pivotal scene, April takes Beans to a garage decked out with candles and rainbow twinkle lights. But instead of inviting her to a sleepover, April tests Beans’ mettle, even hitting her outstretched leg with a tree branch. “If you can’t feel pain, then no one can hurt you,” April advises. Yet as the abuses in April’s past gradually emerge, her determination to simply will away pain comes to seem heartbreakingly naive. Indeed, Beans humanizes the movie’s “mean girl” without forgetting how much those marks sting.

Amidst the unrest of stand-offs, weapons searches, and 24/7 news coverage, Beans is increasingly torn between obedience and self-destruction. Her parents implore her to run from danger while her new friends plunge headfirst into it, whether by throwing sparklers at cops or binge-drinking. Tarbell’s impressive physical performance illustrates these warring identities, as when she runs, smiling, towards her friends at a motel pool, then contorts her face into an insouciant blankness.

Having internalized April’s advice, Beans channels her in moments of danger. In one of Beans’ most dread-filled scenes, the family realizes that they’re driving towards a mob whose shouts grow more deafening each second. As jeering crowds hurl rocks at their car, police officers stand idly by. After they’ve escaped, Beans finds Ruby’s lucky painted rock alongside shards of glass in the back seat. “Why didn’t you help us? You’re supposed to protect people!” she yells at an officer, along with every bad word April taught her. This moment is clearly the culmination of a hundred small slights. Witnessing that symbol of Ruby’s tarnished innocence helps catalyze Beans’ political awareness.

Beans effectively mines the drama at the intersection of teenage angst and worldly liberation struggles while avoiding the trap of preachiness or edu-tainment. The kids of Beans are just as impulsive, impolite, and unruly as teens anywhere. Unlike other coming-of-age protagonists, they’re also reckoning with uncertainty over everything from their siblings’ safety to tomorrow’s dinner. Their community has been put under the harsh glare of surveillance and news coverage. Although no one is explaining competing land claims or the meaning of sovereignty to them, they still register the icy glares from strangers and the laughter of cops.

Yet Beans is also infused with moments of laughter, lightness, and solidarity. One striking scene early in the film cuts from a chaotic broadcast about a “tale of two barricades” to a wide-open shot of Ruby and Beans biking down an empty road, an expanse of clouds behind them. “This is our road!” Ruby yells. “Our road!” Beans echoes her.

Ultimately, Beans’ journey is one of claiming what she deserves, including the freedom to define who she wants to be.

Beans Film Trailer

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From Mainstream Success to Indie Reinvention

Navigating the music industry as an independent artist might seem daunting, but music has been a part of Hien’s life for as long as she can remember.

“My parents used to tell me that I started to sing as I was learning how to speak. Music was just always around me. I watched MTV for hours when I was little on TV and my parents always played music,” she reflects. Hien grew up on a steady diet of MTV, karaoke with her family, and Paris by Night, a show which she calls “the Vietnamese Bollywood.”

“My parents and my family are big fans. All day long really, they always played those videos…” she recalls. “It was just a really natural thing for me: music and singing and performing in front of my family.”

Hien learned to play piano at six, took up violin a year later, and began to learn music theory soon after. This early start in music ultimately propelled her towards competing on the big stage in Hungary.

“When I was 14, I took part in a talent show. It was a TV show called Megasztár… basically the Hungarian Idol,” she explains. “I made it into the finals. And from then on, I got signed by a Hungarian label. When I got out of that show, I started to perform all over the place in Hungary.”

Hien emerged onto the Hungarian music scene as a teen pop star, releasing two albums and multiple music videos on Tom-Tom Records. Her schedule was packed, performing multiple times a week across Hungary while also studying for school.

“It was pretty intense,” she recalls. “My music career started pretty early. But it was a very different kind of music compared to what I do now. It was more like this teen pop vibe. I think I started to find my voice and my sound better when I moved to the U.S. for college.”

Hien eventually applied to Berklee School of Music, was accepted, and traveled to Boston, nearly 12 hours away from her home and family in Budapest. The move was a big culture shock both from a musical standpoint and a cultural standpoint.

“In Hungary, I wasn’t exposed to that many cultures and that many people from all over the world…” she shares. “The Berklee years were some of the best years in my life because obviously, artistically, I developed a lot, but also as a person… I had a better understanding that there were different cultures.”

Hien thrived in music school, taking on a double major in Electronic Production Design and Professional Music. She also signed up for a different musical ensemble each semester, exploring a plethora of musical styles and cultures and sharpening her performance skills. These included a Middle Eastern Fusion Ensemble, a Balkan Choir, a Motown Ensemble, and even a Techno Rave Ensemble, where electronic musicians improvised together on synthesizers.

“The ensembles were a really important part of this Berklee journey,” she reflects.

But Hien’s main area of focus revolved around learning about everything that goes into music production from both a technical and business perspective. In Hien’s pursuit of musical independence, it was her audio production classes in particular that helped expand her approach to music composition.

“I learned how to produce music while I was studying at Berklee, which is really important because I was a songwriter, composer, singer before, but I didn’t know how to produce my own music,” she says. “I had clear preferences about what I like in music production and in sounds, but I just couldn’t articulate it. Even though I got to work with really cool producers, I never felt that it was one hundred percent what I wanted.”

For Hien, learning the intricacies of audio production and sound design was a milestone because it allowed her to express her full artistic vision.

“All the production classes; all the sound design projects were cool, because they gave me more and more tools to produce…” she explains. “I got to try a lot of things; I was able to build my own workflow and set of tools.”

With a comprehensive education from Berklee under her belt, Hien set her sights on New York, moving to Brooklyn in the summer of 2019. Even though the pandemic would hit New York City hard within less than a year of her move, Hien says she could not imagine herself in any other place right now.

“New York has been amazing. I know it’s cliché because I feel like a lot of creatives and artists say that, but it’s really the place where you can be whoever you want to be,” Hien says. “I think I grew so much as an artist because I was not scared to just express and make the kind of music I want to. I didn’t feel that thing that people put me into boxes.”

Bloom was composed and produced during 2020. Lockdown gave Hien the time to isolate and really focus on her songwriting. The EP is aesthetically cohesive with Hien’s beautiful, airy high vocals matching the ethereal textures and warmth of the instrumentals. There is an uplifting quality to her music, present both in its sound and in the way her lyrics highlight transformation and empowerment.

Though Hien is grateful for the major label opportunities she received while in Hungary, she ultimately admits that she did not feel like she had full control over the art she was making.
“I have more creative freedom now,” she notes. “That’s why I wanted to try out this whole independent artist thing. I still have a lot of faith that this is my journey. I am open to the idea of being signed again, but I think that for now, this is what I need to develop and grow.”

Family, Community & Creative Freedom

This new era of independence provided the opportunity for the self-reflection and self-discovery that Hien needed not only as a musician, but also as a person. There were times when the pressure of independence left her lonely and unsure. She wrote the track “Family” as a way of forging a connection to her ancestors, seeking their protection and guidance. Over shuffling drum breakbeats, her lyrics are more fragmented than the other tracks, piecing together dynamic words like “Relatives, Origin, Represent,” as if repeating a mantra. Hien explains that the lyrics reflect the thoughts that she envisions when she prays to her ancestors.

“We used to pray a lot at our family altar, which is called bàn thờ. We have these to commune with our ancestors. It’s a way for us to get in touch with them and have their protection in our lives,” she says. “In New York, I don’t have a family altar in my apartment, so I miss that. I started to pray more in my head and talk to them more. Ever since I moved to New York, it’s interesting because I think I felt this protection stronger than ever; maybe because I needed it more than ever.”

This emphasis on honoring family and nurturing a spiritual connection to one’s ancestors is central to Bloom. Hien finds strength in remembering that her parents have gone through the same difficult journey of immigrating to a new country.

“I just know how much more difficult it was for my parents when they moved to Hungary, not knowing the language,” she shares. “I’m so proud of my parents. Every time I feel that life is heavy and difficult, I always think about the struggles that my parents and my grandparents went through because that gives me a lot of strength.”

Bloom is just as much about Hien’s growth as an artist as it is about her personal journey as a Vietnamese Hungarian immigrant. Being far from home and missing her family, she realized how much she had taken things for granted.

“I think I started to embrace my Vietnamese heritage more after I moved to the U.S.” she reflects.

Hien also credits the generations of Asian Americans who have come before her for paving the way for new Asian immigrants to be proud of their cultural heritage.

“I realized that being Vietnamese Hungarian is really unique,” she says. “I think the reason why I have a sound and the reason why my music is different is because of that cultural background.”

While Hien’s fierce independence as an artist is evident through her work ethic and the journey that has led her to this moment, Bloom is also a reflection of growth she has made in advocating for and finding the right collaborators to help bring her artistic vision to life. Of the five artists listed as co-writers, three were already her friends. Co-producers bad entity and lstnght are both former classmates from Berklee and Oreine Robinson, who helped with the lyric writing session for “Family,” is Hien’s roommate. Poets Ore Asonibare and Marissa Davis, who helped with the lyrics on “Bloom” and “Slow” respectively, are new collaborators that Hien met in New York.

“I’m so grateful that I met with good collaborators because I also had bad experiences in the past with collaboration. I feel like those people are the kind of friends that will stay in my life for a long time. I have a lot of trust for them,” she says. “The reason why I love to work with these people on this EP is because besides their talent, they have a lot of humility.”

Hien compares collaborating to dating—an apt description that reflects the trust, vulnerability, and communication required in creating music with other artists.

“Collaborations are really like relationships. You talk to them on an everyday basis, and you really show your vulnerable side to them. These boundaries are much more blurred. A lot of things depend on feelings and intuition,” she explains. “It’s really hard to navigate through that when you just don’t speak the same language, or your intentions are different, or your intentions become different in the process.”

Hien says that “Bloom is the small beginning of this whole journey.” The word “bloom” is dynamic, identifying an action in motion rather than the completion of that action. It is a fitting title for this release, an acknowledgment of growth with a sense of excitement that we are bearing witness to this journey in real time. Both an appreciation of the moment and an anticipation for the future.

Hien has just finished filming the music video for “Family” in Hungary and is already hard at work writing new music—but she acknowledges that her next chapter as an independent artist is a marathon, not a sprint.

“I want to be a little bit more easy on myself with deadlines because although this year has been amazing because of the release and the work that we did, it’s been also really harsh on me,” she reflects. “I want to take care of my physical and mental health more. I think that’s what the third song is about: to take this slow and not let my passion make me make decisions that are not healthy for myself.”

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Upon returning to the region as an adult, Gomes was baffled.

“When I passed by the road in Toritama, I saw the billboards in the middle of nowhere with jeans models, with paradise, and I said, ‘Oh my god, what’s that?’ The driver told me, ‘Toritama now is the Brazilian capital of jeans’ . . . ” he recalls. “When I got to Toritama, the city was completely polluted, the noise was completely oppressive, the city was a mess. I said, ‘Wow, this must be England in the first Industrial Revolution, like a hundred-fifty years ago, that people work, work, work. And the people don’t have free time to enjoy themselves.'”

“I was interested in the human environment,” he continues. “I was interested in the people — what changed in the way that they think about life, the way that they dream, the way that they think about the future.”

Indeed, throughout Waiting for the Carnival, Gomes continually juxtaposes the old and new Toritama, wondering how a quaint village became a jeans boomtown. The change is registered by all five senses, but particularly sound, as Gomes reflects on the cacophony of industry. The respite of lunchtime is now the only time the town returns to its original quiet. Waiting for the Carnival also finds a visual language for this large-scale transformation, weaving potent symbols throughout. Shots of the last remaining goat herder, who must traverse sidewalks and freeways to get his goats to pasture, take on an elegiac tone. Sometimes it seems that only the monsoon rains, which come like clockwork every June, have remained unchanged. With striking motifs of weather, Waiting for the Carnival is highly attuned to the natural rhythms of Toritama not yet eclipsed by human time clocks.

To Work for a Living or Live for Work?

Despite the melancholy tone, the film’s subjects, many of whom work in backyard factories called “factions,” repeatedly extol the virtues of being their own bosses and setting their own schedules. Rags-to-riches stories of lowly assembly line workers becoming faction owners abound. But the hours are long and the pay miniscule: 25 USD for making 1,000 hems, and 50 USD for making 1,000 zippers. A cadre of older women describe how they regularly work from 6am to midnight, returning home too exhausted to do anything but take a hot bath and plop into bed. Yet many say they feel lucky to choose when to take breaks for lunch and dinner, which are lively, communal affairs.

The domestic atmosphere of these workplaces also belies descriptions of them as “sweatshops.” In one scene, a young woman talks to Gomes while also wrangling her cat off her lap and scolding her toddler son for playing with one of the sewing machines. Meanwhile, the young men, many of whom became fathers at 19 or 20, bring a certain swagger to their work. Striding down the streets, they blast music and whip jeans in the air as though practicing a new dance move. Waiting for the Carnival vividly captures the chaotic entanglement of home and workplace, leisure and labor.

For Gomes, his subjects’ sanguine attitude towards the workload was surprising. “I thought [they were] going to complain about life, say that life is terrible, and they said the opposite!” he reflects. “They said, I have the freedom to decide the time I can work, to decide if I want to work or not. I am the boss and that’s why I’m happy.”

