Hi I’m a Black Queer artist and filmmaker. I’ve been selected for the UnionDocs Summer Lab in New York City and I want to tell you about the powerful film project I am researching:

The Project

I met Jimmy in the summer of 1949 and instantly fell in love. We discovered each other in L’Abbye a dive bar on Rue Jacob, Paris, late in the night where the hungry for life, no money expats and hustling French femme boys hung out. On seeing me, at first, he thought I was one of those regular femme boys, petty theives and hangers on, so he readily dismissed me. Me, not a femme boy, but penniless Trade. A Caribbean drifter finding my way through Paris using whatever I could to get by. I caught his eye and asked him to buy me a drink and he with his bug eyes, mesmerising smile and enormous laugh allowed me to seduce him all the way back to Hotel Verneuil. Where we made mad furious love on white sheets surrounded by threadbare walls while listening to Bessie Smith on the portable record player he hauled all the way from New York City. Our love making was a feast, a celebration of finding each other far from home with nothing but our strangeness to keep us going.

Blending fact with fiction my film delves into the creativity and culture of Black Queer life through my imaginary love affair with James Baldwin. Jimmy was a vibrant sexually alive and adventurous man hungry for success and fame. His mission was to bare witness to his time but he also left us with a legacy. This legacy has been erased and denied as marginal by Black and white cis straight filmmakers and writers. It has been convienient to compatmentalise him as orator, activist and Black writer without honouring th Queer vision at the heart of his work. However, Jimmy’s legacy is unambiguosly Black and very Queer and my love for Jimmy is ispired by the way he chose to live out load, unbothered by labels. Afterall, he did say that growing up “Poor Black and Gay” meant that he “Hit the Jackpot”. There are few contemporary statements and creative responses about Jimmy’s work from Black Queer men. We have been too busy negotiating the pressure and demands of living in the “space inbetween” mainstrem straight culture, Queer culture and Black culture. Out lives fall into the cracks between the twin pillars of racism and homophobia.

Why this project matters?

Across the Globe the reality for ordinary Black Queer people is increased marginalisation. In the USA they are erasing Black and Black Queer life through book bans and legistlation. In African countries like Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria and Bukino Faso voices are being silenced and erased and Black Gay and Bisexual men are being blackmailed, beaten up and murdered. The result is to reduce the power and purpose of Black Queer culture. Yet we still manage to light up the world.

In this imaginary journey of love, friendship and making art I want to explore what it was like to be a template of a Black Queer artist. I want to discover how he loved and why he loved through those who knew him like Micheal Reubourn his ex lover and Anton Phillips an artisic collaborator. I’ll speak to others equally obsessed with Jimmy and recreate imaginary scenes of his life. This is an Afro-fabulous Black Queer adventure film asking what can Black Queer culture and conscioness teach us about the workd and how can Black Queer men continue to take up space, make love and simply be in a hostile world? The first stage of this project is about researching and gathering materials. It’s about finding out how to connect the dots between my perosnal raltioonship with Jimmy and his rerlationship to Black Queer existence globally.

There will be a visual style. There will be dance. There will be poetry. There will be music and there will be Black Queer Joy.

Ok so I am little obssessd with Baldwin and his work but I kid you not this will be one of the most interesting and exiciting explorations of Black Queer culture I have ever made. I truly believe that Reclaiming our History is a political act. One that is sorely needed in this era of erasure and cruelty.

Bio

Topher is a London based artist and filmmaker performer and writer, committed to telling stories and taking up space for Black Queer culture. His film work includes, documentary, drama and gallery installation that explores Black masculinity, Black artistic expression and Black Queer history. His work is innovative in form and challenging in content. His gallery installation at Tate Modern was an exploration of the feeling and expression of BlackQueer realites through archive:

It’s a kind of archive of emotion…..There’s an exploration of afrofuturism, as well as club culture and the idea of community through dance, the release of the body. There’s another room about meditation and stillness, which is about moving away from that scrolling, clickbaity, impatient Western world into a space of sensation and memory. And it’s all very personal.

Topher is co-founder of the rukus! Archive. Europe’s largest archive of Black LGBTQ+ culture and history. The rukus! Archive is over 2500 items including posters, books films,photographs private letters and art works. In 2024 Topher curated M,aking a rukus! a retrospective exhibition at Somersert House. The rukus! Archive is housed at The London Archives.

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Ridgewood, Queens, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. An intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Research and Development Lab in August is for projects preparing to go into production. Filmmakers are developing their conceptual approaches to their work and are aiming to strengthen their proposals and sharpen their creative ideas, as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.