Project Title
Paradise
Estimated Running Time
45 minutes
Log Line
A deep dive into a multiracial Caribbean American family history exploring race, immigration, and imperialism.
Synopsis
Paradise is a personal documentary exploring the filmmaker’s race and national origin.
My grandmother, grandfather, and mother emigrated to the United States from the
American occupied Panama Canal Zone in 1968. Both of my grandparents are black
West Indians, whose ancestors were lured to Panama to build the canal in exchange for
American citizenship. That citizenship never materialized and workers like them were
granted Panamanian citizenship to live along the canal in communities that were
segregated by US special forces. My family eventually settled in Brooklyn, NY where my
mother met my white father and they started their family. Paradise is my attempt to
understand the complexities of my ethnic and racial identities as informed by history,
family interviews, and my own research. In order to do this, I have divided the film into
five distinct visual acts with each one exploring a single aspect of this journey.
Act I will incorporate footage from the 2018 World Cup. 2018 was the first time that the
Panamanian Men’s National Soccer Team qualified for the World Cup. This was a
profound emotional moment for me, which I found both strange and gratifying. In this
act, I will reflect on how this deep moment of emotional connection made me want to
make this film and talk to my family about our identity and our immigration story.
In Act II, I will lay out my methods and concerns for making this project. Since this
portion of the film is solitary and exists within my own mind, it will be animated.
Animation is, for me, a solitary and reflective practice where I get to experiment
emotionally and formally. In this animated space, I can speak frankly about my
experiences and my prior knowledge going into the project. I will also incorporate
elements of a 60 Minutes special on the Canal Zone I purchased on 16mm.
Act III is an interview with my maternal grandmother about Panama, her mother (my
great grandmother), and a food item that she taught me to make. This portion of the
film combines a Facetime interview conversation I had with my grandmother about
most Americans’ ignorance about Panama as a country with me making Panamanian
Beef Patties the way her mother taught me. In this conversation, my grandmother
explains our family’s position in Panamanian culture, as well as in American culture.
In Act IV, I will combine footage of my four brothers with audio of interviews I will
conduct with them about our racial identity. The footage of my brothers will largely
focus on our physical similarities and varying ethnic ambiguity. In the interviews I will
ask each of them how they explain our background to other people, the frustrating
responses we’ve received from the world, microaggressions from people, and what this
all means and feels like to them. At various points in our lives, each of us has expressed
some level of racial anxiety around being mixed, black, latino, half white, etc. I hope to
give each of them a space to express himself and give insight into what our heritage
means to them.
Act V will focus on our father’s whiteness and our relationship to it. This is, perhaps, the
most nebulous topic to approach both emotionally and factually. In this section, I will
interview members of both sides of our family, incorporate text and audio from people
talking about whiteness, and also talk more broadly to a range of people about
whiteness particularly as it pertains to multiracial people with a white parent.
Artistic Approach
While this project is a personal documentary at its core, I consider myself an
experimental media artist first and foremost. With that in mind, this film will be
grounded in the theoretical and aesthetic traditions of experimental work. This means
incorporating distressed and otherwise physically altered film, found footage, and
editing style that privileges emotional and aesthetic connections over spatial and
temporal continuity, and a more poetic rather than prosaic approach to storytelling.
This film will largely make use of the 16mm Bolex, though I will use the Aaton XTR for
some portions. For the post production process, I will hand process my footage and use
the optical printer to recapture and alter footage. Using film rather than digital
technology is a regular part of my practice which feels especially critical to this project.
Since so much of this project relies on memory and emotion, an added layer of organic
matter and artifact feels especially vital to my vision.
Topic Summary/Relevance
The Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies have awoken a number of
questions and fears in me and many of my fellow Latinx friends and family. I feel such
kinship to those detained migrants and the US-Mexico border. They seek the stability
and opportunity that my family was able to access. Their countries of origin were
similarly destabilized by the country from which they seek asylum.
As an American, I recognize that I would not exist without this country that commits
these atrocities in my name without my consent. I recognize that having a white father,
who was born in the United States affords me tremendous privilege, but I also recognize
that his whiteness does not transfer to me because of my mother’s blackness.
What do we really know about our families? About where we come from? About all the
complex pieces of those histories that shape our identities? How do those identities
shape our worldview?
My mother was born in a country I’ve never been that was colonized and impacted by
the only home I’ve ever known. When United States Special Forces established the
Canal Zone in Panama, they brought segregation with them. My mother was born in an
all-black town called Paraìso (Paradise).
