The annual “Images of Black Women” film festival runs from Friday 29th through to Sunday 2nd March. The festival opens with “Talk to Me”

The true-life story of Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr during the mid-to-late 1960s, in Washington D.C. A story of friendship between two men Petey Greene & Dewey Hughes. The film’s centre point is the devastating effect of Dr Martin Luther King’s assassination on America.

Saturday 1st March is International Women of Color Day

“In the 1980s the U.S.-based National Institute for Women of Color, founded by SHARON PARKER, designated 1 March each year to celebrate & honour women of color in the USA - Native American, Black, Latina, and Asian and Pacific Islander women………….In 2008 Women of Colour Day is now GLOBAL. WE ARE NETWORKING: recognising each other and ourselves, the world’s majority population - women.

Saturday’s film is a comedy
/love story, “Phat Girlz,” about a plus-size African American woman struggling with self-esteem issues. Followed by panel discussion on ‘mainstream influences’ on the way Black women feel about themselves, plus Q&A with the film’s actor Jimmy Jean-Louis. £8 Cons £7

The Women of Colour group will meet at 4:00PM in the lobby of the Tricycle Cinema on Kilburn High Road. Nearest tube station is KILBURN on the Jubilee line. Come out of the station and turn right - 10 minutes walk.

“If you have come to help me, please go away. But, if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.”- Lila Watson, Aboriginal Woman Activist

Tags:
Black Women
Film
International Women of Color Day
London

Dreams of Dust is the first full length feature film by writer and director Laurent Salgues. The film was shown at this year’s Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou and won the Grand Jury Prize at 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

The gold diggers of the Sahel region of the Sahara are boys and young men who work in horrendous conditions in the numerous unregulated mines. Apart from the hazardous conditions of working in sand and dust which has left many of the children and men with TB and other chest related illnesses, the rewards are small yet as the film depicts, poverty drives young boys and men from across the region to the mines in the vain hope of making a living to support their families. The film is set outside the town of Essakane which has grown around the mines over the past 30 years.

Reading the directors synopsis of the film, I am reminded of all those who cross the Sahara or the Atlantic ocean from Africa to Europe in the hope of fulfilling the dream of earning money to send home only to find themselves carrying the burden of the death of their fellow travellers, living and working on the periphery of society suspended in a a kind of timeless no man’s land.

From the director.

Rêves de poussière (Dreams of Dust) is a stationary quest, the interior journey of a character who finds himself by going away to lose himself. It is a simple story of letting go of one’s ego The characters are castaways from the shipwreck of life. marooned in a gold mine where everything seems possible but nothing is achieved. Happiness is too far away, out of reach. They are all carrying a burden: a heavy past, a child on their back or a sack of stones. In this way they all echo the main character, Mocktar Dicko, who arrives carrying a suitcase but also the guilt he feels for the death of his little girl. Essakane is a makeshift gold mine located in the far north of Burkina Faso. It is the perimeter of the film. This space anchors the story line. It is the setting for a contradictory atmosphere, a mixture of hope and despair. “Sahel” is a word of Arabic origin meaning “shoreline”. On this shore, Essakane seemed to be a kind of port, where people dream in vain of setting off for happiness. The characters contemplate the vast desert as others might look at the sea. They live according to their own rhythm, with a predilection for suspended moments, for all the floating seconds where it seems everything can still change.

Links: The DVD can be purchased through Film Movement
Tags:
African Film
Burkina Faso
Gold Diggers
Dreams of Dust

The 10th Carnival of Positives is over on Slimconomy - the name refers to a wasting the wasting disease common with AIDS.

The categories are: Film, Health and Fitness, International, Personal Accounts, Politics, Spirituality, Support and 3 video shorts:

and Miss Empowe(RED) presents a documentary SistahGirl: Black Women and HIV/AIDS

project featuring the lives of HIV positive Black women from the US, with some traveling on an unprecedented journey to meet HIV positive African women activists to exchange ideas about prevention, treatment, physical, and spiritual healing.

Plan International - You Tube: Impact of HIV on children in Uganda

and Malak: Words and Silence

This film shows a woman who has HIV/AIDS interacting in her community and society without ever speaking a word. The film shows how she listens to other peole’s concerns and thoughts, meanwhile, all the time, we are faced with the reality of her own existence, taking medication, the different things she must live with, without ever getting a chance to speak to others about her own difficult life. Throughout the film she is silent but in the end she decides to speak

Tags:
HIV/AIDS

black.womyn.:conversations is a documentary that explores a range of Black lesbian experiences from activism, racism, gender roles, coming out, marriage, patriarchy.

Excellent

Links: black.womyn.:conversations blog

Tags:
Lesbian
Black Women

Goodbye Uncle Tom - One of the most shocking aspects of this unashamedly racist film full of gratuitous violence and frankly disgusting, is that it was made not in the 1930s or 40s but in 1971 by Italian directors, Gualtiero Jacopetti Franco Prosperi. The directors claim the film’s stated aim was to expose the horrors of slavery and racism but it is crude and only succeeds in reinforcing racism and making a mockery of Blackness as the slaves are presented without voice or agency and are completely dehumanized.

This is part one and lasts only 40 minutes. For those living in London the whole film is to be shown on 3/11 followed by a discussion - venue: NFT as part of the London Film Festival.

Tags:

USA
Slavery

Thanks to African Writers for the link to SayItLoud