“That’s completely different from the 19th century in England,” he continues. “People had to work, work, work, and afterwards, they made some strikes, they made some unions, they decided that they have to have free time, holiday. They created labor laws for like a hundred-fifty years.”

His subjects’ different attitude towards work has implications for all of us, Gomes believes. “But now the new liberalism, the new idea, is, ‘Yes I can.’ I can make more money, I can work more. So all of a sudden, this film that was going to be about this city that for me was the past, became a film about, what do we do with our lives? What do we do with our time? Do we work for a living or live for work?” he questions. “I found out that Toritama is not the past; Toritama is the future. Because nowadays, with the internet, email, WhatsApp, and Zoom, we work from 9 to 9 and sometimes from 9 to 12. Our life is work.”

Carnival is the Soul

The film’s subjects latch onto the yearly, week-long festival of Carnival for both a reprieve and a sense of purpose. Yet despite its titular importance, Carnival is only first referenced near the end of the film. This unexpected sequencing cleverly puts the viewer in the position of the worker, who toils 51 weeks of the year for seven days of revelry. The film’s subjects eagerly sell their stoves, TVs, and motorcycles to loan sharks, knowing full well they’ll have to buy them back at a steeper price, just to pay for Carnival. One woman explains, “Gotta live for today. Only God knows what tomorrow will bring.” It’s a version of the YOLO ethic familiar to many American viewers. There’s more than a hint of FOMO, too, in the poignant scenes with teenagers who can’t afford to go, left behind to sit listlessly on stoops. They compare Toritama during Carnival to a “cemetery” and a “ghost town.”

For Gomes, Carnival is one of the few pockets of culture left in Toritama, which has lost music schools, libraries, and theaters since the jeans takeover. Even its spiritual centers now exalt work above all else.

“They don’t have music schools anymore. They don’t have libraries anymore. They don’t have a theater anymore,” says Gomes. “At all the evangelical churches, they promote the idea that work is good. In the name of God, you have to work 12 hours, 14 hours, 15 hours. The only cultural heritage that is left is the Carnival. It’s like in the States, the 4th of July; it’s like Thanksgiving. Carnival for us is really serious. Carnival to us in Brazil is like part of our soul. Since I was five years old I used to play Carnival. I think [it’s] the most important thing in our culture.”

From one angle, this deeply rooted love for Carnival makes the inevitable return to grinding work tragic, yet Gomes’ subjects largely accept the rules of their world without resentment. The work calendar and the yearly monsoon seem equally inevitable. Indeed, Waiting for the Carnival isn’t an exposé so much as a textured sociological portrait — a bottom-up exploration of a rapidly expanding industry. Waiting for the Carnival is a rich enough work to inspire divergent responses, and perhaps even raucous debate.

The completion of Waiting for the Carnival stirred passionate interest in Toritama. “I met the owner of the cinema [in Toritama] and I said, ‘I’m making a film about the city and I’m going to present the film in your cinema.’ And that was something unique,” Gomes recalls. “[It] was the first movie about Toritama. The film was there in the cinema for almost two months, and more people watched our film than watched Batman. Why? Because it was the first time that people could see themselves in a screen! They could see their lives, their actions, the way that they live, the place that they live.”

Beyond the billboards and advertisements, Waiting for the Carnival plunges the viewer into the lives of those who spin the world’s “blue gold,” otherwise known as the ubiquitous, humble pair of jeans. It is a world well worth visiting.

Waiting for the Carnival Film Trailer

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As a documentary with narrative components, Blue Island displays an irreverence towards genre boundaries, even as the ideas it explores are dead serious. The daring conceit of Blue Island is that three young activists, each one active in the 2019 protests, play younger versions of older dissidents who resisted both Chinese and British governments in the past. As they wrestle with how to faithfully embody memories that are not their own, the past reverberates into the present with resounding force. Facing the specter of the 2020 National Security Law passed in response to the 2019 protests — which criminalized verbal support for Hong Kong sovereignty — these activists are forced to constantly weigh sacrifice against safety. And the viewer feels it all.

For Chan, such disorientation was precisely the point. He says, “I’m trying to blur the boundaries between documentary and fictional film. You keep asking the question, ‘Is it a documentary or is it real?'”

In part because of such ambiguity, Blue Island is a heady, deeply rewarding watch. Moving beyond attention-grabbing but fleeting headlines, the film constructs a sweeping history of dissent in Hong Kong over the course of decades, anchored in poignant personal stories.

Fact & Fiction Flow in Parallel

Blue Island begins with the story of Hak-chi Chan, a soft-spoken intellectual who survived the Cultural Revolution before swimming to Hong Kong in 1973. Ansom and Sin, a couple active in the 2019 protests, recreate his escape, transforming from gangly students to hardened survivalists. These reenactments not only place the young activists in a lineage of resistance, but also let Hak-chi Chan correct the historical record on himself. During a sequence set on a forced labor camp, complete with sweeping vistas of the highlands and booming speeches, Ansom breaks the fourth wall to ask him, “Was the mood like this back then?”

Shaking his head, Hak-chi Chan says, “No, not so fervent. We didn’t chant slogans like that.” Instead, he explains how he went to the farm to spare his family from an even worse reeducation camp. As committed as each actor is to accurately portraying the past, it is these in-between moments of doubt — these departures from the script — that are perhaps most revealing.

As Chan describes, his subjects had such a strong connection to the material that he barely needed to coach their acting. “Their emotion or what they’re facing is quite similar to the protagonists,” he says. “Actually most of them are very depressed after 2019 because they think the protests have failed, and some are asking if they have to go somewhere else to search for freedom. Through the process of reenactments, we can make connections with the old history of Hong Kong, but at the same time try to understand the actors themselves. So it’s two-layered.”

Compared to the other two activist pairs profiled in the film, Kelvin and Raymond have a more formidable gulf of understanding to bridge. Then-teenage Raymond participated in the 1967 riots against Hong Kong’s colonial government, and today is a successful businessman who leads patriotic tours for students. Yet many Hongkongers now look askance at the 1967 protests supported by the Chinese Communist Party, viewing the Chinese government as no longer an underdog, but rather a new oppressor. At a ceremony for “martyrs” of the 1967 protests, Raymond clutches flowers while the speaker promises to root out “anti-Communist” and “anti-Chinese” elements from the body politic.

As Chan explains, the meaning of the 1967 riots changed radically after the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. He says, “In 1967, those rioters, or protesters if you want, actually were in a minority. At that time, Hong Kong was a British colony, so what they are fighting for is that they want the Chinese Communist Party to take control of Hong Kong. How they think about the protests nowadays is so much different from that time. So it’s very strange for me. But at the same time, their political stance is still the same — in the past and now, they are very pro-Communist Chinese Party.

It also makes me think about ourselves, and if in the future we will change our position thirty or forty years later,” he adds.

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

Photo by Chi Lok TSANG on Unsplash

Friction Between Worldviews

Rather than just a mere gimmick, the format of reenactments turns out to be the perfect vessel for these clashing visions of Hong Kong. In one particularly mind-bending scene, Kelvin plays a younger Raymond as he is being interrogated by a British officer.

“You grow up in our colony; you studied in our schools. So then why are you fighting against [Britain]?” the officer scolds.

But when Chan repeats the refrain back to Kelvin, he replaces “Britain” with “China.” In his palpable nervousness, Kelvin quite literally embodies a contradiction, playing both sides of a love-hate relationship with China that has soured as the Chinese Communist Party cracks down on ever-more freedoms.

Perhaps because of this friction between their worldviews, the interactions between Kelvin and Raymond prove to be especially bursting with insights. It helps that they share the singular experience of being criminalized for their words. In a break between reenactments, the two sit against the wall of a mock jail cell, disguised by darkness. While Kelvin tries to face the prospect of jail time stoically, Raymond cautions against romanticizing prison, warning that it can grind down anyone’s idealism.

This scene was a serendipitous encounter, says Chan. “My original plan was for them to be separate, but I suddenly had the idea, ‘Okay, maybe they can start a conversation with each other and talk about their own political thought.'”

“So we put them in the cell, we left them for one hour, and in the beginning Raymond talked quite a lot about his experience and Kelvin [was] kind of shy,” he continues. “But in between, we had a break, and I asked Kelvin, ‘Maybe you should share more about yourself,’ and actually, [this] is the first time he introduced his experience in the 2019 protests to Raymond. When he sees the young Kelvin there wearing the costume, somehow there’s some connection between them. It is like Raymond’s past connected with Kelvin’s future.”

In stitching together seemingly disparate protest movements, Blue Island illuminates recurring motifs of resistance. In particular, the student-led protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 resonate into 2019 and beyond. Kenneth, a lawyer who risked his life in 1989, seems to draw a kind of psychic strength from young activists like Keith, who plays him in reenactments. At a 60th anniversary event for the Federation of Students, which organized the Tiananmen Square protests, Kenneth is almost an avuncular figure. He treats the young guests in attendance as equals of the veterans of 1989, rather than relegating them to the “kids table.” But fighting the gravity of years of democratic backsliding, Kenneth’s shifting facial expressions betray a deep-set weariness.

Blue Island doesn’t spell out all these 1989 to 2019 connections explicitly, instead rewarding the eagle-eyed viewer. The same black and white banner bearing the message, “The People of Hong Kong Support You” shows up in footage from a 1989 march, at a vigil attended by Kenneth, and in a corner of Keith’s cramped studio apartment. The cumulative effect is surreal, as though this banner has skipped in time. In this context, China’s ban on the city’s vigils in remembrance of Tiananmen Square, a tradition for thirty-some years, is an admission of their fear of people remembering the past. Keith, for his part, openly compares cops’ brutality in 2019 to the People’s Liberation Army in 1989, which infamously mowed down protesters with tanks.

While footage of the 2019 protests is readily available online, Blue Island goes beyond merely repackaging existing video, instead placing these events in a longer, more epic trajectory of Hong Kong resistance. Chan describes filming those 2019 events as a challenge — one that inspired him to find innovative ways to tell this story.

“In 2019, they are hiding their faces [with masks], they are wearing black bloc, so you cannot distinguish anyone. Also, they are doing it everywhere in the city; it’s not only one or two places. And every day is more tense, with more confrontation between the police and the protesters,” he explains. “So for me as a documentary filmmaker, it is quite difficult. I’m making footage that I don’t know how to use.”

“In a protest, it is very timely; we have to tell the story immediately — but for documentary film, eventually it is more about how to make things become timeless,” he notes.

Blue Island‘s slow-burn approach, which involves assimilating an array of perspectives and timelines into one cohesive whole, is especially valuable given how rapidly events in Hong Kong are changing. John Lee, a former deputy chief of police known for helping pass the 2019 extradition law and sanctioning police brutality towards protesters, was elected in May, making the future of Hong Kong even more uncertain.

“Nowadays, being a Hongkonger, you can see your home city changing so fast, and the situation is deteriorating, and it seems we cannot do anything. We are depressed, we are angry. Actually the Chinese title of this film is something like ‘Depressing Island,'” he says. “As Hongkongers, we are sure we have the ideal Hong Kong; we have our imagination about what Hong Kong should be or what Hong Kong is, but somehow we never have the chance to control our fate in this city.”

Yet Blue Island‘s reenactments do exactly that. They wrest control of Hong Kong’s history and destiny away from British or Chinese governments and into the hands of angry, defiant Hongkongers. While much has changed since Blue Island was filmed in 2017, the viewer can easily imagine its indelible characters continuing the perennial fight for democracy long after the credits roll.

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Spotlighting Sarah in all her messy complexity, Queen of Glory combines the lightness of academic satire with the weightiness of family drama. With quips about Ghanaian divorces and weddings, Queen of Glory is both affectionate and honest. While Sarah balances the “old country” with the new, Queen of Glory plumbs the fraught dynamics of scattered immigrant families, to deeply moving effect.

As Mensah explains, she wanted to reimagine ubiquitous narratives of flailing young adults. “A lot of times with that quarter-life crisis genre, people are just making enough money to buy the weed and pay the rent, and that wasn’t really my experience,” Mensah explains. “[With] my experience, especially being the child of West African immigrants, there was never going to be an opportunity to kind of coast à la Slackers. So I thought it’d be so interesting to have a character who is experiencing this quarter-life crisis and also is holding it down at work. I don’t think we get to see women be on top of their game in their profession and then perhaps falling apart in their personal life.”

“I interviewed some directors and spoke about the project in the very beginning, and they all had takes that were super interesting, but they just weren’t the film that I was looking to make,” Mensah explains. “I wasn’t doubling down on the strife narrative of what it is to be Black and a woman and from the Bronx. I wanted it to be a little more nuanced – a little bit more dynamic.”

The Humorous Chaos of Bearing it All

Queen of Glory plunges the viewer into the chaos of Sarah’s upended life. Her gruff father’s sudden return from Ghana disrupts her family unit, as well as her plans to move to Ohio with her married boyfriend. For Sarah, the herculean task of organizing a Ghanaian funeral is like being saddled with a second, unpaid job. In one punchy montage, she grows increasingly exasperated as she answers the same questions on the phone, insisting again and again about her mother that “Yes, she has a will!”

