Film

Mekala Session attempts to establish a new path forward for the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra.

Darol Olu Kae’s homage to the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (Ark), an LA-based avant-garde jazz ensemble, moves the spotlight from the stage to the labor which makes a gig happen. With polyphonic structure, Keeping Time mirrors the fluid and multigenerational composition of the band, as members leave, pass through or die, and follows new bandleader Mekala Session’s earnest attempts to honor past legacies while forging anew. In a skillful kaleidoscopic assemblage, the film weaves together archival footage and audio with the present, restless energy that seeps from every corner of Session’s house. —Chrystel Oloukoi

Artists, researchers, students, and more retell the Myth of “Lascar” in a multimedia collage.

Sol sees Afrofuturism as a link between past and present, and as a rebuttal to a world in which “we are all commodities within a same architecture of violence”. Diffracting their observations, dreams, beliefs, and poetry through an ambiguous, collectively imagined figure named “Lascar” — an antiquated term referring to Southeast Asian sailors on European ships, a present pejorative for diasporic, suburban French teens, and any other number of definitions depending— Yehouessi assembles a team of incisive young collaborators whose multiplicitous views yield a fluid and aesthetically bombastic imagining of Blackness along the space-time continuum. These ideas, sounds and images may be individually familiar, but as the film obliquely states, “The difference? Is (precisely) in the plural.” —Inney Prakash