Every year Open City Documentary Festival commissions a filmmaker previously screened at the festival to create the trailer for the following edition.

Filmmaker Rhea Storr has screened A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message (2018), Through a Shimmering Prism, We Made a Way (2021) in past editions of the festival. She spoke with Open City’s Marketing Manager Laverne Caprice to discuss the context, shooting process and future plans for the 2024 trailer ‘surfaces’.

Laverne Caprice: You shot parts of the trailer at the Keskidee Centre in Islington, Britain’s first arts centre for the Black community. What drew you to this location?

Rhea Storr: I became interested in the Keskidee during lockdown, with not being able to go to many places and my research being originally focused on Caribbean associations, I started to look into archives for the historic sites of Black organising.

I was drawn to the Keskidee because of the fact that it is no longer there. Doing archival research, I also saw that the way it was narrated online was quite different to what it was actually doing. It’s often talked about as a theatre space, but ‘it also held some meetings of the Black Parent’s Movement, for instance. They also had a library with Linton Kwesi Johnson being the first paid librarian. The site was not only culturally active, but politically and socially active as well. People could often go there to get advice. Influential figures like Angela Davis spoke there, Bob Marley shot his “Is This Love” music video at the site and Imruh Bakari talks about filmmaking pioneer Horace Ové’s Pressure being shot at the Keskidee so it was absolutely an important place.

LC: The site has now being converted into luxury flats, there really is a sense of loss when it comes to community work and places for the Caribbean diaspora, and this film also shows that their histories are not immediately visible. What do you hope the audience who will see this trailer can take away?

RS: My interest in talking about the Keskidee is to highlight Black community organisers. There were plans for a larger centre that are contained within the London Metropolitan Archives. However, it’s not clear what the intention was for those plans, they were wholly unrealised. I want a younger generation to see the kinds of struggles that were happening when this centre was around from the early 70s to the early 90s and how they might be replicated today; capitalism has taken over the site of the Keskidee with it now being luxury apartments, that area is being heavily developed in the north of London. Where are the spaces for that kind of organising now? Where did the people go who were hanging around there at the time?

LC: Do you think that maybe the people that did the original plans didn’t expect them to be stopped so abruptly and that’s why there’s not that much knowledge about how things were going to go?

RS: I have seen that the scholar Charlotte Anthony talks about the Keskidee architecturally. They mention that the architects only met with Oscar Abrams, the original architect and designer of the site, a few times. It’s not known whether these were plans that were going to be realised. I’m very interested in the idea of Black radical imagination and as Robin Kelly, the US scholar talks about it, the idea that the imaginative can bring about radical change. I do wonder if those plans were drawn up with the intention to make the radically imaginative into something tangible and concrete.

LC: How are these important sites documented? Could you explain your process of accessing archives and obtaining rights? Does this come with any difficulties?

RS: Yes, lots of difficulties! This piece is part of a larger film of which access to those images is kind of an ongoing issue for my work. Archives are often held by other archives, which is the case for some of the images of the interior of the Keskidee, which are held at London Metropolitan Archives. Some of those images are also owned by the Eric and Jessica Huntley Archive but it’s unknown who owns the copyright. Sometimes the archive owns the copyright, and it can be very expensive to licence those images.

I’ve engaged with the George Padmore Institute, which you see in the film. It’s housed above New Beacon Books near Finsbury Park, which is also a site for Caribbean organising and the Caribbean Artist Movement. The image taker for the images of that location is not known.  I’ve got to do the labour to find who those images belong to in order to use them and if I can’t, I have to narrate how I’ve tried to find them. There are a lot of images that are held in the archives that are kind of opaque and lost and if people aren’t able to do the labour to make them circulate again then I think that’s a real loss for issues around Black organising that are held in the archive.

LC: The spoken word in this film has a nod to both Toni Morrison and Kodwo Eshun, it’s such a focal point within the film – what made you decide to go with speech throughout the trailer?

RS: I visited a number of other sites mostly round North London, and it was kind of my route through the sites of Caribbean organising. It’s therefore a very situated point of view as it’s my personal path through London at these historical sites. I also thought it was important that we hear a voice which is not my voice, but it is my words. It showcases someone who’s also making their way through tracing a path around those key sites.

LC: Were there any specific works that came to mind when coming up with the film’s concept?

RS: I thought about Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Ja’Tovia Gary’s Quiet As It’s Kept which I saw last year at Open City. I pondered on the idea of something being abundant or excessive in relation to black life; being able to be not just adequate, but more than or better than.

LC: There is a unique shooting style in the trailer with surfaces imposed on top of one another. You often shoot with 16mm film, why is this important to you?

RS: I was interested in the idea that a surface can substitute what is missing in the archive or how a surface can be present in the absence of history. The way that I encounter these surfaces now, it kind of

tells me that it’s nothing more than brick and mortar, but sometimes as you see the crumbling facade of the West Indian Cultural Centre, I’m interested in what those surfaces can tell me by using affect as a way to think the body and the life of something. I’m very interested in using 16mm because it is a physical surface that I can touch and effect and reprint. The colour washes a holographic surface that I photographed frame by frame on an optical printer. I then put it through the optical printer a second time with the film that you see behind it. The idea that different times and context and surfaces can exist together is something I think relates to the concepts in the work.

LC: Can you talk a little bit more about the plans for this becoming a larger piece of work?

RS: I want to kind of expand on the ideas contained within this work such as the idea of searching. I’m going to apply some of the archive imagery that I have been able to obtain and use more 16mm processes as I have the idea of a wandering eye around archive imagery, so I still might be taking this errant route around images which are already fixed in history. I’ll be doing that next with an image of Bernie Grant opening the West Indian Cultural Centre in Hornsey, which I found at the Bishopsgate Institute. There’ll be more archive imagery and more surfaces with more of a discussion about how me as a person today, I might relate to those histories.

LC: Are you working on anything else outside of this project as well?

RS: I’m working on a longer form film about Caribbean Associations that exist today and why it’s hard for them to continue to exist, and why they’re so important.

LC: I love the focus on the Caribbean in the context of the UK. It’s such a complicated relationship for many whether its political, societal or economical. It’s important that things can be documented in this way with archives at the root.

RS: I especially think people outside of the UK don’t necessarily know that history. In talking about it, I’ve often found that people do come with some sort of commonality. Maybe they’ve migrated or have dual heritage so I’m interested in how it might even speak outside of itself.

Rhea Storr is an artist filmmaker who explores the representation of Black and mixed-race cultures. Often working in photochemical film, Storr considers counter-cultural ways of producing moving-image.

You can watch the full Open City Documentary Festival trailer here.