This deluge of tasks proves to be great fodder for comedy, but also poignantly reveals how a high-powered career woman might be reduced to an assistant in the domestic realm. In an early scene where Sarah’s aunt accuses her of being “scared of the scale like a white lady” for refusing to weigh herself, Sarah continually sets boundaries that her relatives then disrespect. In these moments, Sarah’s response of choice is sarcasm. Yet the eye-roll or side-eye disappears from Sarah’s face whenever she’s alone, replaced with a lost, faraway look. By revealing the shape-shifting nature of Sarah’s coping mechanisms, Mensah gives a bravura performance informed by personal experience.

“In speaking to friends who have experienced the loss of a parent, one of the things I was struck by is that of course there is this seismic shift happening to you, but then also it is almost comic – the banality of the things that just have to get done, be it paperwork or finding a makeup artist for the cadaver,” Mensah states. “It’s extremely wild that we are asked to do these things and perform these rituals while experiencing this seismic trauma. Sometimes the grief gets pushed to the back because there’s so much to do; you’re almost planning a wedding, not a funeral.

“Especially because in our story Sarah’s an only child, and a female child,” she adds. “It really does all fall on her.”

The most onerous of these responsibilities is deciding whether to sell her mom’s Christian bookstore in the Bronx while managing its sole employee, Pitt (Meeko Gattuso), a muscled ex-felon. Casting was crucial for Pitt’s character. As Mensah explains, “I saw Meeko Gattuso in a film called Gimme the Loot, and he’s so magnetic, so watchable. It became clear to me very early that I was writing [Queen of Glory] with him in mind.”

Mensah then contacted Adam Leon, the director of Gimme the Loot, who also plays Sarah’s boyfriend, Lyle, in Queen of Glory. She wanted to see what else Gattuso could do.

“In Euphoria, he’s playing a drug dealer, and that’s kind of obvious… Here’s this man with a gravelly voice and a lot of tattoos on his face,” says Mensah, “and I’m like: what is the most random location I can put him in? And guess what, it’s a Christian bookstore.”

In their first interaction, Sarah is repeatedly stumped by the fact that Pitt is in charge (“You?” she asks.) Yet Pitt confounds Sarah’s expectations with his SAT-worthy vocabulary, encyclopedic knowledge of the Christian books market, and penchant for baking (of both the legal and illegal variety). Their scenes have a lived-in chemistry, full of the delightful frisson of characters from very different New Yorks colliding. Indeed, while the camera lingers on the shop’s “I Heart Jesus” keychains and rack of right-wing bumper stickers, the nuanced dialogue undercuts any predictable smugness.

An Ensemble Cast to Capture the Richness of the Bronx

As funeral planning takes Sarah on an odyssey through the Bronx, Queen of Glory‘s scope widens to encompass a whole network of relationships. A motley cast of characters cycle through the store, looking for solace or just shade from the sun. In a memorable series of vignettes set to a jaunty score, a nearby man hawks tapes under a banner reading, “African Movies Library & Retail & Whole,” while occasionally clashing with the neighborhood’s teenage boys. As brief as these scenes are, the salesman’s cycles of cheeriness and disappointment are full of pathos. Indeed, the bookstore is the perfect vehicle for these parallel narratives playing out alongside Sarah’s, putting Queen of Glory in the company of many of the best ensemble New York movies.

Among the most memorable of these side characters are the Russian neighbors of Sarah’s mom – the only white people at her wake. Sarah quickly bonds with the sullen teenage daughter, Julia, while helping her harried pregnant mother around the house. In moments like these, the Bronx almost feels like a small town. The juxtaposition of the Russian family also serves to deepen Queen of Glory‘s portrayal of claustrophobic family life. In one scene, as Sarah and her neighbor talk, their conversation is subsumed by children bickering and roughhousing in the foreground. It’s a veritable tableau of domestic chaos. With the audacious cinematography and stylistic ambition of scenes like this one, Queen of Glory distinguishes itself from other quarter-life crisis films, such as Clerks, that Mensah cites as inspiration.

Mensah felt it was important to add more nuance to the portrayal of immigrant families on screen, including those from different ethnic backgrounds. She met actor Anya McDall, who plays Julia’s mother, in an acting class, and discovered that their “struggles were frighteningly similar.”

“She was always getting called in to play, like, Dead Russian Prostitute Number 4,” says Mensah. “What do we usually see in Russian families on screen? Oh, we see crime, maybe some sort of mafia element, trafficking… so I wanted to show a blended family that was of course flawed, but bountiful in love.”

“Growing up, I remember watching my mom, a Ghanaian immigrant, interact with one of her employees who’s from like Bangladesh, or India. The miscommunications, and the shared humor — I was always really struck by that,” Mensah continues. “I wanted to show that yes there are these enclaves, but also, one of the beautiful things about New York is being on the 4 Train and seeing that somebody’s Puerto Rican, somebody’s Bangladeshi, somebody’s whatever, and we all just get on.”

Indeed, as the Bronx pulls Sarah deeper into its orbit, Queen of Glory becomes an ode to the beauty of New York. It’s as though the camera has fallen in love with the geometric shadows of fire escapes and the lush canopy of trees as seen from the train. Shots like these give Queen of Glory the old-school, soulful feel of a Bronx unmoored in time. The film exhibits a deep sense of place; Sarah’s move from her Manhattan apartment to her mom’s home in the Bronx embodies a personal transformation. That both of the primary locations — the family home and Christian bookstore — are owned by members of Mensah’s family in real life further ensures a degree of verisimilitude.

When Sarah’s dad first returns, both he and Sarah seem estranged from the house. They’re both tourists, in a sense; she chides him for losing the key, while he wonders why she’s sleeping on the couch. By the end of the film, however, she’s moved back into her childhood bedroom. The door to her bedroom is left ajar as she leaves a voicemail to her boyfriend; it seems to slice through the screen.

“Hi, it’s me, trying you again, like you said. I may have to stick around here for a while?” Sarah says, every note of her voice uncertain. Yet the viewer senses — perhaps even before Sarah does — that she’ll be sticking around for much longer.

Music as Ancestral Connection

“Everything I’m doing is because of my ancestors…” says Nance. “My parents are artists, and have a very polymathic sort of sensibility and a practice, and I have a wide range of curiosities.”

Nance credits his mother as a theater director, actress, movement person, and organizer who is interested in Black history and education, and comes from lineages with similar fascinations. Similarly, Nance says his father is a photographer, journalist, singer, and drummer, who comes from a family of musicians and photographers, among other things.

“Being in that family, we definitely have pretty clear family medicine…” Nance continues. “I think we were definitely raised in a way of being — a Black-centered way of being — that was about being in awareness and in praise of how our ancestors, how our family, has carried forward those practices. So I think that’s pretty important to come into a more careful awareness of. And to carry forward, obviously, as an uncle to the children in our family.”

Such perspectives even expand to those who Nance collaborates with on projects. V O R T E X features guest contributions by influential figures such as Nick Hakim, Serpentwithfeet, and Nelson Bandera, plus GRAMMY-nominated artists Brandie Younger on harp, Nick Semrad on Keys, and Raja Kassis on guitar. Asked for tips on how one might assemble a good team, Nance believes that there “no science” to it, but that having a practice rooted in values and ancestry can has connected him to others with similar ancestry and ancestral mandates.

“You just sort of look up, and the people who are there, are there…” Nance says. “It’s just God working, putting people together. It just seems all orchestrated.”

Photographs by Alima Lee

Music as Storytelling

Initially, Nance conceptualized V O R T E X as a parallel experience to 2012’s An Oversimplification of a Beauty, but the record ultimately required a different type of time and attention than the film.

“I think that the songwriting itself was a lot less literal and a lot less real life quote unquote than Oversimplification… just because music, in general, for me, is more like a channeling practice, so whatever comes through is a little less identifiable with my own identity or story, or my body, or anything like that…” says Nance. “I think [V O R T E X] has its own sentience, in a way; it has its own sort of intentions that I am just even still understanding, and [it is] articulating itself as an album and a sonic experience that has its own space, that isn’t parallel to another story.”

Nance has grown to see V O R T E X as a “balancing tool between opposing energies of existence.” The album’s press release cites “Visions” from Stevie Wonder’s 1973 masterpiece, Innervisions, as influential for its ability to tell a story through different movements in a song.

Nance shares, “The type of fable or story that V O R T E X is, I think, asking [is]: ‘What are the many challenges to maintaining that kind of balance, as things are spinning around constantly?'”

At 11 tracks and clocking in at just under an hour, V O R T E X is a swirl of a listen. Its sequencing allows for an ebb and flow, like some kind of musical tide, which carries you along on a journey you can never truly predict, even upon multiple listens. Expressive changes are certainly present, but expressive repetition also plays an unconventional role.

For example, the album’s playful lead single, “In Contemplation of Clair’s Scent,” features the recurring phrase, “You’re like that,” as does “Dragon,” which repeats, “This is to that,” in an off-kilter rhythm. Yet even such repetition comes with a sense of dynamism.

“I’m just trying to find the rhythm and the amount of time to make the message stick,” Nance says, of the chanting. “It’s like the first time you say it, you feel a way; the thousandth time, maybe you’re really understanding it.”

“And I do think, like, whenever I’m listening to it, I’m a different person; I’m at a different point,” adds Nance. “You want to hear the same thing at a different point every time, so that its present meaning can reveal itself, knowing that it changes all the time.”

Music as an Outlet

Earlier in Nance’s career, music was seen as an outlet for filmmaking, due to what Nance perceived as the “psychologically, spiritually, and physically demanding” nature of filmmaking. Similar to any sport, Nance says film requires an off season, but creators often are not afforded one due to the how much interfacing with people and resources the craft requires in order for one to succeed.

Thus, from a “logistical and spiritual perspective,” Nance saw music as a medium one could tackle on their own, for less money. Though Nance now realizes that music-making is demanding in a different way — in part due to the nebulousness around distribution — music does allow Nance to explore the multidimensionality of creativity, in a more low-pressure way than Hollywood might.

“It’s a very Western concept to have a lot of sectarianism or separation between creative disciplines…” shares Nance. “In the hegemonic way of doing things, there’s a lot of specialization, you know? And that specialization is really, really codified in how films are made, especially in how unions operate, and how companies operate. It’s explicitly taboo and [one is] not allowed to cross [or] to make across disciplines.”

“The main tension that I feel is: because it’s explicitly not allowed, that obviously requires that I be more fugitive and outside of the hegemonic systems,” Nance says. “Because when I was in it, I ended up doing things that are not allowed.”

Yet as Nance raps, sings, narrates throughout V O R T E X and musical breaks give way to significant tonal shifts, the visuals are still vivid in the mind’s eye. One can picture a mash-up montage of image and video snippets which span technological mediums and editing styles.

It’s serious work — technically-robust and detail-oriented — but the record seems to come with a sense of freedom and play, also. Perhaps it is because Nance has learned to disassociate from the Western, hegemonic dynamics that previously felt limiting, to instead focus on what is being made in any given moment.

“At the end of the day, [I’m] just making, in a way, that satisfies my curiosity,” says Nance. “And a lot of my curiosity is about the technical execution of each aspect of everything. How things are made.”

But there is also so much more to unpack. Central to the album’s imagery is the spiral, a symbol which is used the world over and connected to such themes as life, creation, birth, evolution, awareness, and growth. The life-giving spiral is obviously connected to the title of V O R T E X, but it is also referenced on the album cover, as a symbol in its upper corner, and in Nance’s hairstyle.

Like the spiral, V O R T E X is, and can be, many things. And those things are likely to change across space and time. Follow Nance’s lead, though, and perhaps one need only to be engulfed by the album’s calculated chaos, in order to find a sense of balance.

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A Natural Evolution of Creative Forms

“When we all went into lockdown, I kind of was in shock and a state of grief for not being able to take this to the stage, and the cast… we were all rehearsed and ready. A beautiful set had been designed, and it was just ready to happen…” Renville recalls. “After a couple of weeks of being in shock, we started to talk about maybe we could turn it into an audio, and that gave me something to focus on and live for in lockdown.”

Renville and Fernandes continued to work with Sound Theatre Company, who provided the equipment to the actors, who each recorded their parts separately. The audio play became a lockdown production, and Renville was especially proud of a first-time child actor, Max Willis, who voiced a S’Klallam grandchild named Johnny Burns. Willis worked through a complex process with patience and grace.

“The last few years have been very hard for Native people and Native communities, and I wanted for us to create a world that would be pleasurable and happy for the cast and characters to live in for a while, and that it would be a light-hearted look at a future that we can hope for… ” explains Renville. “It was a really beautiful shift from the dream that I wanted to the dream that we made happen out of this really intense, scary, lonely time.”

Howie Seago’s eventual involvement is somethng Renville credits less to herself and more with “the fortunes.” After the audio play was released, it came into contact with Howie and his team.

“That’s when,” Renville shares, “it’s kind of like our baby left home and started making art with other artists…”

A Multifaceted Experience of Characters

Teresa Thurman, Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Sound Theatre Company, asked Seago to help the production find two hearing interpreters who could interpret the audio play into filmic form. Seago’s immediate reaction was one of skepticism; he felt that watching two interpreters communicate on-screen for an hour would be highly unengaging.

