Black Salt Water Elegy

A short film that weaves together original and archival material to create an ethereal narrative texture Black Saltwater Elegy intimately links the discordant threads of a popular history of dispossession Africville with the solitude of its protagonists graveyardshift fantasies After opening with disquieting archival footage of the demolition of Africville the film shifts to an austere observational portrait A palatable sense of the duration of midnight work slowly shifts into subtle gestures that hint towards choreographed events Eventually a breech occurs as the protagonist fuses with an emergent dreamscape where ruined landscapes and a resurrection of an extinct community intertwine Using the protagonists disembodied pointofview the audience floats above a reconstructed Africville one forever present nesting in a bed of saltwater fog