In the final chapter of our series exploring the black aesthetic in cinema, Justice Nnanna directs and edits a video poem inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s fictional religion, Earthseed. Founded in the groundbreaking belief that God is change, Earthseed is a way of life that embraces our intangible and fluid universe. As believers of Butler’s faith system, we’re invited to “shape God” and, consequently, recognize the power we have to shape reality.

Edited together as a mood board of salient messaging bound with the director’s film archive, Earthseed pays tribute to the black individuals who have fought to change their realities. Name checks include Sojourner Truth, Gabriel Prosser, Steve Biko, Rosa Parks, Cicely Tyson, and more, as part of a community of alchemists who transmuted subjugation and injustice into hope.

Alongside collaborations with artists in Los Angeles, Lagos, Brooklyn, and São Paulo, Nnanna interviews his grandmother, Kengerte Thornton, who provides a moral line that runs throughout this film. As a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist and non-fiction director, Nnanna’s work crosses continental divides and assesses the effects of climate change, economic disadvantage, and race relations in diaspora communities.

Read on for an interview with the director...

How do you think religion and spirituality shape how Black Americans deal with joy and pain?

Religion and spirituality are just two examples of how Black Americans deal with joy and pain. The Black American imagination, and our capacity for faith, is as richly diverse and inventive as anything I can think of. Although the pain is often displayed and presumed when one learns about the historic brutality and material conditions Black Americans have been, and continue to be, subjected to. 

Joy is ever-present and a crucial part of our spiritual survival. Joy comes in many forms and thankfully I recognized that early on. Growing up, I attended a Black Baptist Church for many of my formative years. There I learned the moral code that leads many Black Americans of faith. Surrendering to something beyond yourself, being of service, gratitude, love, respect, collective mourning, artistic expression as catharsis, and communication — many of these values span far beyond organized religion or spirituality and have materialized themselves in many secular ways.

Justice Nnanna's recommended reading list...

What shared narratives did you discover after working with black creatives in different continents?

As my mother is African-American and my father Igbo-Nigerian, my concept and perception of Black people has always been very expansive. Sheila and Dafe, the Lagos-based artists who created the scene of Sheila dancing in the presence of her sister and nephews, are dynamic and fluid. Since all of our communications around this project had to happen remotely, we had to surrender an amount of trust and relinquish control to the other artist’s contribution. Making this in 2020/21, we had to deal with a tremendous amount of loss and the stress of a world in flux. Each of us surrendered our expectations and centered compassion, understanding we all have internal lives. This mode of operating and collaborating made me feel present and aware of the unknown circumstances that guide our lives.

How has the relationship changed between Africa and the diaspora?

We’re living in the early days of many seismic shifts that are happening simultaneously. African independence from European colonization is very recent, with 17 nations gaining sovereignty in 1960. As is the connectivity that the internet and telecommunication have allowed. The ease of global travel and globalized market places has also brought us into more direct contact. The diaspora is sprawled across the world, and the majority of African diasporans don’t have the means to travel across nations. Thankfully, many of us get to bear witness to the world via HTML, Python, Mp4, Mp3, PDF, all the formats created to connect us in the information age. This seems to have created closer proximity to contemporary Africa, African nationals, and diasporans. 

The line to each other is more direct and that’s only to our benefit. We now can connect over the internet, consume cultures we wouldn’t have had access to, educate each other about our histories and current events—and of course, there are tens of millions of us whose parents have migrated from the continent, giving us a direct tie to a place that feels like a spiritual home to many.

In your utopia, what does the future of cinema look like?

In my utopia, the future of cinema looks more female. It looks democratized and unconcerned by commercial interests. This is to say that the future of cinema would reflect the minds, interests, and hearts of people living in our day and age — across socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, age, nationality, ability, all the things that prejudice participation in the creation of cinema. Sojourner Truth, a famed American abolitionist and Women’s rights activist who escaped slavery with her infant daughter, captioned photos of herself “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance”. I use the quote in Earthseed because it smartly articulates the conflict we experience when we must sell something—our time, labor, a product—to support the substance.

I’ve made Earthseed while in my final term of Graduate school and I’ve been lucky enough to engage with brilliant professors like Deborah Willis, Fred Moten, Manthia Diawara, and Sheril Antonio. These truly astonishing heavyweight practitioners all experienced the majority of their lives in a world without the internet, supercomputer cellular devices, or social media—“digital immigrants” as opposed to “digital natives”. Their deeply developed perspectives, as practitioners who continue to democratize their knowledge whilst transitioning into the age of digital dominance, the Connected Era, have expanded my understanding of the potential power in cinema and storytelling.