In a Zoom interview with REDEFINE, Seago shares through an interpreter that, “I just thought it would be so boring, people would be snoozing in their seats. I said that to them, and then it was, ‘Why not find deaf actors who can all come around and tell the story together? Not just acting, but just telling the story together?'”

Eventually, they collectively settled on two Deaf actors playing two Deaf characters, which Seago felt was a much more entertaining proposition. The first actor, G. Christian Vasquez, was easy to find; Seago already knew him. Vazquez plays the roles of: Changer, the creator who is also known as Duk-we-balhlx; Sonny “Pop-Pop” Burns, a S’Klallam elder; and Officer Dunstead, a sympathetic figure familiar with treaty rights.

“It was really hard to find a [second] Deaf signer with some experience in acting, so that was quite the search…” says Seago. Around the same time, Seago, who is white, was introduced to a Deaf Native American consultant, Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody (Cherokee), who was able to assist the film team with accuracy related to culturally-appropriate artistic sign language.

“When we got her on board, she knew of a deaf man[, Roberto Sandoval,] who was a Native American man down in LA,” Seago explains. “We interviewed him, and we liked him, and we picked him for the role.”

Like Vasquez, Sandoval plays three roles in Changer: A Hand Telling: Coyote, the mythical trickster; Johnny Burns, the grandson of Sonny; and Sandi Jackson, a disgruntled white woman who is angry about Indians being on her land. Seago highlights that Sandoval is especially skilled in “visual vernacular” — signed shorthand as “VV” — which is a physical theater technique often performed by Deaf artists. Visual vernacular frequently incorporates elements of poetry, mime, facial gestures, and strong movements to communicate the visual world in more complexity.

Thus, in each frame of the film, Vasquez and Sandoval form a fascinating pair of interacting characters, due to their differing styles. Changer and Coyote are the first pair to be on-screen together, and as two mythic characters, they speak about one another’s reputations and habits across expansive time. More rooted to the human experience, Sonny and his father Johnny share lessons and stories which have been handed down through generations, while Officer Dunstead and Sandi Jackson gently spar over Native rights as non-Natives. Throughout, the actors’ wardrobe changes and distinct ways of inhabiting their characters allow for clarity in storytelling, even when multiple pairs may be in conversation with one another at once.

Director Howie Seago offers a summary of “Visual Vernacular,” with the assistance of interpreter Lindsay Goodman.

Communication Through a Diversity of Styles

Under the guidance of McKay-Cody as a consultant, the film team set out to be creative with their use of sign language. When asked to describe how different kinds were incorporated throughout the film, Seago shares that the cultural signs “are going to be the signs used by the Native Americans. They have their own history of sign language within their communities.”

Over Zoom, Seago offers examples of signs which might be different between ASL and Native sign language. One he offers is the sign for “coyote,” which in ASL, looks like one is using all five fingers to pull out a long snout.

“[The Native American] sign is like this, from the head, kind of like the two ears from the head,” Seago shares, while making the motion similar to a peace sign moving forward from the top of the head.

Another example was the film’s combining of words and names. Because Coyote’s reputation is one of a trickster, Coyote’s name was signed as “trickster” early in the film; as it went on, both “coyote” and “trickster” were shrunk down together and signed quickly, almost as if they were a compound word or motion. The sign for Changer was similarly created out of multiple signs: the ASL signs for “change,” “earth,” and “moon” — all of which are globe-like in shape. Furthermore, because Changer is called numerous names throughout the story, such as Duk-we-balhlx, a series of signs were developed which were visually related to one another but still allowed for variation.

With so many creative boundaries being pushed throughout Changer: A Hand Telling, clarity of communication was of the utmost importance to Seago. ASL signs were used to offer support when needed, though they were sometimes made more artistic to create additional flourish. Furthermore, though the entire film is in sign language, it also features dialogue from the audio play and captions, which concretize some of the more artistic sign language into readable English language.

“If someone asks a Deaf person, ‘What impacts you most about this [film]?’ They’re going to say the clear signing,” shares Seago. “That’s the biggest comment that I got — that I get so often from both this story and stage play directing… I am so strict about making sure the sign is clear. If signing isn’t clear, then why bother?”

Director Howie Seago offers examples of artistic sign language used in the film, with the assistance of interpreter Lindsay Goodman.

Changer: A Hand Telling contains narratives and myths which were hand-picked by Renville and Fernandes, because they are “all parts of being culturally-fluent in Coast Salish story.” Circling back to the beginnings of this project — when it first transformed from a stage play to an audio play, and later to a film — what has never changed for Changer is its use of humor and playfulness to honor Coast Salish culture of the past and the present.

“I think Native people have always viewed humor as medicine, and it might be in part because, if you don’t have a lot of things, you’ve always got your sense of humor. Nobody can take that away from us…” shares Renville. “Humor is not only a coping mechanism and a release of stress, but it’s also a value. And I think that Native people believe very much in the value of coming together as laughter, as medicine, as bonding. We love to tell jokes. We tell them all day long.”

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Khu.éex’ perform at the High Dive in November 2021, with Tlingit rapper and vocalist Arias Hoyle, or Airjazz, on vocals. (Credit: Spike Mafford)

A Fluid Exploration of Theme

Khu.éex’ has four LPs under their belt and have recently recorded their fifth with producer Randall Dunn, which is as of yet untitled and likely to be released in 2023. Thematically, the upcoming album will be focused on the Urban Native experience, as many of the band members have tribal affiliations but are not from tribes of this region.

“One of the big themes… is [of] being tribal people from a place other than Seattle, but growing up in the Seattle area, and the experience of being displaced tribal people in Seattle… and kind of painting a picture of what it’s like to grow up as a Plains person in Seattle or Alaska Native in Seattle, and… what you encounter,” explains Captain Raab, of Siksika descent, who is a guitarist and multiinstrumentalist; he is often also called the band’s musicologist. Raab came to Khu.éex’ after being a touring member of a legendary Native band called Red Earth, based out of Albuquerque.

“With all respect to the tribes that are from the Puget Sound area… all of us who are Native people in Khu.éex’ [are] from tribes that are not from Seattle,” shares Raab. “Within the band, we have a shared experience of, you know, what’s it like being a displaced — or you know, relocated — tribal person, you know, in a land where… there are also the people that are Indigenous to that specific spot.”

The themes that Khu.éex’ explores on their records are not always clear from the outset; they often emerge intuitively from the creative process. 2020’s Héen — “water” in Tlingit — was created in the period during the Standing Rock battle between Indigenous groups and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). With a cover that features a Tlingit person cosmically floating atop a background of ocean waves, the album opens with a funky synth-and-flute laden track entitled “Song to the Water Protectors,” while 13-minute epics like “Killer Whale Creation” are moody spoken word offerings of Alaska Native folklore, in a combination of Tlingit and English.

“It wasn’t even really intentional. I think we kind of just go with the flow. After we finish recording, we kind of look at: what are the common threads… [and ask,] what does the music want itself to be?” explains Raab. “We try not to box it in… until we’re kind of into the mixing stage… [when] it’s kind of showing itself [as] what it is.”

A Vibrant Mix of the Traditional and Contemporary

During Khu.éex’s very first recording session in 2016, they entered the studio to simultaneously begin work on what would eventually be two triple albums, including Héen and 2021’s WOOch — “together” in Tlingit. These two records would be the last featuring keyboardist and Khu.éex’ co-founder Bernie Worrell, who passed in 2016. Worrell was a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic and contributor to numerous Talking Heads albums; the incorporation of “WOO” in all caps spoke to his philosophy of using music to bring people together through sound. The record itself focuses on the concept of “the Alaska Native communities’ shared experiences” and “explores the connection between historical and contemporary issues and intergenerational strength in the face of trauma.”

Worrell’s impact on the band and its members has been significant. The band’s other co-founder, bassist Preston Singletary, is a Tlingit glass artist well-known for his sculptural work. Singletary had already been playing with Native musicians for years when he met Worrell in 2013.

“The story goes… when I met Bernie, it was a Kickstarter campaign that was trying to fund a tour bus for him. You know, he was like, 69 [or] 70, and he was still touring with the Bernie Worrell Orchestra,” recalls Singletary.

The campaign had a level where one could donate and have Worrell drive his bus to their city; Singletary jumped at the offer. After Singletary told Worrell’s wife, who was his manager, about his art and band, she suggested that they open for Worrell, and Singletary made sure they were available to play the gig.

“The night of the party, I sang a traditional song, and I had my hand drum, and I was singing… [Worrell] took that melody, and he started sort of improvising on it,” shares Singletary. “He played his organ, and it became the symphonic thing… he started playing synthesizers, and that was turned into this psychedelic rock thing… he’s really known for that — just improvising.”

It was an eye-opening experience for Singletary, who realized that direction was exactly where he wanted to go: taking traditional songs, figuring out the chord structure beneath them, and putting additional instruments underneath the melody. Worrell expressed an interest in collaborating, and Khu.éex’ had their first improvised recording session, including Singletary, Worrell, saxophonist and pianist Skerk, Native storyteller Gene Tagaban, drummer Stanton Moore, and the late Clarissa Rizal, a Tlingit weaver who passed in 2016.

“[Rizal] was… a real spiritual person, and so trying to mix the music, and the culture… I really wanted to have her to see how we could kind of navigate that and bring something special to the music,” Singletary says, describing her as a mentor.

Both Rizal and Tagaban, who had been raised in Juneau, had worked for a group where they had learned and presented old Tlingit stories as theater.

“Some of the songs are considered clan property… it’s like intellectual property, owned by a specific clans, and that represents the clan, but some of them we kind of perceived as being in the public domain, so to speak, and that other people from other clans will use the songs,” shares Singletary.

Khu.éex’ started with a shortlist of those particular songs and had already recorded them when one of the younger members of the band suggested that they talk to the clan leaders about using the songs, out of respect and protocol. Singletary retroactively went out to clan leaders to ask for permission and they were able to use all except two.

Tagaban, who comes from a storytelling tradition, was able to incorporate a mix of Tlingit words, poetry, and storytelling into Khu.éex”s numerous spoken word pieces. All of it emerged through improvisation. The band would launch into a certain key, and Tagaban would just begin speaking.

“If you listen, you can hear, you know, the call and response almost… Bernie was really good at that… Gene would say a phrase, and then, and then he would kind of come in over the top. And sometimes it would kind of elicit kind of a feeling of… whatever he was talking about, and he was so quick on his feet with all of that,” says Singletary. “It was amazing to see that.”

An Intergenerational Approach to Revitalize and Preserve Culture

Khu.éex”s lineup has changed a bit since their first recording session in 2016, though some of the same members remain. Raab was brought in during the second session, and today’s lineup includes Singletary, Skerik, Tagaban, Raab, and newer members such as percussionist Denny Stern, keyboardist Tim Kennedy, drummer and vocalist Ed Littlefield, trombonist Jason Cressey, Haida vocalist and hand drummer Sondra Segundo, and Tlingit vocalist and rapper Arias Hoyle, aka Airjazz. Airjazz and Segundo are evolving language in unique ways within the band, with Airjazz pursuing fluency in Tlingit and presenting it through rap, and Segundo reinterpreting some gospel songs into Haida.

Khu.éex’ has what Raab describes as a “family atmosphere” uncommon with many bands, perhaps due to the fact that they have members as young as Airjazz, who is in his early 20s, while also having members who are grandparents.

“It’s cool having such a wide range of generations within the band, and I think that is another reason… why this group sounds different than I think other groups I’ve been in…” explains Raab. “You introduce an elder into a group, and it’s a different energy; if you’re an older group, and you have somebody really young join the group, that infuses other energies. It’s cool having that many dynamics at play, and it always keeps it really keeps it really interesting and feeling really grounded.”

With so many active members — most of whom have other projects in music, art, and activism — it is a boon that Khu.éex’ has members who are masters of improvisation. They are able to pull off technically-proficient shows with very little rehearsal time, which allows the band members to live their full lives as creators that span genres and disciplines.

“When you look at Native communities, the people who are… the songkeepers… there’s nobody, that’s just a musician…” says Raab, who mentions that a musician might also be a fisherman or have another role in the community. “It’s a really Western way of thinking to be where you’re just a musician, and nothing else. And if you’re not just a musician without a day job, then you’re not really a true musician…”

For a band like Khu.éex’, whose music is an Alaska Native language revitalization tool, and whose self-professed focus is “raising awareness of social issues, stemming from the Native American struggle, that branch out to serious issues that [a]ffect all people,” having a flexibility of roles and worldviews is vital.

“If you have an artist role, but then you have another role, like, maybe as a social worker, or whatever… you’re gonna have more things to communicate through the music than if you’re just… boxed in as just being a musician,” says Raab. “We’ve really wanted to have the music be really deep and about something and be something that… 30 years down the road… people could listen to the music and you have some insight as to what was going on in Indian country.”

Khu.éex’ perform at the High Dive in November 2021, with Tlingit rapper and vocalist Arias Hoyle, or Airjazz, on vocals. (Credit: Spike Mafford)

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In this poetic Q&A interview, Qaisar describes the area as “considered geographically uninhabitable by most in the rest of the mainland” and generously offers insights into his childhood there, prior to many modern conveniences. These early experiences helped shape his relationship to place as Leh undergoes environmental catastrophe, and also offers a framework of comparison for some of his other interests, which include “the collective unconscious as a traumatic megasystem” and “geotraumatics,” or trauma experienced by the land itself, often due to humanity.

