Kwame Braun

Two brothers try to get back the nightclub that was swindled from their mother.

By Kwame Braun. Color, 24 mins, 1998. From distributor Documentary Educational Resources: At a street festival in West Africa, a young girl is delighted to discover a video camera trained on her. But her exuberant display is quickly cut short when she recognizes that the cameraman has already lost interest in her. But all is well: he has a document of the moment. Video has tipped the balance in another human interaction, and turned it into a curio. This experimental video essay probes the complexities of video as a tool for cross-cultural research and representation: it examines, in effect, the politics of its own production. How does the intrusion of this expensive technology distort relationships? What are the ethnographic filmmaker's responsibilites towards his "subjects?" Yet perhaps these concerns are themselves distortions, preoccupations that obscure a more balanced encounter, in which human accommodation can flow in both directions.

An elderly couple, reminiscing about their long-lost youth, comes across an advertisement for a new technological invention that promises to reverse the aging process. Intrigued, they pay a visit to the scientist who invented it, but things don’t go as expected.

Joe Wild, a virtuoso of vocal effects and acoustic body noises who earns his living driving a taxi. In his travels, he encounters the experimental vocalist Shelley Hirsch. Together they flee the Nothing Human sound studio, whose engineers have been attempting to steal their voices, and they stroll off into the sunset warbling sweet nothings at each other.

Meg & Siggy Go Swimming is a short film inspired by the script of Nightswimming and the poem "Zenith" by Morgan Elise Dawson. The film tells the story of two former circus performers who meet years later inside a shared memory, where they try to discover what sent them off in different directions from a love that seemed so total and so complete. It is an attempt at cinematic poetry, with music, poetic language, and resonant imagery meeting non-linear storytelling. Meg & Siggy Go Swimming features Porscha Shaw in the role of Meg. It was written and directed by Jeffrey Fracé, shot and edited by Kwame Braun, with music by Christian Frederickson.