BLACK MOTHER

Visionary filmmaker and Beyoncé’s Lemonade cinematographer Khalik Allah follows up his acclaimed Field Niggas with a haunting, hallucinatory portrait of his family’s Jamaican homeland that challenges Western perceptions of motherhood and spirituality.

Continuing on from his groundbreaking work as a photographer and his stunning cinematic portrait of Harlem in Field Niggas, Khalik Allah brings his unique perspective to bear on his mother’s birthplace, Jamaica, using a radical tapestry of filmmaking techniques to capture a land where immersive spirituality and gritty reality exist side by side.

From the city’s ecstatic spiritual prayers to the charismatic sex workers of the streets, Jamaica comes to life in a rhythmic, mosaic tone poem of fevered imagination, mixing Super 8mm footage, still photos and HD video to explore a land steeped in the sacred and profane, in which black women are exalted as "Mothers" of the Earth.

"Confirms the aesthetics of visionary filmmaker … Allah’s approach sits on a striking continuum of lyrical interrogations of black identity, from Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust to Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, in which the lush imagery and profound asides coalesce into microcosms of marginalized experiences." – IndieWire