ELA- Change is Gonna Come Film Project

America’s Soiled Timeline: “We are Here”

The focus of my film was the empowerment of a black woman. I chose this focus so I could shift the mindset of the “Angry Black Woman” or “Pitiful Black Girl” to show, in reality, the strong black goddesses that we are. My film was selected to show the neglect of black women, show our sacrifice, manifest our execution of power, and demonstrate that we should still stand proud through the timeline of color, gender and struggle. While I did glimpse into the past, I also narrated my personal present to tell my own segments of my journey of being a black girl in America. I executed my pain while ending on the stronghold of the ancestor’s before me and my life and strength.

The process for creating my script wasn’t difficult at all. I was raised learning my history in my own community and at home. I did research alot to back up the information I was starting to narrate, but much of what I researched was my own common knowledge. One of my goals was to become and envision a griot(African village storyteller). Start from the soil and root of our history and not from the enslavement. Transition with the Overseers and not with the officers. The script was built upon this sort of timeline through the various emotions that are built into the poem. One line that stood out and really snapped the transition of the story was, “Proud to be. Proud to keep. Until it was stolen from me. Dead.” This line expresses the shocking emotion of joy to despair as the wondrous dancing of the homeland shifts to the enslavement by foreign souls. In addition, each time I mention death and rebirth, it is to tell the story as if from the same soul, but different bodies and experiences shown in the visuals of the film.

The process of creating the film was actually very fun. I love to dance and I think that dance itself is an art that details the passion in one’s movements and for the purpose of this film, escalated the entire production. The production planning was already done in my dance group in class weeks before we got started in literature class. The timeline is indeed parts of our history aligned with the motions of our dance. Each part was chosen to be different songs representing the emotions, moods, and experiences of each period in time I chose to address. Starting from joyous grand arm movements of African dance down to fluid or shocking snaps of our body, the dance itself is a timeline. I also edited and placed pictures in different scenes to more explicitly state the symbolizing of each scene, while enacting my voice to tail the pain that I dug out in my dance. Filming the film was the best part, because the colors and lighting of the various sections illuminated my body to enact either an emotion or for example what I saw the middle passage to be(Red scene). In fact, the color blue that was born after the first “death” spoken in my poem made me want to call myself the “Blue girl”. Just like my script, the “Blue girl” went through different bodies and a diversity of colors, scenes, and environments to end on that she still lives and “We are still here” symbolizing the strength of the black woman.

Overall, the film was very fun to create. I felt like I could make some little black girl out there proud to live in her own skin. From a scale of one to ten, based on the materials and knowledge that I had available and experience in dance, I would give myself a ten. I know that in 5 years, I probably wouldn’t give myself the same grade, but I feel like I really put passion into what I created. I wouldn’t change anything right now, but maybe I’ll be more satisfied when I have the money to where I could make my room full of blue stars turn into real stars or look like the middle passage, I will feel more satisfied with my creation. I didn’t learn much except that I am a good dancer when I put my heart into it. Maybe I have a bit of a future in dancing.