a portrait of the last day that i saw my grandmother alive, and the last words she said to me – a prayer.
an important motivating factor in my decision to come to the new school was a desire to figure out a way to create a platform for african women to tell their own stories because there are whole industries (development & humanitarianism) built mostly on the pain of women and their children. their stories are told for us and to us, but they never get to speak unless it is in service of our agenda.
letting my grandmother speak her own, uninterrupted and uninterpreted words, and showing her in her unvarnished beauty was the first time i have been able to take that concept out of my head and make something with it.
she was a woman who never got seen – she was background to my grandfather and her six sons for her entire life. i never really got to know her until he died. by then, she had dementia and i never found out who she was before she was a mother and a wife. and that was heartbreaking to me because i will never know the stories of my foremothers.
so this was my way of letting her last words, a prayer for her family in her absence, live beyond the moment & to finally give an audience to her voice. but also, a way for me to explore film and editing and the power to amplify or to censor that comes with that.
i plan to keep learning ways to magnify unheard voices
shona kambarami 