Now Pretend

© Now Pretend (L. Franklin Gilliam, 1991)

Now Pretend

Now Pretend is an experimental investigation into using race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing on language, personal memories, and the 1959 text “Black Like Me”, it deals with Lacan’s mirror stage, and the movement from object to subject. 

Leah Franklin Gilliam’s film looks at how totalising definitions function for or against women of colour—a visual and sonic effort to (re)collect the self.

The restoration and new digitization of Now Pretend was completed by Cinenova as part of their preservation project The Work We Share—funding provided by Arts Council England.

The film is shown in loop. Free entry.

Read moreLees meer
22.03.2023

A portrait of a leper colony in the north of Iran, where 'ugliness' is juxtaposed with religion and gratitude.

KIJKWATCH

An introspective essay about the search for a place between reality and imagination: a placeless place made up out of dreams and a longing for fluidity. Slowly, the grains of the compressed image become the sands of the atopic beach, revealing an imaginary place.

KIJKWATCH

In this urgent diary film about longing for freedom and community, the filmmaker reflects on the individual yet collective experience of growing up queer in Tunisia today.