Black Mother (Khalik Allah, 2018): Jamaica

Reviewed by Omar Jbilou. Viewed at AFI Fest 2018.

Black mother is a movie that dives deep into the Jamaican identity, as introduced by its director Khalik Allah: “I tried making a movie about Jamaica that is not about Rastafarian culture”. It is a documentary about the history, the people and the land of Jamaica where Allah shows a raw and daring reality of his home country.

Divided into three parts, the three trimesters of a pregnancy, the movie is a montage of Jamaican people sharing their struggles, philosophy all together with historical and spiritual chants voiced over images that guide the public through the ideas of the person interviewed. Throughout Allah’s journey, he uses both 16 mm film and high definition footage to picture both the ugly and the beautiful in Jamaica. The documentary is dominated by close up shots of the Jamaican people, and extreme close up shots on some of their body parts like an amputated arm or a face disfigured with acid burns.

Allah reveals the severe poverty in Jamaica through shots of homeless people, poorly maintained streets and an abundance of prostitutes in the first trimester. A poetic testimony shortly evokes the history of the black race and how strong the Jamaican people had to be to heal from slavery times in the 19th century, followed by shots of children holding Marcus Garvey’s work on black nationalism. In the second trimester, Allah embraces the beauty of the Jamaican land and the goods it gives the Jamaican people by showing natural resources in high definition like natural gas coming out of the water in flames. The third trimester consists of an interview with the director’s uncle voiced over B-ree footage of his own childhood which shows how much love and effort he put in the making of the movie. It focuses on describing Jamaican mothers, their hard work and extraordinary ability to raise a family from nothing.

Allah described his movie as “completely experimental”, and although it is atypical, it succeeded in exploring every bit of the Jamaican culture while addressing the beauty and strength of black mothers. 

I give this documentary a 7.5/10