“Er…I’ve got this idea about a fish.”

July 1, 2013 11:40 PM

An interview with architect-turned-filmmaker Kibwe Tavares about his new film, Jonah. "Something I noticed while I was travelling in East Africa was the segregation between tourists and local people. I felt strange. None of the locals expected me to be a tourist because I was black – but I was staying in these weird campsites which were really isolated – so I was in Africa but surrounded by white people. Somehow I was the only black guy in a very black place." (previously)
posted by spamandkimchi (3 comments total)

goodnewsfortheinsane points out that I failed to point out you can watch the film Jonah in its entirety for free at Vimeo. The linked interview embeds both Jonah and the Robots of Brixton.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:48 AM on July 2, 2013 [1 favorite]

Not the best pull quote for the FPP. In the same paragraph the filmmaker says that he wanted to do the film it in a way that was a "bit less black" to make it more accessible for audiences:

"Not everyone – but a big chunk of people – always feel like the outsider. That’s why abstracting it allowed it to be a project that doesn’t have so much baggage. And I think that’s one of the reasons it was successful."

But the FPP frames it as a black experience thing which seems like a disservice to a film which has a much broader horizon.
posted by three blind mice at 2:08 AM on July 2, 2013

Huh. I am not black, yet I still expected to empathize with the filmmaker's experience based on the pull quote, assumed that the film would have a more broadly applicable horizon, and did not in any way feel that this film was somehow not for me or not likely to be of interest to me due to the respective categories of people in my relevant experiences being different from those for the filmmaker. But perhaps I am not the audience he was concerned with making the film more accessible for. As the making friends in NYC thread demonstrates, I think a big chunk of people feel lonely or like they don't have close, emotionally intimate ties to other people (or only to very few other people), or don't feel like they are part of a community. The fact that this is not universal, and that there are other people with strong community, close emotional ties, and who rarely feel lonely - and the fact that the authors of self-help books seem to mostly come from this group, and that both cause and consequence of the lonelies is that the lonely people don't tend to talk to each other about their loneliness - can exacerbate the feelings of loneliness for people in the first category, and make them feel more different from the norm than they are But that's a bit different still from actively feeling like an outsider.
posted by eviemath at 3:59 AM on July 2, 2013 [1 favorite]