Now Available: C Applewhaite’s I AM THE WORLD + let me breathe

Posted July 22nd, 2026 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events

Canyon Cinema is pleased to announce that C Applewhaite‘s I AM THE WORLD (2022) and let me breathe (2021) are now available.

I AM THE WORLD screens at London’s Barbican Centre on July 30th, as part of videoclub’s UK touring program Selected 16. The program includes artists nominated by those shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award and will also travel to Cornwall, Brighton, Cardiff, Nottingham, Glasgow, Bristol, and Eastbourne in September and October. 

I AM THE WORLD (2022, 9 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

I AM THE WORLD is a speculative video that explores how an archive of networked moving images, featuring famed ballroom hosts Selvin “MC Debra” Mizrahi and Kelly Gorgeous Gucci, enables worldly ways of seeing.

I AM THE WORLD is part of a project entitled Scenes of Category Destruction, which emerged from a single-take viral video filmed in 2014 for the “AFTERMATH” series of ongoing YouTube archive, “Ballroom Throwbacks TV”. The work, the first in a planned series of video-led presentations, narrates a search for ways of seeing in between the end of this humanist world and the next one, in which, as the emcee said already, they are the world. Their images guide our crossing to an alternative present; one made of and for transformed genres of existence, in which the narrator finds his seeing – and possibly, his being – anew.

let me breathe (2021, 4 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

let me breathe is a ghostly short film narrating the experiential archives of a black mother from St. Louis, Missouri whose father and son breathe once more.