Fatima captures all of these sentiments through dark, dissonant compositions which move seamlessly among ambient, noise, drone, and post-industrial genres. While Qaisar reflects that joy certainly exists in Leh and speaks of some of the practices of survival for the area’s Indigenous Ladakhi people, he also notes that his personal experiences have more strongly resonated with the “tragic” than the “joyous.”

He shares, “In my compositions, [as] I attempt to interpret and color those atmospheres of either the slow imminent winding build-ups or the unexpected rattling pummels, they naturally come only in the shades of bleakness… I am a sonic chronicler of the various traumatic and tragic occurrences.”

Q&A Interview with Ruhail Qaisar

Fatima is based on your hometown of Leh. Can you describe that region for us, and why it can be seen as a site of trauma and decay?

Leh is the central town in the Union Territory of Ladakh, situated at 3,500 [meters] above sea level. Time works differently there. It is not particularly only entrenched in trauma and decay; that would be false. Yet in my journey growing up, I particularly have had immense impressions drawing either from personal or impersonal catastrophe, in a small community, geographically considered inhabitable by most in the rest of the mainland, living with no telephones, with 4 hours of electricity and regular blackouts.

Through the nineties, the collective unconscious teems with local mythos, both ancient and contemporary, fables and real-life occurrences that intertwine at various interstices, of which I prefer the surreal tragedies that take place in a landscape that amplifies them, and how these narratives strike blows in the corners of my mind.

Even after access to television and 24-hour electricity and 4g internet, I experience and still revel in the mythos and the climatic nature of how our story as a people develops collectively as well as individually. We had flash floods in 2010 which was an extreme catastrophe, trash from a barren valley snowballed with the water and the debris and ended up cascading down on multiple localities laying waste to the telephone exchange, the radio station, the hospital, the bus stand, airport, bridges, inner roads. 71 localities were damaged, 255 were dead, 200 were missing, and 1000s were rendered homeless. You can still see the marks of the debris flow on the mountains.

I was still in middle school. This was time out of joint; life changed suddenly, and we were sent back to our past, coupled with an extreme external natural tragedy collectively. No phones, no lights, no TV, no internet, and the fear of another flood, military relief camps, disappearances, funerals, people, landscape and economy in utter disarray.

The Landscape was scattered in ruins, sculpted in hauntological totems, structures erected with expectations, eradicated. Even the rescue operations were hampered by damaged roads and bridges. It took years to recover the material property damage, and some wounds it inflicted on the inhabitants still fester.

Living through such experiences, I have registered the tragic more than the joyous, and my interpretations of these experiences are deeply personal and firsthand. And in my compositions, [as] I attempt to interpret and color those atmospheres of either the slow imminent winding build-ups or the unexpected rattling pummels, they naturally come only in the shades of bleakness.

View of Ladakh Range (actually Zanskar range) from the Shanti stupa, Leh, India. Photo is attributed to Bernard Gagnon (under a Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 license).

The vast barrenness of the landscape and its geology is also a huge factor. The Ladakh Range is composed of granite rocks of the Ladakh batholith, which is bounded by the Shyok suture zone to the north and the Indus suture zone to the south.

During India’s northward drift, Tethyan’s oceanic lithosphere was subducted northwards beneath the active Andean-type southern margin of Asia, resulting in the intrusion of the Trans-Himalayan alkaline batholith along the 2,500 km length of the collision zone. The final stage of intrusion is marked by a series of cross-cutting leucocratic granite exposed at Chumathang in Ladakh and around the Gilgit–Indus River’s confluence in Pakistan.

The subject of the collective unconscious as a traumatic megasystem intrigues me, along with geotraumatics. During the Archaen [Eon], the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogenous trauma — the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation, looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism. The descent into the body of the earth.

So, Ladakh isn’t only a site of trauma and decay. Its definitions are as vast as its landscape, but I am a sonic chronicler of the various traumatic and tragic occurrences. These traumatic mega-systems exist everywhere, and so far, these occurrences and their patterns and affectations interest me.

Fatima’s Poplar, and the associated track, from the 48-page book which accompanies the Fatima album release.

Why is the album titled Fatima?

Fatima came as a dedication to my grandaunt, who passed away from a tumor a few years ago. She was where we got our milk from back when I was a kid; she had a barn in the backyard with two cows. She was, for me, also a symbol of innocence.

As the work of the album progressed, there came other allusions to the moniker.

Fatima is also the name of a medium appointed by [His Holiness] The Dalai Lama. Now, this is an anomaly again, and an intriguing transgression. The medium comes from a very religious and orthodox Shia-Islam background, and in her trance states, she transgresses her religious background, and becomes a medium for a revered deity in the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon and delivers prophecies.

What is amusing is how a person from the Kargil region, who grew up speaking a different dialect of the Ladakhi language in her trance state, prophesizes in archaic Tibetan.

So in a way, these occurrences ended up validating my yearning for a pan-Ladakhi identity tied more to the land rather than socio-religious dogma.

Namgang, and the associated track, from the 48-page book which accompanies the Fatima album release.

Your music has a harshness about it that mirrors the perpetual conflict of your local area. As an artist, what drives you to capture this sound or feeling?

My area hasn’t always been in perpetual conflict; there have been stable years always — sometimes even for a decade — but the borders and the frontiers have always existed, whether it may be the Indo-Pakistan War in 1999, which I have memories of, or my Granduncle’s anecdotes from the 1969 Sino-Indian war. Living at the frontier always heaves the psychosphere with ominousity and fear: fear of sudden conflict and being the first to experience it.

My mother lost her brother in 1989 under very mysterious circumstances during a conflict between Buddhists and Muslims. She still hasn’t had any closure with the case, and [none] of the suspected people have been tried in any investigation, mostly because of their social status and privilege.

Even while I was composing Fatima in 2020, there was a Chinese intrusion, and I saw 500 war tanks go by my house.

The decay is more because of the late capitalism post, and its effects, leading up to heavy environmental catastrophes, both immediate and long-term; for example, the flash flood or the melting glaciers.

Currently, Ladakh is in a state of uprising because when the right-wing party in power abrogated our neighboring state, Kashmir, of its special status and filled it up with armed forces, they baited us Ladakhis with the promise of autonomy under the status of a Union Territory, which was a hollow ceremonial footnote on their manifesto to quickly cash in on the vote bank.

There were no basic provisions such as land protection and environmental and cultural safeguards. Since we are mostly a tribal population, Ladakhis fear that the central government without these safeguards can perpetuate actual decay through mining, pollution, and hyper-tourism, which in such a fragile environment, could lead us towards apocalyptic futures, considering our self-sustainable agrarian origins.

Other than the stark mundane realities, I feel the vastness of the landscape, and the distinct characteristics of how sound travels physically, along with how sounds — especially vernacular and quotidian in small communities like ours — hold immense power.

I have always been receptive and sensitive to all sounds, screaming into gorges as a kid to hearing back the echo, to hitting electric poles with pebbles.

Since the climate is cold, primarily, we still thankfully have no use for modern inventions such as fans or air conditioners. The many hums of urban machines are nonexistent; the silence allows the natural sounds to interplay in dramatic structures if you just keep an ear out on a silent night. If you are lucky, they occur with such precision you almost feel like you had a schizophrenic experience, unconscious laments of the land.

Abandoned Hotel of Zangsti and its associated track, from the 48-page book which accompanies the Fatima album release.

How much do others in your area use art to cope with the trauma? If not through art, how do they navigate the sense of ongoing conflict?

Song, dance, and ritual have always been a part of the community; they serve the function of deep catharsis through mythos. The Ladakhi traditional folk music — though mostly unchronicled — in its eventual development, holds vast reserves of songs… of joy, sadness, and in-between. There are many festivals where people get together. Most people are deeply religious as well, and they navigate their lives through the practice of the teachings.

I am not a very social being, so I found my own ways to deal with things. But there are many local artists working with different mediums.

I also don’t feel that everybody is obliged to take things the same way as I do; the trauma aspect is very personal to me and ties in with my family history. The entire town isn’t traumatized, nor is it always in conflict, but yes due to late capitalism, the behaviors are switching; psychological aspects are emerging [to] the front that were never considered.

When the land itself — which people were so close to — is commodified in ten different ways, to sell it to the mainlanders, then issues like this are likely to surface sooner or later.

Can you walk us through your songwriting process for this particular album? Do you start with particular sounds, concepts, and feelings?

I think it is merely mindstates. Some of the songs came quickly, and some took varying degrees of sculpting and chiseling. If a narrative, a memory, or a sound has had a profound effect on me, it either finds its way as a sonic motif or an entire composition. This all has to work automatically; if forced, then it fails and crumbles down in a nameless void, never to return again.

Then one has to wait in suspended animation, knowing the time is not right yet, but await the moment with cold reptilian patience.

There is a mention of recollections and “a conjuring of metaphysical totems” through your music as well. Could you expand upon that and how those come through you?

These totems exist locally and are only known to a local mind. I guess it would take a mind which has been constantly processing time and its adverse effects on the space and people, tying it in with ancient and recent history, and forming a conjecture of some overarching symbology. The stupas, monasteries, half-collapsed archways in the old town of Leh, petroglyphs near the border, military trucks thrown off in deep gorges, the traces of Bön shamanism, animistic altars in the mountains, elusive meditation caves. There is no dearth.

My attempt was to only evoke how I felt about these times and spaces and amalgamating them into a sonic montage.

Painter Man and its associated track, from the 48-page book which accompanies the Fatima album release.

The book accompanying the album release is beautiful, featuring writing, many photographic images, and text in both English, Urdu, and Tibetan. It features many types of images and offers a fuller picture of the story behind the music. How did you select the images and text in the book? What were you hoping to convey?

Since my family history is half the context behind this album, I went to my maternal grandmother’s house and dived deep into her photo albums… I found a polythene bag abandoned in another shelf full of beautiful images, a rejected portfolio of my father’s paintings, some VHS screengrabs from my visual piece, Cenacle 97-98.

Album cover artwork for Fatima. Photography by Rana Ghose; Design by Niels Wehrspann; Cover Urdu text by Aastha Gupta.

Your album cover is beautiful; how did you conceptualize it?

During the pandemic, I found myself lured to swimming every day in the backwaters of the Indus River, which runs through my village, I feel its some form of baptism and slow immersion into a pool of apparitions — the Indus also being a very primal water source for civilization.

Diving deep into the darkness can at times serve as a means of catharsis. Now that you are on the other side of this album, how has creating it impacted your perception of the reasons that you created the album in the first place?

The darkness never leaves; it is a strange lure that I wrestle with constantly. And at least through varying forms [of] its soul-grabbing chaos or the lulling comfort, I only can reach certain conclusions and exert lightning through the dense fog. It is an endless cycle, in this age, mental health is always in constant decline; I just feel lucky and privileged that my coping mechanisms bear fruit.

Fatima Full Album Stream

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How to Have an American Baby

(Leslie Tai, USA, 2023)

How to Have an American Baby is a primer in much more than its name suggests. Director Leslie Tai’s 8.5-year undertaking simultaneously introduces, exposes, and empathizes with the complex world of Chinese birth tourism in the U.S.The film follows the stories of pregnant Chinese women who travel to Southern California to stay in “maternity hotels” until they give birth, so that their children will be American citizens. Beyond the stories of these women, the film traces the multitude of intersecting socioeconomic and geopolitical vectors that create such an industry.

Despite the culturally-specific context, the motivations and experiences of the film’s subjects are familiar and relatable. Like so many parents, the women are not so much seeking the American dream as they are pragmatically pursuing the best opportunities for their children. To do so, they must navigate the absurd financial demands and mundanely inhumane protocols of the American medical system.

By documenting the maternity hotel bosses, workers, and nearby NIMBYs, as well as the women and their families, Tai presents a robust world full of complicated relationship dynamics and economic pressure points. The one labor scene in the film feels high stakes not only because of the pregnant woman’s arduous ordeal, but because Tai is pulled out of the room in a crisis moment to translate for another woman whose newborn is fighting for his life. This woman becomes a character in the film, reflecting Tai’s openness to following the twists and turns of the story.

The emotional investment of the audience was palpable throughout the screening, with many sniffles, gasps and one collective guffaw in reaction to a high-tech mahjong table. Ultimately, through the interplay of each character’s story, the film underscores the uniting power of one of the most fundamental of human experiences: giving birth.

Last Things

(Deborah Stratman, USA, 2023)

Last Things by lauded experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman compresses, as she remarked in the Q&A, “4.5 billion years in 50 minutes.” A hypnotic and visually variegated contemplation on the “prehistory of prehistory,” Last Things combines evolutionary geoscience and speculative texts with an entrancing array of film techniques to invoke the spirits of our oldest ancestors, like chondrites: super ancient meteorites.

The film operates on what Stratman described in the Q&A as “scales that are either much smaller or much bigger than we can actually sense,” and she employs an array of entrancing visual techniques to document the spreading formation of soy sauce crystals, extreme close ups of chondrite innards, and colorful superimpositions. Though I didn’t know what I was actually looking at half the time, the feeling-tones of the images invoked a somatic sense of the depth of spacetime beyond cognitive comprehension. At times, the geometric nature of the visuals were reminiscent of the hallucinations that can occur in hypnagogia — the liminal state experienced while falling asleep.

