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| @Cecile Emeke: Black French women in Paris |
The celebrated Strolling documentary series of Cecile Emeke is availble on YouTube again.
On her website Emeke writes: "It’s been ten years since Cecile Emeke began her creative practice, releasing two of her seminole works to date, ‘Ackee & Saltfish’ and ‘Strolling’ within the same year, in 2014.
The much-loved Strolling documentary series garnered a worldwide audience, with Cecile producing 25 films in total between 2014-2016, shot across London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Brussels, New York and Kingston, Jamaica, with notable features in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Financial Times, as well as selections at various film festivals including The Tribeca Film Festival."
The strolling series was an online documentary series that documented Black people across the diaspora, walking and talking about various pertinent topics, spanning the political and social, to the philosophical and anecdot
With special attention made to making the episodes as
accessible as possible; CC Subtitles in up to 7 languages from
Kinyarwanda to Portuguese were made available by the support and
collaboration of viewers, in order to make the series accessible to
non-anglophone and hearing impaired communities."
In Europe the episodes were named:
- Strolling in (London)
- Flâner (Paris)
- Wandelen (Amsterdam)
- Passeggiando (Milan)
- Strolling in Brussels (USA)
Documenting the global black diaspora
Alexis Okeowo of the New Yorker wrote:"It seems fitting that Cecile Emeke, a British filmmaker of Jamaican descent, was partly inspired by James Baldwin when creating her cult-hit Web series “Strolling.” In “The Devil Finds Work,” a book-length essay of film criticism, Baldwin wrote, “The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat.” Elsewhere, Baldwin stated, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”
In “Strolling,” Emeke is documenting the global black diaspora, from children of African immigrants in Paris and Rome, to black Americans in New York, to young natives of Kingston. During intimately and gracefully shot interviews, in which she follows the subjects around their cities, the ensuing meditations often focus on issues of immigration, race, nationality, class, and, ultimately, belonging. Black populations across the world have at least a loose sense of their counterparts—descendants of slaves in Brazil and Haiti, products of migration in Western Europe—but “Strolling” makes their existences, their joys and worries, real in a tangible, addictive way."