Wednesday 10 December 2014

Video: Invisible Universe Documentary

M. Asli Dukan is making a documentary called Invisible Universe: a history of Blackness in Speculative Fiction.

Invisible Universe trailer (Documentary feature work-in-progress) from Mizan Media Productions on Vimeo.

From the website:

From the origins of the genres, images of Black people in fantasy, horror and science fiction or speculative fiction (SF) books and movies have been inauthentic at best in the imaginations of white creators. And although there were a few attempts by some white writers to use the genres for social commentary, these efforts were few and far in between.
There is however a significant output of SF work by Black creators. In the 1800’s, Black writers wrote Utopian and Lost World novels imagining better futures for Black people. During the canonization of the SF writing, Black voices were excluded, but Black writers outside the genre utilized the genre to tell relevant stories. Beginning in the 1940’s, Black filmmakers created low budget films exploring the effects of science and fantastical religious beliefs on the Black imagination. Black SF writers formally engaged the genre during the social changes of the 1960s. In the 1970s, Blaxploitation films enabled Black anti-heroes the uses of science and the supernatural to secure Black justice. In the 1990’s and re-emerging in 2010’s the term “Afrofuturism” signaled the arrival of a critical mass of creators, academics and fans, interested in exploring the intersection of science fiction, technology, art and Afrocentricity.
Brought to life via interviews, film clips, archival footage, text, graphics, music, narration and framed via the first-person SF memories of the filmmaker, this documentary will ultimately reveal a canon of work by Black creators in the SF genres, who have been consciously creating their own universe.

This project sounds really cool.  I wish I'd heard of the project in June when they had their Indigogo campaign, but you can still donate to help with post-production costs at Fractured Atlas. (via SF Signal)

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