New films Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese and The Black Tree (El Árbol Negro) by Máximo Ciambella and Damián Coluccio are astonishing works of art, neither feeling at any point like a documentary.
Both films were screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest, the UK’s best opportunity to delve into the minds of filmmakers around the world. Unlike most documentaries on offer, neither film includes interviews or exposition, or a linear ‘beginning, middle and end’ structure. Rather, by weaving together art, abstract narrative and anger, both films capture stories that feel real, human and haunting.
They are, however, very different films. Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You uses grotesque imagery and jarring audio to condemn a nation, and The Black Tree combines mythology and lush cinematography to chart an indigenous community as they struggle for their rights.
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<h5>Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You.</h5>
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This film is not just a final goodbye to Mosese’s mother, the woman who gave birth to him. It is a declaration of emancipation from his motherland. Mosese currently resides in Berlin, exiled from the Kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa. A visual goodbye to a home nation, his first feature-length film seethes with resentment, anger and deep sorrow.
Memory ripples through the film, which comprises chaotic shots of discarded shoes, abandoned buildings and rubbish dumps interspersed with abstract narrative threads – a silent, resolute and sweating woman dragging a heavy cross through dusty Lesotho streets full of astounded, jeering crowds. A lamb that loses its way from its flock, which we later see skinned, on a butcher’s back, before a crowd of men tear its carcass apart. A mother in a cage-like hut, knitting a thick mask completely over a small boy’s face under a burning sun. Despite there being no common thread linking these moments, there is an overwhelming feeling of being lost, anxious and suppressed.
The scenes are punctuated by a series of goodbye letters, voiced by a female narrator. The letters unspool a narrative that begins with a farewell to a mother, gradually increasing in scope to include a furious defection from a mother nation.
The changes in his perspective begin with his personal relationship to his mother. The narrator recalls adoring her, “You were wearing your blue dress. You were beautiful.” His mother embraced a new religion, leaving behind the adored mother of his memory. Her dresses grew longer, her hair became “too sacred to show”. She once loved Michael Jackson, but all the tapes and books in the house were replaced with sermons and scripture. The change parallels Mosese’s relationship with another cherished mother – his nation – which, when outside of it, he sees differently.
“I saw you through the white man’s eyes. I was ashamed,” the narrator confesses. It is an unexpected, perhaps taboo, message, and one we never truly understand in full. We never uncover what it is about his mother and homeland that forced him away, but his pain and anger are tangible through the blunt, venomous statements.
Mosese has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBLdhC-rxM4&amp;t=">spoken frankly</a> about feeling torn between wanting to criticise his home nation, while not wanting to feed colonial perspectives, describing himself as “a prisoner of political correctness, in a way”.
Suffocating on his own silence, this film is Mosese’s liberation, freeing a voice he felt was silenced from all angles. By bidding his mother and the land, goodbye, he is giving up the need to defend either.
It is a difficult film to watch – a dozen or so people left the theatre at various points throughout the screening. It occupies an unusual, sometimes unfathomable, space between documentary, performance piece and epistle, tackling sentiments that take a while to fully absorb and appreciate. Abstract and palpably painful, it demonstrates the trauma that erupts not only in loss, but in realising there is little space in which to express the breadth of that loss. 
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<h5>The Black Tree</h5>
“There was a time when the sky was below, and the earth was above. They say a Great Tree connected them both. Its roots reached the region of the dead, its canopy was mistaken with the sky.”
The Black Tree is a beautiful hybrid of mythology and documentary. Following the struggles of Argentina’s indigenous Qom community, parallels are drawn between the approaching erasure of their community and the reversal of sky and earth in their ancient mythology. This conflation of the supernatural, ancient world to the real and shifting one is a storytelling technique we also see in <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2019/06/02/the-platform-preview-to-the-sheffield-documentary-film-festival-2019/">La Vida En Común</a>, another film about an indigenous community in Argentina screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest this year.
According to the legend of the Great Tree, a great fire disrupted the world, reversing the sky and earth and burning the Tree black. It is said that hardly anyone can remember the Great Tree anymore, but he who finds his way to it will be able to talk to birds, break curses and cure diseases. Farmer Martín Barrios is presented as the man in search of this Great Tree. Facing a fight with the authorities for his community’s rights, and attempting fruitlessly to understand why his goats are dying, finding the Great Tree mirrors his quest to put the balance of the world back in place.