My grandfather joined the US Army in order to become a US citizen. My mother was two
years old and the family eventually settled in Brooklyn, NY, where my mother met my
father, a white American of mostly Irish descent. The house she grew up in is the
address on my birth certificate. We didn’t live there long: by the time I was nine years
old, I had lived in New York, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, as my parents sought
their place in the world for their growing family. Everywhere I went, I found myself
having to explain where I am from and where I’m really from.
I was first drawn to this subject when I took a Visual Ethnography course with Kathryn
Ramey at Emerson College. Kathryn’s ethnographic focus has largely been
concentrated on Latin America and American imperialism. It was through her
encouragement that I made a short project with my grandmother using a food item to
unpack our particular ethnic identity within Panamanian culture. That project, Fake
Patty , will be integrated into Paradise as a vignette.
Paradise is a deep dive into me answering the perplexed questions of those who find
my brothers and me racially and regionally ambiguous. I will interview my family,
historians, and others to explore these complicated ideas of race and identity. I will use
found materials, new footage, various voices, and animation to interrogate these issues
in a series of five non-linear vignettes tied together by the central themes.
As I revise this, the struggle for black liberation is a critical moment. Protests are taking
place across all fifty states, Europe, South America, and elsewhere. Here in the states,
these protests are being met with horrifying levels of police violence and repression. As
much as this film is an examination of Latinx racialization in America, it’s more critically
a black story. My mother’s own rejection of African American identity by virtue of her
immigrant story is not my own. I am a Black American even if my family is from another
country. My grandmother also identifies as a Black American. I see this film as a way to
heal this divide within myself.
Project Stage & Timeline
This project is well into its pre-production phase. I originally wanted this film to begin its
festival run in 2021, but COVID-19 has complicated my employment status and access
to vital equipment. I was able to use a one-year appointment to purchase supplies and
begin visual tests. At this stage, I have enough materials to continue collecting footage,
begin direct animation of found footage, and experimenting with potential post
production workflows given my limited access to 16mm post-production equipment. I’d
hoped to collect the interviews and footage of my siblings this summer, but that will not
be possible until I can be vaccinated for COVID-19. I plan to have Acts I, II, and III
completed by early 2021. By then, I should be better able to troubleshoot traveling,
distance interviews, and other necessary logistics to complete Acts IV and V.
Key Creative Personnel
Director: Gabby Sumney
Gabby Sumney is a media artist and educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. They
work in experimental nonfiction with a special emphasis on issues of identity and
personal narrative. Their work has screened at curated screenings and festivals
internationally including Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Indie Grits, and
Cellular Cinema.
Producer: Nerissa Williams Scott
Nerissa Williams Scott—CEO of TCGT Entertainment,LLC, Boston, Ma.,
( www.tcgtentertainment.com ) is a dedicated professor in the Film/Video Department at
Massachusetts College of Art and the Night Manager for the Emerson College
Paramount Center Film Sound Stage in Boston, MA. She is a graduate of Hampton
University where she received a Bachelor of Art degree in Fine and Performing Arts. She
has received her Master of Fine Art degree in Film Production (emphasis in Producing)
from Emerson College. Her career experience includes over thirty years of working and
learning in performing and media art.
Distribution and Marketing Strategy
I will submit this project to a number of documentary, experimental, and Latinx film
festivals. On this list are Ann Arbor Film Festival, Canal de Panama Film Festival,
Camden International Film Festival, and New York Immigration Film Festival, among
others. I am also working with my producer, Nerissa Williams Scott, to set up additional
screenings of this project in conjunction with other Afro-Latinx/Caribbean artists to
showcase work about identity.
Intended Audience
The United States of America is on track to become a majority minority country. Too
often, when I hear that projection spoken aloud, there is a level of fear or discomfort in
the speaker’s voice. American anxiety about race relations and inequality often means
that discussions of complex identity are avoided. As a child, I was often torn and
confused about who I am and what that means. With that in mind, my primary intended
audience is other multiracial Americans and the people who love us. I also want this
project to reach other Latinx people and artists of color in general.
Fundraising Strategy and Grant Impact
I am seeking a number of grants to fund this project. I was able to spend a grant for
Affiliated Faculty at Emerson College on film stock, research money for a now expired
artist residency for more film and supplies, and used my time in the artist residency to
explore alternative methods that I will employ in this film. With my one-year residency
behind me and current economy, this LEF grant in addition to freelance work will allow
me to buy enough of my time to work on this project.