Akwaeke Emezi

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A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

Shot in Lagos, Nigeria, Ududeagu is an experimental short film about impermanence and a spider. Narrated in Igbo with English subtitles, it is a brief and haunting piece of visual mythology.

In a city with unbreathable air, a young woman pays a farewell visit to her older lover, a widower who became agoraphobic after his wife’s death. Both immigrants, they argue over her impending return to Nigeria from their place in diaspora, charting an emotional path together through fear, loss, and a thirst for freedom, all marked by an underlying secret. It’s a story of exile, homecoming, what gets left behind, and the truths that change everything.

‘Blesi’ is a short about liminal racial/national identity in which my Tamil mother speaks on her experience of having children who don’t resemble or identify with her. It is a self-portrait that features my sister Yagazie as a proxy subject. The sari she wears in the film is our mother’s kurai, one of her wedding saris, and the music is an evening raga our uncle played every evening at his house in Bangsar, Malaysia.

‘Hey Celestial’ is a video capstone project based on the texts of Toni Morrison. It examines Morrison's recurring character of the wild/wanton woman, using images of silence and absence to depict her in the isolation created by her freedom. The juxtaposition of sung text, intertext, and subtitled text deliberately recreates the interior discord of secluded madness.

Incorporating intertext as narration, this piece features a subject whose lover (a spirit/priest) has left them. Rather than accept this loss, the subject makes a square in the grass and summons the priest into their backyard, trapping it. In this work, both the one who has left and the one who has been left serve as self-portrait proxies.