Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the impulse of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the reparative perspective of its formerly silenced stories. The filmmaker, a Black British-Trinidadian Harvard undergraduate, and their daughter, the writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint to the haunting sounds of archival ghosts.
A New England Document screens as part of the shorts program Colonial (Dis)entanglements, on Sunday, June 27 at 1:45 pm.
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Che R. Applewhaite, is a Trinidadian-British writer, filmmaker and cultural worker. He holds internationalist and interdisciplinary commitments to politics of time, specificity, relation and cultural process. A New England Document, his debut film, received its world premiere in 2020 at Sheffield Doc/Fest. He has written for publications including Harvard Magazine, Open City Documentary Festival and Millennium Film Journal and worked for artist-filmmakers Christopher Harris and Ja’Tovia Gary; for the Harvard-Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship and Harvard Art Museums.