Afrofuturism: Still representing our way into the Future

[Kind of Blue]

A bit dated but the point is still relevant.

Just a few I've enjoyed this year includes, Spike Lee's full length See You Yesterday on Netflix and the short Watch Room.

High school best friends and science prodigies C.J. and Sebastian spend every spare minute working on their latest homemade invention: backpacks that enable time travel. But when C.J.’s older brother Calvin dies after an encounter with police officers, the young duo decide to put their unfinished tech to use in a desperate bid to save Calvin. From director Stefon Bristol and producer Spike Lee comes See You Yesterday, a sci-fi adventure grounded in familial love, cultural divides and the universal urge to change the wrongs of the past.

Meanwhile in another garage ...

Countless nights of creative problem solving have brought longtime friends and scientists NATE, BERNARD, and CHLOE as far as they've come. Collaborating from Nate's ramshackle garage, the trio has blazed a trail to the frontier of Artificial Intelligence - to KATE, a self-aware AI designed to behave like a human, contained to and tested within the safety of a computer program that interfaces with the real world via bootstrapped virtual reality technology.

When Kate fails a key experiment, Bernard and Chloe insist they shut her down and go back to the drawing board, but Kate has other plans.

Unfortunately Octavia Butler's opus magnum Kindred as a motion picture is still too hot to handle. I think there's a connection with Toni Morrison's widely panned magic realism masterpiece Beloved. Though the movie was faithful to the book, I think that it was too honest for the white gaze to accept because it's based in brutal reality. But Butler's Dawn, another masterwork, is in the works directed by my girl Ava Du Vernay. Hopefully her treatment of Dawn will move Du Vernay more than just centering PoC as in A Wrinkle in Time.

Here's a good little chitchat about Afrofuturism, Butler, the writers she's influenced and excitement for Dawn.

Lastly, I'm looking forward to Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor's brilliant post-apocalyptic African Futurism book Who Fears Death is in development at HBO with Game of Thrones mastermind George R.R. Martin as executive producer.

In this video, she talks about her novel, Who Fears Death and her world of Ginen and other books.