At the Tribeca Film Festival in New York earlier this year, Phillip Youmans made history. The 19-year-old director took home the top prize at the festival, the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, for his debut Burning Cane—the first Black director in Tribeca history to do so.
Folk tales have always existed to give shape and meaning to the formless randomness of ordinary life, and to account for why certain occurrences — the death of a parent, the rejection of a lover, the rivalry between brothers — can have an impact on our psyches disproportionate to their un-mythic scale.
In the first trailer for ARRAY’s Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen we see exactly what the title suggests.