Martín seems to live in an isolated paradise within forests near Formosa, a province in northern Argentina. The cinematography is gorgeous, capturing the lushness of the forests at their most wild, untainted and beautiful. This wilderness is in danger, as corporate agriculture becomes increasingly prominent. Scenes of forests being decimated contrast with the Eden-like panoramas of untouched landscapes, and with the ethereal scenes of Martín’s mystical quest to find the Great Tree.
Yet the slow destruction begins to encroach on the land of the Qom people, presenting further challenges for Martín’s community, who are already marginalised. In the wake of the <a href="https://globalvoices.org/2011/05/01/argentina-indigenous-protests-in-downtown-buenos-aires">roadblock of Route 86</a>, a large-scale protest led by the Qom fighting for their lands against agri-business, their political meetings are heavily guarded. We see Martín attend a meeting led by Valentín Suarez, passing a squadron of armoured police watching over the small group of middle-aged Qom people. The community voice an increasing frustration at the erosion of their rights and way of life. Their settlements are often ignored by the government, leading to a lack of adequate schools, electricity supply and even drinking water.
The Black Tree is a masterpiece in storytelling and cinematography. It doesn’t push the boundaries of factual storytelling to the extremes we see in Mother, I Am Suffocating, the abstractness of which may isolate many audiences. Both are beautiful, thoughtful and unique works that tell stories about the struggle to navigate a rapidly changing world, and you should seek both of them out and watch them with an open mind.
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<pre>Featured: The Black Tree 
Body: Mother, I Am Suffocating 
Via Sheffield Doc/Fest
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This year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest brought us experimental new masterpieces in storytelling and cinematography, with narratives highlighting the struggle to navigate a rapidly changing world.

Land, Loss and Love at the Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019

A new generation of British Asians are embracing their skin tones, but still battling against the ingrained preferences of light skin over dark skin  
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One of the most interesting culture clashes I have seen between first generation black and Asian immigrants and their children is that of how skin colour is viewed within their communities. South Asian communities in particular see most clashes centring on elders trying to preserve their ancestral culture and ideals, whilst younger generations seek to assimilate into British society. It therefore appears to be a role reversal of sorts when seeing younger Asians more comfortable with their natural skin colour, while parents are likely seeking ways to lighten theirs. However, recent controversy over Jamaican hip-hop artist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vybz_Kartel">Vybz Kartel’s</a> rather dramatic switch from black skin to an alarmingly grey-tinged white, courtesy of a whitening product that he plans to market soon, has led me to question how far we have come in embracing the skin we were born with. 
It is no secret that fairer skin is equated with beauty in most black and Asian communities, with skin lightening products raking in cash from India and Jamaica in particular. Personally, as a Bengali girl with the perplexing ability to tan deepest brown with only the slightest hint of sunshine, the few occasions I have ever felt uncomfortable about my skin colour has been as a result of people of my own race, rather than as a consequence of growing up in a predominantly white country, as would probably have been expected. I remember the event that caused this discomfort vividly, and it has shaped my perceptions of how skin colour is treated in my community. 
I was 13 and an acquaintance of my family greeted me thus: “What have you been running around in the sun for? What have you done to yourself, you used to be so beautiful and fair!” Beautiful was a stretch; I was a strangely androgynous child. What she meant was that I had once possessed the ‘wheatish’ complexion so prized by South Asian communities, but since I’d gone and gotten tanned, I had no redeeming qualities left in her eyes, and if I’m honest, in the eyes of many within the community who appraise girls by their looks alone. 
She then continued to rant about how difficult it would be to now find me a husband, bewildering to me because firstly, I was 13 and the prospect of having a husband was as surreal as growing a third leg, and secondly, I didn’t understand how not being fair could affect my marriage prospects. Surely I had other qualities that would make whoever married me a very lucky man indeed? Not to this lady, who has come to represent all that is wrong with the Asian community to me. What did it matter to her if I’d just received the highest class mark in my science test (for the sixth time in a row, thank you very much) or that I’d written a poem that had been chosen for an exhibition by talented young people? I was dark now, and no woman in her right mind would want me to marry her son, which ultimately, for this particular lady, meant there was no point in me. 
