Speak Out/Make Their Way dir. by Amandine Gay, and: Vibrancy of Silence dir. by Marthe Djilo Kamga (review)

Given the paucity of black and African women behind and in front of the camera, the non-fiction films Ouvrir la Voixby Amandine Gay and Vibrancy of Silencedirected by Marthe Djilo Kamga and co-written with Frieda Ekotto stand out in the "mere" fact that they were directed and written by black women and take black women as their subject. In both films, the filmmakers have sought to build an archive of black female lived experience andcreative expression, an archive that has been often neglected if not outright silenced.

In Ouvrir, twenty-four young black women take center stage in their candid and eloquent accounts of the challenges specific to living, loving, and creating as a black woman in France. This film, which transforms the typically bland cinematography of the filmed interview format into a gorgeous demonstration of the power of aesthetics, weaves together the responses elicited by a series of questions that Gay, the filmmaker, posed to the women during individual interviews, with occasional clips from performances or community events organized by the same women.

Vibrancyprofiles five women living at least part-time in Europe, the United States, and Senegal but who have strong ties to Cameroon—four were born there, while the fifth was born in France to a Cameroonian father and French mother. The women in Vibrancy, all artists and intellectuals, are well established in their respective fields. For each woman, the film offers a fifteen-minute overview of her work, interspersing individual interviews with footage of the women conversing about what they share as black and African female intellectuals and creators.

Both films, then, document the creative and intellectual production of black and African women, and offer examples of that creativity. However, what is even more unique about both films is the directors' choice to unabashedly maintain black and African women as their primary interlocutors. As a result, Ouvrirand Vibrancymake a remarkable contribution to African diasporic cinema in opening a filmic space where black women celebrate and converse with each other, as the protagonists of andas the primary audience for a story of their own making.

Though the two films share certain aspects with standard educational documentary films, I suggest that film-essay is a more apt term for both, given their shared attention to building an argument through their subjects' words and the aesthetics of the cinematic image—another contribution to the genre of African documentary filmmaking. This is particularly notable in Ouvrir, which is not structured around specific personalities, presented in a series, but is instead arranged into titled chapters. Each chapter features the voices of several women responding to a question that we do not hear, but that can be surmised given their answers. When each woman appears on camera for the first time, there is no subtitling with her name and profession or origin; the viewer can only know biographic details as each woman chooses to share them. The titles of the chapters—such as "Il va falloir lutter," "Ils ne se voient pas en tant que blancs," "Je viens de Limoges,"—highlight a phrase enunciated by one of the women during that particular chapter.

Within and between the chapters, the sharp editing—which condensed over sixty hours of raw footage from the interviews down to two hours and two minutes—creates a natural flow of conversation. Even though the interviews were filmed individually, the women appear to directly riff on each others' words, or even to interrupt each other in an eagerness to chime in. While each woman speaks, the camera keeps a steady close-up on her face, framing it at a slightly low angle that infuses her discourse with authority. The camera moves only when the interviewee shifts...