Omega Rising Women of Rastafari + Born in-a Babylon | + Discussion with Aleema Gray and Carmen Andall-Woodroofe
25 March 2024, 6.30pm – 10.30pm
Our third 'Uncovering the Archive' event – a collaboration between the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) and the MayDay Rooms Collective – will include a screening of two films, Omega Rising (1988) and Born in-a Babylon (2000), followed by a live discussion with Dr Aleema Gray (curator, researcher and public historian) in-conversation with Carmen Andall-Woodroofe (PhD student from the Music department at Royal Holloway) about a cultural movement (Rastafari) and a musical style (reggae).
Omega Rising Women of Rastafari (1988)
Run time – 50’
Omega Rising is a film directed by D. Elmina Davis, a Rastafarian filmmaker, camera-woman, and founding member of the Ceddo Film Workshop. It documents women of Rastafari, capturing their political, artistic and spiritual sense of being.
The film lends a feminine perspective, turning from the historic crowning of King Haile Selassie and his 1966 visit to Jamaica, which was a catalyst for the movement, to the crowning of his wife, Empress Mennen, as an entry point into the shift toward more gender harmony within the movement.
The women recount their coming to Rastafari as personal and intellectual journeys entangling the meta-physical with concrete conditions of liberation rooted in the experience of class, racial struggle, patriarchy and cultural warfare under (post)colonialism, in both Jamaica and England. Establishing women’s organisations and carrying their message in the poetic lyricism of reggae music, they repossess a cultural selfhood and assert a ‘politics of existence’ that is of great importance for the global pan-African movement.
Born in-a Babylon (2000)
Run time – 35’
For our second film of the programme we are delighted to be screening Nicolas Chaudeurge’s short film Born in a Babylon. Filmed and edited whilst the director was completing his studies at the National Film and Television School, the film gives space and time for Rastarian communities based in North London to speak about (and reflect upon) the various ways in which different generations are upholding, interpreting and adapting Rastafarian beliefs in UK culture. Shot in the year 2000, throughout the film we visit the now defunct Rastafari Universal Zion centre up in Tottenham and understand what it means to practise the teachings of Rastafarianism far from its emergent context. This film is not only an important historical and social document, but also a sensitive and generous portrait of the London Rastafarian community at the turn of the millenium.
Aleema Gray
Dr Aleema Gray is a Jamaican-born curator, researcher and public historian based in London. She was awarded the Yesu Persaud Scholarship for her PhD entitled Bun Babylon; A Community-engaged History of Rastafari in Britain. Aleema’s work focuses on documenting Black history in Britain through the perspective of lived experiences. Her practice is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to notions of belonging, memory, and contested heritage. She is the Lead Curator for Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music at the British Library and the founder of House of Dread, an anti-disciplinary heritage studio.
Carmen Andall-Woodroofe
Carmen is a third-year PhD student from the Music department at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on the ways in which roots reggae mediates the environmental thinking of African-Caribbean diasporic listeners across the UK. As part of this research, she has set up the oral history project Rooted in Reggae, which has so far recorded the testimonies of sound system DJs who work with the land or in food production.
June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA)
The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA) holds a unique collection of artefacts and archival material, which has at its core the interest of Pan-African cinema and its relationship with Black British cinema and culture. To date, JGPACA holds more than 10,000 items – including over 700 feature films, television programmes, short films, and documentaries, as well as audio recordings, photographs, posters, manuscripts, magazines and books and documents – connecting African film with the film cultures of diaspora communities in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
Uncovering the Archive
The programme offers a free series of workshops & screenings with an aim to engage young people from marginalised backgrounds and/or those who have not engaged with archives before or are not currently in higher education. The intention is to introduce the archive as a resource and archiving as a mode of storytelling available to, and representative of, those who are normally excluded from history- making practices.
Click here to find out more about the programme.