Contemplates the notion of "identity" through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, the film tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned, lesbian Puerto Rican photographer / videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, this experimental narrative becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences.
Commentary (voice)
The Black Audio Film Collective’s seventh film envisioned the death and life of the African American revolutionary as a seven part study in iconography as narrated by novelist Toni Cade Bambara and actor Giancarlo Espesito. The stylized tableaux vivants that memorialise Malcolm’s life referenced the early 20th century funeral photography of James Van der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead and the elemental static cinematography of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.
Writer
Describes the confrontation between Philadelphia Police and members of the MOVE organization on Mother's Day, 1985, which left 11 men, women and children members of MOVE dead and 61 homes destroyed by fire. The events are situated in the history of Blacks in Philadelphia, the MOVE organization, and the Cobbs Creek neighborhood. All this is explored through historical photographs, interviews and footage of the confrontation and its resulting hearings.
