August15th 2021 - September 14th 2021
"A New England Document"
dir. Che Applewhaite (2020)
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SYNOPSIS
Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the impulse of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the reparative perspective of its formerly silenced stories. The filmmaker, a Black international Harvard undergraduate, and their daughter, New-York-Times-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint upon the haunting sounds of archival ghosts: of future possibility arising from once known pasts.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Che R. Applewhaite is a Trinidadian-British writer, filmmaker and cultural worker. He holds internationalist and interdisciplinary commitments to politics of time, specificity, relation and cultural process. His début short film, A New England Document, received its world premiere in 2020 at Sheffield Doc/Fest. He has written for Harvard Magazine, Open City Documentary Festival and Millennium Film Journal, and worked at the Harvard-Mindich Center for Engaged Scholarship, the Harvard Art Museums and as a research assistant to artist-filmmakers Ja'Tovia Gary and Christopher Harris.
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