2019 Directed by Akosua Adoma Owusu
The starting point for this colourful film is a letter from human rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to the American embassy in Brazil. The fact that in 1927 it was impossible for African Americans to travel to Brazil reminds us of the inequality still faced by that country’s black inhabitants.
Netherlands
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Netherlands
[9]
Ghanaian filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu is gradually building one of the most vital bodies of work in the so-called avant-garde. Like many of the best experimental filmmakers working today, Owusu's work is formally challenging but fundamentally accessible, because it faces outward, directly engaging with basic human concerns -- history, memory, and cultural experience. I think her latest film, with the cumbersome but apposite title Pelourinho, They Don't Really Care About Us, is her finest work to date.
The film consists of footage shot in and around the Brazilian historic center of Pelourinho, in the city of Salvador, Bahia. The capital city of Salvador, and the Pelourinho in particular, are contested sites. Founded in 1549 by the Portuguese, this was…
the COLORS of the hand-processed film in this short piece are incredible, and its mesmerizing visuals work in the service of an important topic: a historical look at racism in Brazil with ongoing contemporary significance, drawing on excerpts from a 1927 letter by W.E.B. DuBois to the U.S. Embassy to expose a deep-seated legacy of prejudice.
“All I want to say is that they don’t really care about us.”
Some good Salvador footage and well structured, but tries to cover far too much ground it can't quite deal with and ended up not that far from the avant garde version of the calculated Jackson/Lee video it refers too.
There is a myth in Brazil that we hear from a very young age: Everyone is welcome here, no matter where they come from. Brazil is supposedly open to all cultures.
That's not true. History shows it and this documentary reinforces that. White immigration was incentivized. Black people weren't welcome. Since it's Brazil, we didn't have laws stating that, as the movie shows. But it was all policy and a clear plot to make the people more white.
This movie really articulates this issue beautifully, showing all the blackness of Brazil, represented here in the Pelourinho, and contrasting it with the white narrative of Brazil's embassy.
I'll definitely look into more movies by this filmmaker.
There’s a lot packed in this short film and I’m frustrated at not being able to say why I enjoyed it, but I did.
I still haven't worked out where I stand on Michael Jackson after the horrors of Leaving Neverland, so I did feel some distance on this. But it's a powerful film about Brazil's treatment of Black Americans. Perhaps a little slight, but it looks stunning and has led me to want to discover more of Akosua Adoma Owusu's cinema which looks at how identities like black, queer, woman collide and are treated in different societies. A fascinating, vital topic.
Dude, I literally just turned in a 8 page final essay about Pelourinho (“the whipping post”) in historic Salvador de Bahia and how it was the first slave market in the world and could be described as the place where the idea of the African American was made, and then I stumble on this beautiful piece randomly. There’s so much history here as the first major intersection between European, Indigenous American and African culture, and was the primary destination of enslaved Africans in general. It is so genius that Owusu used Michael Jackson’s filming of the “They Don’t Really Care About Us” music video in Pelhourinho and how that represented a pretty monumental crossover between two cultures, both imperative parts to the African diaspora. Fucking epic
Owusu’s first movie focused outside of either Ghana and U.S. The basis is a letter from WEB DuBois sent to the American embassy in Brazil. Apparently, in 1927, African Americans were not permitted enter Brazil. Very lovely use of color and music (e.g. Michael Jackson). She makes the video feel like DeBois and Jackson are having a conversation.
A thought this struck in me was on the sound of samba drums in the start - samba uses the military-style drums Brazil inherited from its colonisers, and turned them against the powerful in the writing of protest songs - that seemed pretty apt on this lesson/letter to those who resist letting cultures interact and grow together - and in this case for African-Americans and Afro-Brazilians to reconnect - framed with a spread of cultural contacts from European architecture to Michael Jackson.
WE ARE ONE - FILM #43
"All I want to say is that they don't really care about us."
A bite-sized look into the issues facing a culture, but too short to make all that big a statement.
