Dreaming Rivers

A Sankofa film directed by Martina Attille

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SYNOPSIS

From Sankofa Film and Video comes this bittersweet and nostalgic short drama illustrating the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration. Miss T., from the Caribbean, lives alone in her one-room apartment, her children and husband having left her to pursue new dreams. When she dies her family and friends gather at her wake. The tapestry of words that interweave the drama convey the fragments of a life lived, but only partly remembered.

PRESS

“Remarkable.”

Manthia Diawara Black American Literature Forum

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Martina Attille

Martina Attille is a member of the renowned Sankofa film group of black British filmmakers. She was born in St. Lucia in the Caribbean and has lived in London since 1961. She is a filmmaker “for whom representations of black women remain a central and complex narrative device.” Through films like DREAMING IN RIVERS (1988), she explores the colonial experiences of Caribbean immigrants in Britain. This film’s impressionistic rendering of a mother’s reflections from her deathbed allows Attille to examine generational effects of migration on Caribbean identity and culture. She also directed THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE in 1986. (1/20)

Sankofa

Sankofa is a collective of black, British filmmakers and was founded in the summer of 1983 by then aspiring filmmakers Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, and Robert Crusz. The five young artists were all recent graduates of various art colleges and polytechnics in London and were part of a wave of black independent filmmakers who emerged in the 1980s. Determined to tell their own stories in their own way, they established Sankofa. Sankofa was one of several collectives and film workshops supported by the Greater London Council (abolished in 1986), and the new broadcaster Channel 4, to encourage diversity. Sankofa specializes in distinctive, short films. The Collective’s earlier work includes: WHO KILLED COLIN ROACH? (d. Isaac Julien, 1983), TERRITORIES (d. Julien, 1984) and PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE (d. Maureen Blackwood 1986). The collective’s first full length feature, foregrounds their interest in politics, sexuality and Black British history. Other films such as DREAMING RIVERS (d. Martina Attille, 1988) and LOOKING FOR LANGSTON (d. Julien, 1989,) uncover personal histories with sensitivity and lyricism. In the late 1990s, their production slate broadened to include stories about British Chinese life (YELLOW FEVER, d. Raymond Yeung, 1998) and the work of new writers and directors like Toa Stappard (Strip, 1998) and Mina Courtauld (DUSTY’S STORY, 1998). Among their several award-witting films is ...IS IT THE DESIGN ON THE WRAPPER (d. Tessa Sheridan, 1997), which was awarded the short film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. (10/09)

Subject Areas

Black Diaspora Family Relations Immigration and Exile

The Passion of Remembrance

THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE (dir. Maureen Blackwood & Isaac Julien, 1986), the Sankofa collective's greatly influential first film and a landmark work in British avant-garde film and video, ambitiously explores themes of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generational tensions as embodied in the reality known by a Black British family over the years. Interweaves two narrative threads—one in which a man and a woman discourse on their own experiences living in the UK, another in which events from three decades in the lives of the Baptiste family are staged—Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien tease the accumulated fragments into a spellbinding, heterogeneous mosaic that powerfully evokes the multiplicity of Black experience and identity and critiques the British state’s treatment of its marginalized residents. This 4K remaster by the BFI National Archive, undertaken in collaboration with the directors and cinematographer Nina Kellgren, is based on the original 16mm negative and magnetic soundtrack final mix. Available for exhibition. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

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Home Away from Home

A bittersweet drama that unfolds almost without dialogue, this prizewinning short film from Sankofa Film and Video conveys the isolation of immigrant women’s experiences. Miriam lives with her children in a cramped and dreary house near the airport where she works. The planes coming and going overhead remind her of how far removed she is from her rural African roots. Eventually Miriam constructs a beautiful mud hut in her garden, a magical space which takes her away from the loneliness crowding her suburban existence. Although her neighbors are intolerant, her daughter Fumi learns something about the African side of herself.