New Artist Member: Che Applewhaite

Posted September 23rd, 2021 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events

Canyon Cinema is delighted to welcome London-based filmmaker Che Applewhaite to the collection!

Che Applewhaite “is invested in (un)making the forms of relation, perception, and expression that (dis)place shared worlds; through filmmaking, writing, and curatorial practices.” As Che writes, “I hold internationalist and transdisciplinary commitments to politics of time, specificity, and cultural process that elaborate improvisations of life against death.

“My first short film, A New England Document, premiered at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 and won the best emerging artist jury award at Mimesis Documentary Festival at CU Boulder. I have written for publications including Harvard Magazine, Open City Documentary Festival, and Millennium Film Journal and worked for artist-filmmakers Christopher Harris and Ja’Tovia Gary; for the Harvard-Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship, and Harvard Art Museums. I received a B.A. in Anthropology and History & Literature from Harvard University.” 

Che’s A New England Document is now available for rent or institutional purchase (view trailer).

A New England Document (2020, 16 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the perspective of its suppressed stories. The filmmaker and their daughter, New-York-Times-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint upon sounds of archival ghosts. The film asks, after an Indigenous boy named /Gaishay, what would he have said about the Marshalls if he could have studied them too?