Granite As Heirloom: A Portrait by Caleb Femi

https://vimeo.com/205223348

Caleb Femi, the Young People’s Laureate for London, is a poet-filmmaker whose latest film is

a deconstruction of the white gaze in the portraiture of the black British working-class face; it makes a play on the response to particular black facial features as something sinister, a Hollywoodised alien threat, a dread, out of place, an omen of destruction etc.
The marriage between the poem and the film work as a self-proclamation of the beauty in the black British face and a release from perceived validation of the external gaze.

Although the marginalisation of ‘black’ features in modern aesthetics is a global conversation, this project centres around the aesthetics in the British working-class experience as it is one whose nuances are very much understood by me.

Watch all of his films on Vimeo.

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