Two divergent but complementary narration lines interact as vocal neighbors throughout the film. Valérie Massadian reads in French from a range of speculative and existentialist texts by writers like Clarice Lispector and J.H. Rosny. Geoscientist Marcia Bjørnerud expertly distills the events of mind-boggling timescales into a digestible, compelling story about the astronomical and geological history of stones and minerals.

The last things in Last Things take more recognizably human shapes. A group of people stand in a beautiful field, each holding a mirror, reflecting the brilliant shine of the sun into the camera in a synchronized rhythm, while chill-inducingly beautiful choral music plays in the soundtrack. Stratman waits till the final scene to take us to an unedited human environment: a group of capoeira dancers performing on the street.

R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity

(Mohanad Yaqubi, Qatar, Occupied Palestinian Territory & Belgium, 2022)

R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity is a rare kind of film essay about the movement for Palestinian liberation struggle, drawn from 16mm propaganda films from the 1960s-80s which were maintained by Japanese activists. Feeling a strong sense of solidarity with the Palestinian fight for freedom against an imperialist oppressor, the Japanese group preserved and presented these films to raise awareness about the Palestinian struggle in Japan. A multi-layered exercise in cultural reflexivity, R21 is a film that questions the function of the archive, displays a solidarity gesture from one social struggle to another thousands of miles away, and presents a revolutionary film archive in dialogue with itself.

Director Mohanad Yaqubi took on the archive and sculpted R21 from twenty of these archival films. The archive is presented with loving attention to detail, including the preservation of music tracks in all their warped fuzzy glory. The only contemporary footage details the archival process, through close ups of film cans being opened, reels delicately removed, and the digitized files interfaced with in transfer and edit software.

In one striking propaganda film, a group of Palestinian boys play outside, far from town. One boy finds a discarded piece of artillery. When another boy eyes it covetously, a chase ensues. Cleverly cutting in footage of Israeli tanks rolling in, the story climaxes with death, spurring the surviving youth to take up arms. In a flash, petty child’s play is replaced with revolutionary battle cries.

Ultimately, the incredible specificity of the film’s context implicates the audience with a series of probing questions: what is my role and responsibility to global awareness? Whose seemingly disparate story is in fact connected to my own? How can I raise consciousness in my community about these connections? As the programmer introducing the screening remarked, what does it mean to make a film about a solidarity movement as it’s still in process?

Hummingbirds

(Silvia Del Carmen Castaños & Estefanía “Beba” Contreras, USA, 2023)

“What’s your favorite film so far?” is a common conversation starter at film festivals. Hummingbirds was the answer I heard most often at True/False, frequently followed by, “it really feels like you’re hanging out with them.”

Directors Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras’ — in close collaboration with Producer and Cinematographer Miguel Drake-McLaughlin, along with many first-time filmmakers working with mentor-collaborators — extend us an affable invitation to their daily lives in the bordertown of Laredo, Texas. On the surface, the film follows the directors’ surface activities: fiddling around on a synthesizer, buying snow cones on the street, marveling at the discovery that Wal-Mart accepts pesos, breaking into empty buildings, warding off cat-callers, and generally goofing around. But such moments sit seamlessly alongside Beba’s nerve-wracking experience waiting on hold with an immigration agency, waiting for a status update on their case. We witness Silvia and Beba grappling with their sense of responsibility to the community, wondering about their futures, engaging in immigration rights activism, worrying about their parents’ financial struggles, and recounting the story of crossing the border as a babe in arms.

One night, they team up with a bestie to commit “a little-itty-bitty crime” against a neighbor’s pro-life yard sign. The stylized sequence follows the crew as they gear up in fiercely assertive abortion rights drag and then power dance down the street (in slow-mo, of course) toward the scene of the crime. At one point they joke, “The suspects are two small males and one very tall female.” The act of vandalism itself is creative rather than destructive, as they simply adjust the wording of the sign to make it pro-choice. It’s an inspiring example of Gen Z activism that centers humor while taking social justice seriously. They prove that it’s possible to laugh at yourself while standing up for what you believe in–possible to banter about gender norms even as you defiantly fuck them. At the conclusion of the scene, the entire audience erupted in applause.

The stories of their traumas similarly come up organically, even lightly, as they swap stories of being deported, or a parent having to pawn an iPad from school for money to feed the family. These experiences are embraced simply as reality, without any intellectualizing or disassociated analysis. Mexico is another recurring character: as a ghost of the past and an idea about the future. They hang out at the border river, hollering at the little kids on the other side, pontificating about the shared air (“someone’s Mexican fart”), and yearning for the ability to move freely from one side to the other.

Drake-McLaughlin’s camera is appropriately up close and personal, circling their heads bent together, their bodies entangled in supportive embrace, and framing their faces against many a beautiful Laredo sunset. Just before their True/False premiere, the team won the “Generations” section at Berlinale. True/False gave them a standing ovation, when Beba appeared in-person and Silvia via Zoom.

Time Bomb Y2K

(Brian Becker, Marley Mcdonald, USA, 2023)

One of the most buzzed-about films at the festival, Time Bomb Y2K tells the tale of the 2000 millennium bug: the global late 1990s phenomenon marked by widespread uncertainty about whether computers would cross over from the year 1999 to 2000 without going haywire.

Co-directors Marley McDonald and Brian Becker employ an entirely archival approach to recounting the once-in-a-millennia story. With editor Maya Mumma, they painstakingly stitched together hundreds of sources, including news reports, White House press briefings, and New Year’s Eve home videos — as well as footage of middle America preppers, Y2K personalities, the etymological history of the term “computer bug,” and endless lines of code flashing across computer screens, tended to by bespectacled programmers.

Moving at a fast clip, it’s an unabashedly fun ride — as much a mirror of our current cultural nostalgia for the 90s/aughts as it is a thorough historical account. The sense of collective memory and therefore common bond felt palpable at the world premiere on March 2nd, as nearly every audience member could recall lived experience of the film’s topic. It felt cathartic to collectively process the past, even while the clear parallels to today’s technologically fraught public sphere beg further contemplation and action.

In the Q&A, the directors shared how they drew upon Becker’s experience as an archival producer, and informed their storytelling strategy by reaching out to dozens of the film’s subjects. In fact, “Farmer Jane,” one of the preppers featured in the film, lives in Missouri and made the trek to the fest for the second screening.

Shorts: Seratonin

The common theme in the True/False experimental shorts program, “Serotonin,” was the effects of the depletion of said neurotransmitter, which is vital for maintaining a positive mood and facilitating communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

The block opened with attending filmmaker Zach Dorn’s Moomin (2022), composed entirely of content pulled from his iPhone photos, apps, and screen captures. Dorn’s deftly dry voice offers narration and recounts a long-distance relationship torn asunder by the pandemic — and his subsequent loneliness-spurred obsession with an app game. In the game, called Clawee, you play IRL claw machine games from your phone, and any winnings are mailed to your house. Dorn sets out to turn an inside joke with his ex into a grand romantic gesture staged inside the claw machine. Lucky for us, he documented the whole thing, because the resulting film is a hilarious, and touching example of pandemic hobbying.

In Barbara Vojtašáková’s No Elements (Prázdna množina, 2022), a former couple review 16mm footage they shot while together, their voice-over exchanges rich with the complexity and tension of their history and ongoing dynamic. Following Moomin, it felt kind of like if Dorn had showed his film to his ex and then they made a meta-film about the end of the relationship. But in an experimental Czech documentary kind of way.

The only other filmmaker in attendance for the program was Nastia Korkia, whose film You Are Not Here (2023) closed out the program. In it, she documents her grandmother’s austere funeral rites in a Russian Orthodox church. In the Q&A, both Dorn and Korkia spoke about how they use filmmaking as therapy, though Korkia joked that therapy might be easier.

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Director Jonathan Ben-Shaul, a British movement and theater director, crafted the film during a two-month residency at the Kharkiv Literary Museum.

“It’s about exploring the living relationship that we have with structures like this,” he explains. “In putting the body in that space and exploring the tensions and the oppositions that that architecture offers, it gives us a more holistic language to approach architecture … Our relationship with buildings is one that is interactive and constantly changing.”

Shot in September 2021 — just a few months before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine — the film eerily captures simmering divides between Russians and Ukrainians in Kharkiv. Their fights seize upon seemingly “symbolic” issues arpund language, plaques, and architecture. Yet the film makes clear that such issues are actually a proxy fight for the question of who gets to decide Ukraine’s future.

What Shall We Do…? uses five buildings as case studies to understand how a Soviet past haunts Kharkiv. Architects and ordinary citizens first explain a building’s significance; dancers then bust open those explanations via movement. But there are startling breaks from this formula, too, as when passersby begin inserting themselves into the scenes. Like rings of a tree, buildings contain layers of Ukraine’s history — one marred with successive invasions from outside empires. One architect points to the artificiality of Soviet symbols tacked on to structures dating back to the Russian empire.

The film documents resistance to such Russian influence, ranging from the organized to the anarchic. One expertly edited montage syncs heavy dubstep with the toppling of Soviet statues. Other monuments have been reclaimed; the brutalist Kharkiv Opera House, built in 1991, has since become a haven for skateboarders and techno-ravers.

The film’s dance sequences uncover the emotional underbelly of these buildings. One of the film’s two dancers and co-producers, Mykola Naboka, explains that Ben-Shaul would instruct him to walk around the buildings to get a sense of their dynamics, then quickly make a charcoal sketch. Inspired by those drawings, Naboka crafted dance sequences that toe the line between abstraction and acting, with elements of mime and vaudeville.

Another sequence is inspired by the 1928-built Dherzprom (Держпром), a giant gray dollhouse of a building that dominates Kharkiv’s central square. While considered an architectural jewel, it’s also faintly oppressive, notes one interviewee. To Naboka, it felt as though the building’s many blocks were springing out of the ground. As he and his partner dance, an imaginary force field on the ground seems to send them flying backwards.

Naboka’s education at the School Jacques Lecoq in Paris, which he attended alongside Ben-Shaul, gave him the tools to deconstruct these ideas.

“[The building is] just a structure with certain lines, with certain emphasis, with certain equilibrium or disequilibrium, with certain push and pull in it … So I can’t really say that I was reacting or responding to the building,” Naboka explains. “I would rather say that I was responding to this 3-D model which presents itself in space, and then just playing around with this form and trying to respond to the dynamics that are within it.”

The film’s frenetic editing only adds to the surrealism of this sequence. As the Dherzprom expands, metastasizing and overtaking the sky, it presses down on the dancers. At times, it becomes see-through, but another version of the Dherzprom always pops up. In other scenes, the buildings refract into infinite versions of themselves, like Matryoshka dolls. Sometimes even the dancers multiply.

“In order to keep a building sense of play — a [sense of] scale, if you will — we felt there should be increasingly more playful effects throughout the film,” says Ben-Shaul. “There was this idea of the building being almost infinite, having this unbelievable maze of corridors. And so to demonstrate that, we thought it would be fun to replace the sky with even more Dherzprom.”

The Dherzprom sequence exemplifies this mounting experimentation. Ben-Shaul and his editor came up with these trippy, destabilizing sequences under a severe time crunch. They edited together the interviews and dance sequences in only three days before the premiere of the film.

“I think probably a lot of the inspiration for the wilder edits came from the fact that we were exhausted, and it was in the middle of the night,” laughs Ben-Shaul.

What Shall We Do…? approaches its subject with whimsy, but it never forgets how high the stakes are. Visceral, on-the-ground confrontations, which were unplanned and unscripted, capture the city’s edginess. In two separate moments, anonymous passerbyers — not authority figures, not police officers — demand that the crew stop filming.

In the film, as the activist Vadym Pozdniakov explains his efforts to remove a seemingly sledgehammer-proof Leninist plaque, a man needles him with accusatory questions. When he insists Vadym speak in Russian, their argument escalates. For the crew, it was an intense moment.

“Some of those interactions were more aggressive than you see in the film,” says Ben-Shaul. “Once the cameras stopped rolling with the man in front of the plaque, a car pulled up, and he had some big guys who sort of chased us off. It was clearly quite tense, not just because of the resonances that architecture had in Kharkiv at the time. But also because Vadym himself is a bit of a polarizing figure, especially within that community.”

“This situation is actually one of the million which represents the level of tension in which people in Kharkiv were living,” says Naboka, who believes these simmering debates about Ukrainian identity foreshadowed Russia’s invasion. “Drawing a parallel with nowadays, when we have this full-scale invasion — you can feel that in the air 5, 10 years before it happened, by these little tiny signals that would just bring up the question of, ‘Okay, which plaques should we have on the streets: Ukrainian ones or Russian ones or Soviet ones? Okay, but which language should we speak?'”

“There was a constant confrontation of two parts, pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian, which kept fighting for Kharkiv and for eastern Ukraine,” Naboka concludes.

In the two years since the film was shot, most of its cast and crew have left Kharkiv, as the city has borne the brunt of Russian shelling and missiles. Many of the buildings featured in the film have been heavily damaged. Proceeds from the film are being donated to the group Evacuate Kharkiv, whose 200-member team includes Igor Klyuchnik, Naboka’s dance partner.

