(Photo by Timothy Duffy)
Lonnie Holley presents, ‘I Snuck Off the Slave Ship’, a film created by Holley, Cyrus Moussavi, Brittany Nugent, and Matt Arnett, featuring cameo appearances by gospel legend Theotis Taylor and the Edeliegba Senior Dance Ensemble. ‘I Snuck Off the Slave Ship’ will premiere as an Official Selection at Sundance Film Festival 2019.
Check out the trailer below!
Lonnie Holley has been adrift across the timelines for longer than he can remember. Using advanced technology of his own design, Holley does his best to transgress reality with his imagination, liberating the people he meets along the way, including different versions of himself. Temporal talismans guide Holley through the fragmented mundanities and phenomena of the Black American experience, as felt in his own life and beyond. But his freedom quest always seems to get trapped in the same point of discontinuum: the 4th of July, birthdate of the self-replicating slave ship, ‘America‘. Historical trauma collides with advanced technology. What will it take to break the time loop?
“Drawn out of the muck of America by Lonnie Bradley Holley Sr., a self-taught African American Artist,”? this short film accompaniment to Holley’s song “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” adds a new frequency to Afrofuturist time travel. Shot around his home in Atlanta, GA., I Snuck Off the Slave Ship is the first time Holley, an acclaimed visual artist and musician, directs a film. Built from the scraps of his life and hard sci-fi alterna-realities, the short film is an assemblage of Holley’s encounters with the slave ship America and a testament to imagination as resistance.
“I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” is originally taken from Holley’s 2018 album, MITH. It was one of the songs first shaped just before the 2016 presidential election, capturing the mood of that moment and all that has transpired since. Sombre, poignant and curiously comforting, “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship” serves as a sort of Chicken Soup for the Disenchanted American Soul.
“[Holley] collects our ugliest obscured objects and transforms them into singular reflections on our troubled world.” – Pitchfork
“Holley has an almost shamanistic quality, as if he possessed all the wisdom of the universe…” – The New Yorker
