Shown at Leeds Queer Festival:
Brown Queers (Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2017)

Brown Queers developed out of a need to create a social document of current modes of identity through multiple personas and styles. The protagonists of Brown Queers explore such modes through their conscious decision to be gender fluid and non-binary. For the past eight months, I have been following Krishna Istha, Katy Jalili and Natasha Lall, all individuals who identify as queer and brown. Beyond this, complexities related to nationality, race, gender and sexuality play out through their bodies and in the different contexts in which they live and work: the film thus acts as a record of these individuals in contemporary Britain. Brown Queers poses questions that come out of the layered states of being that embody fluidity, “browness” and “queerness”.

I have authored the work, but it is very much a conversation about presenting and framing the individual. During shoots, an idea is posed and the result is a docu-fiction, located between the verité of Jean Rouch’s Chronique d'un été [Chronicle of a Summer] (1961) and the illusion of realism in highly stylised films such as Lachapelle’s Rize (2005). Thus far, locations have been varied, following each subject at home, in tattoo parlours, in clubs or performing on stage. The plan is to “voice” thoughts so that their bodies speak, rather than via direct conversation to camera, in order to offer a multiplicity of voices, a plural body, where three individuals contribute to a wider monologue that speaks for many experiencing the unknown territory of identity as identities.

Just as Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin question whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera. I wish to complicate the framing of the individual through thought, as monologues toy with the conscious fictionalising of self through costume, make-up and the body politic.

The sequence in the teaser trailer was shot at Central London bar Sketch, a space very much part of the establishment and thus embodying privilege. I wanted the brown queers to be visible within the stylised pink décor, thereby intentionally playing with the stereotypically gendered colour scheme for girls or women. Under the guidance of expert trans hair and make-up beauty stylist Umber Ghauri, Krishna, Katy and Natasha transform into their chosen identities against the tableaux-vivant of Sketch’s main dining room.

As a person of colour and a queer filmmaker, the significance of this project is key to my work both personally and politically.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/21421