As the world bears witness to Russian atrocities, What Shall We Do…? reminds us of Kharkiv’s cultural vitality, its indomitable spirit, its legacy of resistance.

Reflecting on the questions around identity and national pride raised by the film, Naboka says, “These kinds of questions weren’t just cultural discussions … These questions were deciding the future of your generation and your kids’ generation.”

A Colorful Immigration History

As a self-described Third Culture kid — someone who doesn’t fit neatly within either immigrant or stereotypical “American” identities — Ahmad has faced biases which have influenced his understanding of self from a young age.

“I grew up being told… that the lands my hundreds of years of lineage came from was not a real place. I was once told by an elementary school teacher that Palestine didn’t exist,” recalls Ahmad, who was only seven- or eight-years-old at the time. “I didn’t realize I was being disrespected… I went home and I was like, ‘Mama, baba, is that true? Where are we actually from?'”

Through therapy and other healing modalities, Ahmad sought to understand everything that happened before him in order to understand where he wanted to go next, whether in life or music. He reflected on the ways in which he had rebelled against being like his parents when he was young but later found himself doing as they would have done. The result is his first debut record under his own name, despite his long history as a musician and DJ.

“As I’m maturing as an artist, I’ve started to pick out and understand more: ‘Okay, what was nature and what was nurture?'” Ahmad shares.

The backbone of Inheritance is his family’s colorful, multi-continent immigration story, which began with his grandparents fleeing the highly-contested Palestinian territory of East Jerusalem and landing in South America, in search of refuge. His mother was raised in Venezuela and his father in Brazil, where there were large refugee populations; his dad’s family eventually immigrated to the United States in the late ’60s while his mom’s family came in the ’70s.

“[I was] raised with a bizarre amalgamation of New York culture, Palestinian Arab culture and South American culture, which really affected my parents,” Ahmad explains. “You can understand why there was a need for me to take a moment to stop and reorganize the whole litany of things that were influencing my childhood.”

Family Archives as Primer

These reflections also support Ahmad’s curiosities around genealogy and archival materials. Recently, he found old photos of his grandparents immigrating through New York’s Ellis Island, as well as cassette tapes which have made their way onto Inheritance. Their audio samples provide a sonic bridge which “involves the past as heard through a present-day lens,” while giving a voice to the record’s many themes.

Such evocative samples can be found on “Gesso,” where a chorus of family voices are heard, speaking in Arabic. Serving as the intro and outro of the track, the samples bookend an ambient wash of pleasant sounds, reminiscent of flowing water overlaid with shiny synth twitterings. The track is what Ahmad describes as a “call-and-response,” recorded shortly after he was born.

“My dad is interviewing my sisters and videotaping it to send to my grandmother in East Jerusalem. He’s effectively saying, ‘Your brother Omar has been born. What do you think of him? Do you love him? Are you excited that he’s here?'” Ahmad translates. “And my sister Amna, very extrovertedly, is like, ‘Yeah, I guess he’s okay. Yeah, cool. I think he’s sleeping; I don’t know; I don’t really get what the big deal is.'”

Ahmad’s dad would eventually take the same video camera and tape to East Jerusalem, show it to their grandmother, and record her response.

“I get kind of misty thinking about it, because she’s the person to whom the record is dedicated. Her name is Amneh Ahmad,” says Ahmad. “She basically said, ‘I’m building everything here for all of you. I’m so happy to hear that Omar has been born. I cannot wait to meet him and to see him.'”

The track’s title, “Gesso,” takes inspiration from the paint primer that is laid on canvases to prepare them for painting. The word also has a deeper, abstract symbolic meaning for Ahmad, as the recordings provided a kernel of inspiration early in the album’s creative process.

“I treat [“Gesso”] as… the inner dream state that a child was in before they’re really sentient. It’s the ideas and thoughts and sounds floating around in a baby’s head that they don’t really understand,” he explains. “These voices have relatives floating around, talking about the significance of [an] event that they can’t possibly understand yet.”

A Matriarch’s Wisdom

The presence of Ahmad’s grandmother on the Inheritance is very much intentional. Ahmad credits her as being the matriarch of the family, as well as “the reason my family, in its current state, exists the way that it does.”

“She was an incredibly entrepreneurial and tough seamstress from East Jerusalem,” he gushes. “She made a lot of amazing dresses in traditional Palestinian weaving, which takes a particular style that is local to that area, and there’s this little street named after her in East Jerusalem as well.”

Furthermore, his grandmother was the one who saved up funds to ensure that his greater family could eventually put down roots in Brooklyn. After many years of being a single parent of sorts — because his grandfather was working abroad in Brazil — his grandmother was to reunite their families, after much time had passed and contact had been lost.

“She’s the one person in my life, I would say, [who,] no matter the circumstance, has always made me feel completely unconditionally loved,” says Ahmad. “Every single person who had ever met her had such a deep respect for her as a person, but she never did a single thing for herself. And not in like a performatively selfless way, like a lot of people can do. She just really held everybody together.”

In 2017, Ahmad had been planning to move into his grandmother’s building, to an apartment across the hall from her. Unfortunately, she passed away right before that happened — but creating the record in that space did provide an unexpected sense of poetic inspiration.

“The entirety of the album was written in the same house that I first lived in, which was her home, so all of the sounds were recorded in the same space that she used to occupy in Carroll Gardens on DeGraw and Henry Street,” he explains. “I think it felt necessary.”

A Multicultural Approach to Collaboration

Ahmad’s multicultural upbringing is also evident in the way he approaches his collaborative efforts. In the music video for “Lapses,” which feels like a mixed media mashup of time and place, Ahmad worked with illustrator and painter Singha Hon and Andrew Charles Edman (ACE). Both Hon and ACE are biracial artists, and while Ahmad is not biracial and does not claim to have a similar experience to them, he believes there’s something about “being split between two cultures, two ideologies, or… seemingly opposing forces” that provide common ground for their shared creativity.

“The goal was really to create a visual and audio space that could somehow summarize being like a Third Culture individual, where it’s really truly torn and split between two regions — neither of which I feel like I can fully call my own,” explains Ahmad. “I’m definitely too Arab to be considered the average American and too American to be considered the average Palestinian, so there’s a certain desire to convey that.”

Ahmad intentionally strayed away from CGI or over-reliance on the digitized abstractions ambient artists often gravitate towards. The video incorporates the analog medium of painting, which felt aligned with the record’s archival aspects and physical forms of media; it also reminds viewers of the colorful portrait of Ahmad which Hon created for the album artwork.

“Lapses” also incorporates archival video footage, including images of New York protests against Israeli occupation. Another dramatic clip shows an Israel Defense Forces soldier kneeling on the neck of a Palestinian man whose name was also Omar, by sheer coincidence. Ahmad overlaid the image with the simple portrait of an Arab American family.

“While my childhood was complicated and challenging at many turns, it paled in comparison to the struggles of a mirrored version of myself who could have grown up in East Jerusalem,” explains Ahmad. “Part of [the video] is a cautionary tale to Arabs in the U.S. who rest on the laurels of the struggles of those abroad, and who quickly claim victimhood as a part of a conflict that doesn’t actually affect them directly on a daily basis. What we feel as the diaspora is real and deserves its own focus and compassion, and there’s room for all of these conversations. We just need to have them with integrity and to honor those who have sacrificed the most.”

Bridging the divides further, Ahmad was able to use the release of Inheritance as an opportunity to make a mixtape for Radio Alhara – a pirate radio station based out of Bethlehem which has been associated with well-known electronic musicians like Nicolas Jaar. The mixtape features experimental Palestinian artists like Muqata’a and also serves as a personal milestone for Ahmad.

“To know that it was premiering in Palestine at the same time that it was premiering in the U.S. literally made me teary-eyed, because I never thought that would be remotely possible,” he explains.

The last time Ahmad returned to Palestine was in 2017, and his 2020 trip was sidelined due to the pandemic. Now on the heels of Inheritance, he hopes to return sooner than later to conduct archival work, make recordings, and meet up with Palestinian musicians.

In the meantime, Ahmad is also bringing global sounds to Brooklyn. In collaboration with Alicia Coleman aka DJ Miss Alicia, he has created a dance party called Ūmboma, which features Arab, African, and Latin dance music — as well as a smattering of other sounds from the global South. Its name is a made-up amalgam of words comprised of: umma, which means “greater family” or “congregation” in Arabic; libertad, which means “freedom” in Spanish; and ngoma, which means “dance” in Swahili. Effectively, Ūmboma is “a congregation of freedom and dance,” and its goal is to create a sonic blend that never feels forced, kitschy, or gimmicky, but points out the many ways in which rhythm and dance are universal.

“A lot of these regions in particular are regions where there’s been so much great suffering and co-opting of their cultures and appropriation of their cultures,” says Ahmad. “So to be able to let the music breathe and pay homage to the artists directly, rather than listening to a deep house track with some Arab vocal in the background by someone named Sven in like Finland on some deep house chart… [is the goal].”

Whether as an experimental composer or DJ and show promoter, what’s clear is that the throughline of Ahmad’s work is one that shows pride and curiosity in his lineage. It’s his Inheritance, in all its multifaceted glory.

Installation view, Songs for Ritual and Remembrance, Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

Upon entering the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, one encounters a recording of the hymn “Sit Down, Servant.” The people singing are relatives of the artist Adebunmi Gdabebo; the occasion is a funeral at the Old Jerusalem Church, located on what was once the True Blue plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina. The building still exists but it is no longer used as a church. Only vestiges of its original purpose remain, like the cemetery across the street where many of Gdabebo’s ancestors are buried. Installed in the gallery are two wooden pews that once stood in the church, hand carved by members of Gdabebo’s family over a century ago. While they have held up beautifully to repeated use, there are worn spots in the finish that bear witness to all the bodies that have sat in them through the years. Paired with the music, they permeate the gallery with physical traces of human presence.

A few weeks after I viewed this exhibition in person, I spoke over Zoom with my friend Emily Zimmerman, who curated it. She tells me that the Old Jerusalem Church is significant because it was the first institution that Gdabebo’s formerly enslaved ancestors built after their emancipation. “It was the first thing they did with their free will,” she says.

Hanging on the wall near the pews is a companion piece titled “Remains, piece of Balcony Baluster” – a series of seven architectural elements salvaged from a home built by Gdabebo’s ancestors about a decade earlier, before they were free. Like the pews, these balusters are weathered from years of use.

Adebunmi Gdadebo, “Pews,” 1890. Original church pews. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

Unearthing Histories

In the context of the exhibition, these found object installations are in dialogue with Gdabebo’s handmade works, which incorporate commodities like indigo dye, cotton, and rice, along with human hair and red clay soil dug from the plantation where these commodities were produced. They are also in dialogue with the work of three other artists: Ken Lum, whose monumental typographic piece commemorates both the accomplishments and the exploitation of garment workers; Mary Ann Peters, whose latest addition to her “impossible monument” series uses silk and glycerine to honor 19th century female silk workers on Mount Lebanon in Syria; and Guadalupe Maravilla, whose multimedia assemblages are healing rituals in sculptural form.

Each of the works in this exhibition embodies a material history that merits our attention, but is often actively marginalized by those in power: for instance, South Carolina is one of several U.S. states that has recently passed laws limiting how the legacy of the institution of slavery can be taught in schools. Together, they perform a kind of historiography that can only be achieved by arranging objects and sounds together in space. We can talk or write about these things, but the effect can never be the same as being in a room filled by them; of listening to singing voices while contemplating traces of blood, sweat, and toil.

“The concept of reparative history is really important,” says Zimmerman. “It’s an exhibition saying, ‘Here’s the gap in the power relations as they exist now, compared to what they should be.’ In many ways, it’s trying to model a corrective sense of historiography.”

Adebunmi Gdadebo, “Remains, piece of Balcony Baluster”, 1848. Original balcony baluster of the McCord House in Columbia, SC. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

Expanding Contexts

Zimmerman’s approach has developed through many years of curatorial practice, which may be traced back to her time as a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and through the previous positions she has held, including as Director and Curator of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. The word “curate” is often overused to the point of absurdity, as when people talk of “curating” their friends or their Instagram feeds. But the curation of contemporary art is a field with its own theory, practice, history, and ethics — the intricacies of which Zimmerman is currently teaching in her course, “Curating Contemporary Art,” at Penn.

“We’re in a moment of transition of what the term ‘curation’ means. It still refers to a specific set of activities which, since the beginning of museums, have included activities that had a certain hierarchy built into them,” she says, pointing out how the International Council of Museums (ICOM) recently changed its definition of a museum in an attempt to chart a more progressive, community-oriented vision for the field.

“In the past, I think that museums reflected certain classes of individuals and served certain classes of individuals. They were born out of rich people’s collections, and only became public many years after the first museums were founded,” Zimmerman explains. “The profession of curating has similarly been dogged by some old vestigial organs of aristocracy. The field has not caught up to an equitable distribution of funds where, for instance, someone can curate who does not come from a wealthy background.”

