A new film sea­son explores what it means to be mixed heritage

There’s a stark con­trast between the films that T A P E Col­lec­tive have select­ed for their upcom­ing BFI sea­son ​‘But Where Are You Real­ly From?’ and their expe­ri­ence cre­at­ing it. While films like Black Girl, Bin­ti and Shoot the Mes­sen­ger tell of peo­ple of colour being exploit­ed and abused, the pro­gram­mers have been giv­en total sup­port and encour­age­ment. ​“There’s been mas­sive sup­port from the pro­pos­al stage onwards,” says Isra Al Kas­si, one of T A P E’s founders. ​“I don’t think there’s ever been a com­pro­mise or a moment that [the BFI] have been difficult.”

T A P E, which con­sists of Al Kas­si, Angela Mon­eke and Nel­lie Alston, are stead­fast in their unwill­ing­ness to dilute them­selves to be more palat­able to larg­er insti­tu­tions or broad­er audi­ences. ​“We had this con­ver­sa­tion recent­ly about not want­i­ng to com­pro­mise,” Al Kas­si adds. ​“We’ve estab­lished what we want to do and what we want to cham­pi­on and the way we want to oper­ate.” In the case of this sea­son, that means pre­sent­ing clas­sic films from Ous­mane Sem­bène and Elia Kazan along­side new works like Aleem Khan’s After Love and Run­yararo Mapfumo’s doc­u­men­tary short What’s in a Name?

Al Kas­si and Mon­eke found­ed T A P E in 2015 after meet­ing on the Bar­bi­can Young Pro­gram­mers scheme, with Alston join­ing soon after­wards (“I basi­cal­ly fan-girled my way in”). They all cur­rent­ly work in dif­fer­ent areas of the film indus­try, with Mon­eke in pro­duc­tion, Alston in dis­tri­b­u­tion and Al Kas­si in exhi­bi­tion and out­reach. T A P E is their ​“pas­sion project” and they have built a strong iden­ti­ty and devot­ed fol­low­ing over the years.

“We had no inter­est in try­ing to con­vince some­one to let us be there,” Al Kas­si explains. ​“We want­ed to do some­thing that we knew peo­ple would attend with­out hav­ing to con­vince some­one of its worth. But actu­al­ly just do it in com­fort­able spaces, which is why we start­ed with the com­mu­ni­ty café in Peck­ham.” As it was Inter­na­tion­al Women’s Month (and they were lim­it­ed to films with­in the pub­lic domain) they showed pro­to-fem­i­nist dram­e­dy The Wild Par­ty by Dorothy Arzn­er paired with Lois Weber’s split-screen thriller Sus­pense. ​“None of the tech was work­ing,” Mon­eke laughs, ​“but it was amazing.”

While things have changed ​“a lot” since T A P E began, Alston believes they have retained their dis­tinct approach to pro­gram­ming. ​“A huge part of it is that the pro­gram­ming doesn’t speak to every­one,” she says. ​“The film indus­try is pre­dom­i­nant­ly old­er and whiter and it’s rel­a­tive­ly nat­ur­al to pro­gramme things that speak to your own expe­ri­ence. That’s what we’re talk­ing about here. This is some­thing that speaks to us.”

Part of T A P E’s remit is to cham­pi­on films that, for what­ev­er rea­son, strug­gle to reach the audi­ences they deserve – or, as Mon­eke puts it, ​“could be cult clas­sics.” Rather than ​“ask­ing for per­mis­sion, we just sort of put it out there and hope that who­ev­er is inter­est­ed finds us. We want to share films that we think are inter­est­ing and want to talk about and unpack.” One such film is Eyi­mofe, an inti­mate dra­ma from first-time direc­tors Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri about two peo­ple who live in Lagos dream­ing of immigration.

It’s not just screen­ing these films that inter­ests T A P E, then, but the dis­cus­sion around them that ensues. As Mon­eke explains, ​“part of our mod­el allows for things to be dis­cov­ered and to be talked about in a dif­fer­ent way; we always encour­age con­ver­sa­tion after­wards.” Those dis­cus­sions are not always easy, as in the case of Elia Kazan’s Pinky which, brazen McCarthy­ism aside, is about a white-pass­ing Black woman played by a white actress. For Alston, how­ev­er, this made its inclu­sion all the more impor­tant. ​“It would have been quite a con­tro­ver­sial film at the time, but in a dif­fer­ent way to now. We want to talk about what has real­ly changed in the last 70 years.”

Anoth­er dis­cus­sion will include the writer Nikesh Shuk­la, who edit­ed the 2016 book ​‘The Good Immi­grant’, which is one of the season’s core themes along­side ​“moth­er tongue” and ​“the sig­nif­i­cance of names”. Al Kas­si, who is host­ing the event, explains, ​“Though film is our main thing, we’re also try­ing to look at lit­er­a­ture, art and music as part of our dig­i­tal takeover. We’re curat­ing a playlist of music as well. There’s a lot Euro­pean rap on there, which I’m per­son­al­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by. If you talk about dual her­itage and mixed iden­ti­ty, the go-to genre seems to be rap and hip hop.”

While the mem­bers of T A P E each have dif­fer­ent back­grounds, they all con­nect with the season’s broad­er themes. As Al Kas­si explains, ​“It’s a pat­tern you see repeat­ed no mat­ter what the coun­try of ori­gin is, no mat­ter the coun­try of the film. Whether it’s peo­ple liv­ing in a dias­po­ra or immi­grants or chil­dren of immi­grants, it’s relat­able. Even though the pro­gramme seems quite var­ied, it’s some­thing we all felt we could relate to.”

T A P E Col­lec­tive are tak­ing over the BFI’s online chan­nels for one week from 28 June, and their sea­son ​‘But Where Are You Real­ly From?’ runs at BFI South­bank through­out July.