Having dark skin is unfortunately seen as an affliction in certain communities, and as with most conditions, do not fear, there’s a remedy! Cue the ubiquitous pink-capped tubes of ‘Fair &amp; Lovely’, with adverts that demonstrate that side effects of fairer skin include increased job prospects, the appearance of one’s true love, and of course, finally gaining the love of one’s own parents, something ‘Fair &amp; Lovely’ would have you believe is difficult for darker offspring to gain. A particularly shocking <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahdvo70fRhk&amp;feature=player_embedded">Indian advert</a> for a fairness cream has been circulating the internet. The entire clip succeeds in being infuriating and unintentionally hilarious in equal measure, but one section in particular is shocking in its racism. The newly fair-skinned woman swishes confidently into the airport and an employee, clearly floored by her beauty, assumes she’s foreign, to which she responds by giggling with pleasure and replying in the negative. I’m surprised the slogan isn’t “if you look Indian, you’re ugly!” By the end of the advert, the woman is blue-eyed, blonde-haired and creamy-complexioned, and everyone around her stops in their tracks to marvel at her beauty. 
The fact that adverts such as these are aired throughout India, sometimes with <a href="http://www.dnaindia.com/money/report_shahrukh-khan-to-endorse-emami-men-s-fairness-cream_1103882">big-name celebrity endorsement</a>, and usually have the desired effect upon the target audience, is disgusting. Such an advert would not be allowed to run in Britain. That adverts like this can air in a country where people’s skin spans the full colour spectrum of what humans can have is devastating. Rather than embracing the diversity of our ethnicity, the very large proportion of South Asians that don’t have white skin are encouraged to believe that we are ugly, and must apply creams so that we all end up looking like one homogenous race. 
Supporters of ‘Fair &amp; Lovely’ and the like claim it is unfair to say that women of ‘colour’ who dye and straighten their hair and lighten their skin are traitors to their race, as many do, without addressing the fact that white women who tan and bronze their skin (often to beyond any colour seen in nature), curl their hair, inject their lips and buttocks with silicone are not addressed as such. Though they adopt the features of other races, they are perceived as merely enhancing their own looks rather than betraying their whiteness. It can be argued that the South-Asian hang up with fair skin stems from Britain’s colonisation of the area and the implementation of a caste system, where those in higher castes who could afford to not work in the sun remained fairer than the poorer people in lower castes. It could also be argued that white skin was, in those times, associated with power and wealth, and when people of colour seek to lighten their skin, they are seeking to emulate those in a position of privilege. Therefore, the desire to be tanned has none of the cultural implications that the desire to lighten skin has- when African, Caribbean and Asian women seek to lighten their skin, they seek to attain a level of beauty that a more privileged race has not only set, but has excluded them from by saying only white is right. Women who tan or bronze are not trying to look like another race. 
If we look at the most celebrated black and Asian beauties in mainstream British culture, and the ones said to be preferred physically by men, such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Aishwariya Rai and Freida Pinto, we see that they are all much lighter than the average black and Asian girl. And while these women are all indeed beautiful, if darker girls don’t see women that look like them being regarded as beautiful, or if they don’t receive any positive reinforcement elsewhere about their skin tone, or indeed of the diversity of shapes and sizes that women come in, this attitude will always remain present. 
I’m tired of seeing girls being insulted, to put it bluntly, about things they have no control over. They are made to feel ashamed of, and burdened by, physical attributes that they should be proud of. Thankfully, I believe that younger generations of British Asians have come leaps and bounds in accepting their own skin colours and widening the definition of what ‘beautiful’ is. Plenty of Asian girls now go tanning, wear bronzer or use fake tan &#8211; although this is yet again symptomatic of someone who is not happy with their natural skin tone and is seeking to copy the current mainstream look &#8211; I feel that this rejection of the older generation emphasis on ‘white is right’ demonstrates significant progression. 
However, there is still plenty of work to be done. I heard a young British Asian woman remark laughingly that she was relieved her daughter was fairer than her sister-in-law’s new baby. I still hear young men confess that they are only interested in marrying fair-skinned girls. This preference of light skin over dark skin has become as ingrained into non-white communities as the preference for thinness has been into almost all cultures. This deplorable self-racism is even ingrained into our language. I have had more than one heated argument with women in my community who use the word ‘dirty’ (‘moila’) to describe someone with dark skin. Many of them didn’t even realise they were doing something wrong. This meaningless standard of beauty we have inherited needs to be stamped out.

Rori Raquib