“All of this is in the background and informs a hierarchical approach to programming that is author-led,” she continues. “In the past model, there was the genius author curator who put together their show and said, ‘Here, the public, this is what you need to be looking at, contending with, thinking about.’ And the shift that’s taking place [now] is: rather than that author-led model, more of an audience-led model of asking, ‘What are the needs of the community? How can we serve those needs? What are the conversations that the people who trust us need us to be having right now in order to come to terms with our world?'”

Ken Lum, “The Recounting of the events and experiences in the life of Yashir Khorshed,” 2017/2021. Letterpress print, courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

Over the past several years, Zimmerman has developed a practice of working within institutional parameters to make the boundaries between those institutions and the communities they serve feel more porous. As Associate Curator of Programs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, she programmed a series of outdoor public performances called The Untuning of the Sky, which brought music, poetry, and film screenings to venues across the city. It was through this series that I first got to know Zimmerman from an artist’s perspective, when she invited my band Hair and Space Museum to perform on the Seattle waterfront.

She describes this series as an “aha moment,” when it occurred to her that she did not need to confine herself to art that fits inside a museum. “I realized, I can go elsewhere, and that I might serve community better if I thought more expansively about context.”

This expansion of context would define her tenure as Director and Curator of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, the gallery inside the University of Washington’s School of Art + Art History + Design. Among the many projects she spearheaded here was the launch of an art journal called Monday, which published critical writing on the interface between art and the social worlds in which it is embedded.

When Zimmerman returned to her hometown of Philadelphia in early 2023, she set out to discover what kinds of public interventions would make sense in her new/old context. “Songs for Ritual and Remembrance grew out of a process of checking in with community stakeholders and saying, ‘What’s going well? What’s not going well? What do you see the students needing?,'” she recalls. “Because the students are always kind of our frontline audience – our first constituency. It’s where we can make a case for art and model productive relationships with artgoing to the students.”

She identified two key points as emerging from those conversations. “First, the students did not have the tools that they needed to deal with the aftermath of the pandemic, so they needed stronger toolkits to contend with the kind of emotional, physical, economic realities that they were encountering,” she explains. “The second thing was contending with the need to start a conversation with the community. Recognizing that this is a beginning of a many years-long process, one needs to begin somewhere, and there are ways that this show could kind of jumpstart that.”

Zimmerman mentions a handful of other recent Philly-based curatorial projects that have engaged with their broader community in ways she has found inspiring. These include Rosine 2.0, an interdisciplinary project using art as a collective method of harm reduction and healing, and Isaac Julien‘s immersive installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die) at the Barnes Foundation, which pointedly interrogates the role of museums in creating and perpetuating racialized hierarchies through a colonial practice of stealing and hoarding objects.

“It’s one of the best pieces of expanded cinema I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says of Julien’s installation. “It became something that haunted my brain as I was thinking about this show and thinking about: what are the other ways that community holds memory? And how, in an institutional context, can you uplift those moments while also putting together an exhibition that will be made up of objects? Guadelupe Maravilla was an artist that offered an answer to that question pretty early on because he creates objects that reference a history while also creating space for ritual.”

Over the course of the exhibition, this space has been activated by musical rituals – most recently a sound bath performed by tone scientist and healer Michael Jay. Maravilla was introduced to sound therapy while undergoing treatment for cancer; including a sound bath in the exhibition allows the gallery to become a space of collective healing.

Guadelupe Maravilla, “Disease Thrower #16,” 2021. Gong, steel, wood, cotton, glue mixture, plastic, loofah, and objects collected from a ritual of retracing the artist’s original migration route. Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W Gallery, New York. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

Mary Ann Peters, “impossible monument (the threads that bind),” 2023. Courtesy of the artist and James Harris Gallery, Dallas. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

The Politics of Aesthetics

One of the ways that museums have historically perpetuated hierarchical violence is through the aesthetics of the white cube.

“It erases its history,” says Zimmerman. “It hides behind the white walls and tries to say nothing, [as if] we are in an eternal present and nothing else has ever happened in this space. But you see it on the opposite side of the wall. You go beyond the white wall and you see all of the hole marks and the putty and the funny shelves that were installed for a particular time, because there’s no effort to scour away that palimpsest.”

The Arthur Ross Gallery is not a white cube. Its architecture is highly idiosyncratic, with oddly shaped window frames and waist-high wood paneling, making it a fitting environment for an exhibition about the ways that spaces and objects can embody histories.

“One of the things I enjoy about the Arthur Ross Gallery is that it says very loudly when you walk in, ‘I was once a Shakespeare library!'” Zimmerman laughs. “‘And also: ‘I’m built in a totally different architectural style than the building that I’m attached to (the Furness Building), and that difference has to do with the politics of aesthetics.'”

I ask her what curators can do to push back against the aestheticized politics embedded in the colonial history of museums, and she replies, “I think changing the methods and processes by which our work happens is the hardest and the most important thing – those quiet rhythms that determine when you do things. And also, changing the politics of hierarchy within the institution; letting go of some of that need for power or authorship, while also putting at the service of community all of the skills that a curator will have.”

“In some ways, I’ve been learning tools to think of myself as a facilitator rather than an author,” Zimmerman concludes. “In this specific case, I undertook some learning about somatic healing because I think exhibitions speak in a language of embodied space, so they’re well-suited to broach that subject.”

Mary Ann Peters, Emily Zimmerman, Adebunmi Gbadebo, and Claire Oliver. (Image courtesy of Emily Zimmerman)

Installation view, Songs for Ritual and Remembrance, Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania. (Credit: Emily Pothast)

Photo credit: Houston Cofield

Addressing Gender & Hypermasculinity

“As a rapper who exists in hip-hop spaces, which are inherently hypermasculine — at pretty much most times — I feel like self-awareness isn’t always there, and sometimes that’s the best way to get the message across through my art, especially being that I am masc-presenting, although I identify as nonbinary,” says Santinac.

For their latest six-track EP, Kamakiri 222, Santinac explored themes of “themes of triumph, and empowerment, defiance, rebellion” by working in the spirit of “unbothered.” They had been in a creative rut and unsure of their next steps, when a Seattle hip-hop show featuring The Alchemist, Boldy James, Action Bronson, and Earl Sweatshirt refreshed their perspective. Action Bronson, in particular, had been inspiring.

“He didn’t really seem to care about anything that was happening outside of that stage. He appeared very comfortable in his body, and that reminded me, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what it means to be a rapper. You’re already cool. You don’t have to explain yourself; you just have to be,'” Santinac explains. “I wanted to encapsulate that energy, but also in a very sassy way.”

One way that this sassiness is captured is through curated audio samples. One such clip, used on “My Lesbian Barber <3,” comes from a 1985 Grace Jones interview with the Australian current affairs program, “Day by Day,” where she has to defend herself from a white interviewer who asks if she is “aggressive” or “masculine,” and whether he should be afraid of interviewing her. In the track, Jones is heard saying, “I like being both [feminine and masculine], actually… it’s not being masculine; it’s an attitude, really. Being masculine, what is that? Can you tell me what is being masculine? I just act the way that I feel.”

This clip resonated with Santinac, who explains, “Grace Jones is a huge example of my personal philosophy on not necessarily gender, but the way that I perceive and navigate femininity and masculinity, which for me, are two different forms of the same energy… that, for me, is what that soundbite was all about: just Grace Jones being defiant, absolutely, in her own philosophy about gender identity.”

While Grace Jones may speak volumes with her quotes, some of Santinac’s references may be a bit more hard to entangle; their meanings may be more veiled. This is particularly true when Santinac pushes the boundaries of making people uncomfortable with their music. A repeating refrain on “Simp x Fried x Rice,” for instance, states, “Don’t talk to me unless you sucking dick,” backed with soulful vocals echoing the same in a femme voice, in an almost joking manner. The track also ends with the sounds of hentai, or anime porn.

“[“Simp x Fried x Rice”] usually makes [cisgender heterosexual] men feel very uncomfortable… at least, until they notice femmes singing along, and suddenly, their demeanor changes,” Santinac explains. “For me, it’s all about defying hypermasculinity and creating dialogue around the discomfort of men who don’t often consider the discomfort they create within hip-hop spaces both in and outside of the music.”

When asked how they might deal with misinterpretations of their intentions, Santinac responds, “Sometimes, I wonder if my lyrics have some sort of enigmatic, members-only (if you know, you know) feel to them, and this stresses me, because naturally, I want everyone to digest [them], but I also know that I can’t control how others interpret my art, and art isn’t always pretty to everyone.”

“I can only leave the door open for potential discourse,” they add.

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Drawing Atypical Influences from an Atypical Upbringing

Ash León’s creative process is in part informed by collaborations, including their work with iNGudCo, an artist collective they helped co-found. Artists they work with in the collective include Spek Was Here, Dame Mufasa, Austin Crui$e, theGoddessie, and StarBunny. In particular, Santinac describes their friendship with Spek Was Here as very unique — one where the majority of their time is spent doing “non-music things.”

“We just love watching movies together — to the point that even when we are working on music, there’s likely some film playing in the background,” says Santinac. “That’s how we discuss concepts with each other. When we’re talking about what type of sounds we want, we talk in film. We mention film directors; we talk about the different textures that we experienced watching something and how we can translate that sonically.”

Along the way, they have amassed a trove of sound bites that end up being incorporated into their work. This approach takes influences from plenty of niche film genres — whether it be science fiction, samurai, Blaxploitation, or spaghetti westerns — because Santinac believes these aesthetics feel otherworldly or timeless.

“A lot of the time we lean towards more grittier, dustier, grungier textures when it comes to what we’re creating sonically, because the implication is the illusion of timelessness — that you really can’t tell what era you’re in when you’re listening to my music,” Santinac explains. “For all you know, you could be 300 years in the future, and you’re hearing something from back when, or this could be broadcasted from an entirely different planet.”

This otherworldly feel is certainly also highlighted by influences from comic books and anime, which are just fundamental to how Santinac was raised. Born in 1990 and self-identifying as a “baby millennial” Santinac explains, “By the time I reached middle school, Adult Swim was pretty much my older sibling, and all of the programming that they would air… definitely altered the trajectory of my life… because that is how I even really, truly discovered what anime was.”

These early interests in anime bloomed into fascination with Japanese culture at-large, but Santinac cites some early identity struggles from spending time with their grandmother in Warwick, New York — which was predominantly white and upper middle class — and later moving to Memphis, Tennessee for high school. Once in the South, they found that certain types of artistic tastes they had developed were no longer popular or accessible.

Album cover artwork for an upcoming, untitled EP

“[Living in Warwick was] how I was able to gain access to a lot of my nerdy interests, and why a lot of those same nerdy interests were seemingly culture shocks for some of the other black children that I eventually went to school with down south,” Santinac shares, reflecting on life in the early ’00s. “This was before social media. Impoverished communities of color that barely have access to grocery stores (food deserts) aren’t very concerned with the existence of comic book shops or graphic novels.”

“That’s not to say it doesn’t happen,” they quickly add. “HELLO WU-TANG CLAN.”

Still, developing such a complex identity from such a young age led them to wondering how to be authentic while still taking inspiration from multiple cultures.

“It’s important to me to not only have identity, but be authentic in that, so a lot of those references just come from my inner child and the things that not only fascinated me back then, but because of that fascination, I still know a lot about today,” Santinac explains. “[I also think about] cultural exchange versus appropriation. I feel like it’s possible to enjoy something, say that you like something, [and] pay homage to something without wearing it as a costume.”

With the Kamakiri 222 EP, a real life incident with a praying mantis played a role in the final artistic output. In Japanese, the word kamakiri translates to “praying mantis.”

“My favorite part of this entire experience is that a praying mantis that [landed] on me during a photoshoot… it wouldn’t leave, and I love that. I feel like [it’s] the superstar,” says Santinac. “I looked into what the praying mantis symbolizes across different cultures, and the duality it holds in Japanese folklore resonated with me — a symbol of great courage and fearlessness, but also cruelty and merciless. The Angel number 222 can be interpreted as a symbol of balance, harmony and spiritual alignment. That’s the story I’m telling from the first track, ‘Helios ,’ to the last track, ‘Ichiban!‘”

Album cover artwork for Kamakiri 222

Pushing Boundaries & Manifesting Trippier Things

Kamakiri 222 was born out of a particularly difficult time; as a result, Santinac used the record to intentionally transformed moments of darkness into moments of empowerment.

“I don’t like to rot… some days just aren’t good days, and some moments aren’t good moments, and they can last,” reflects Santinac. “It was a rocky summer, and I just felt like the best thing I could do in that moment was to shift frequencies and put that energy into just… well, affirmations,” they continue. “I won’t say positive, but just affirming that, ‘Hey, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere,’ you know? Bad bitches don’t die, so let’s get it.”

Santinac is presently working on a number of upcoming releases, and they consider Kamakiri 222 to merely be an appetizer on a long string of dishes which still need to be served out. Coming next, in Fall 2023, is an as-of-yet-untitled four-track EP which continues to expand upon gritty, grungy textures and metaphysical themes galore. Other releases are in the pipeline as well, such as an EP inspired by the Japanese revenge film Lady Snowblood.

“I feel like I experience music in colors, and there’s still an entire kaleidoscope that I have not written about yet — that I’ve not manifested into content that other people can digest and enjoy,” they explain. “So that’s really my focus: what boundaries can I push? How can I make this even more trippy and psychedelic?”

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