The early afternoon sunlight is streaming into OHYUNG’s New York apartment when we meet over video call to discuss their latest album, imagine naked!, released this spring as a double cassette...
Read on
Zach FrimmelThroughout Deantoni Parks’ 20-plus-year career as a prolific, experimental drummer and record producer, he has collaborated with luminaries such as Flying Lotus, Sade, and more deeply with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale and Mars Volta’s Omar...
Vee Hua 華婷婷With luminous rainbow tones, the music video for Matt Evans‘ recent track, “Firn,” draws its name from a geologic term defining the “liminal striation between glacial ice and snow.” Crafted in VR by visual artist...
By the time I enter the spacious warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Danish-Kenyan movement artist Phyllis Akinyi has already begun her performance. I hear her before I see her. A repeating loop plays overhead, with an off-kilter rhythm and the...
With the COVID-19 pandemic has come many emotions, not least of which is grief. Grief in the sense of loneliness, loss, and confusion; grief in the sense of isolation. In her stop-motion music video for “Anhedonia,” Brooklyn-based artist Cressa Beer...
Written and compiled by Brooklyn-based artist, sound healing therapist, and meditation teacher Lavender Suarez, Transcendent Waves is a delightfully experimental new book which pays homage to the creative power of deep listening and the potential...
Rosemary SisselIt’s an unassuming video. Just 17 minutes in length and made up of exactly what it’s title promises, Stack Until it Falls Down is redundant, slow, and rather dull. It’s also hypnotic, soothing, and exactly the meditation we all need right now. Born...
Laraaji, whose name honors the divine energy of the sun, is a radiant personality who often plays up solar influences by dressing head-to-toe in a bright orange color, considered by Eastern yogis and color theorists as symbolic of transcendence. Sun...
![Nana Mensah Interview: Queen of Glory Expertly Blends Humor and Pathos in a Ghanaian-American Family Story
READ THE INTERVIEW
by @alison.j.smith:
https://bit.ly/redefinenana
///
As writer-director-actor Nana Mensah @itsnanamensah of Queen of Glory explains, she wanted to reimagine ubiquitous narratives of flailing young adults. “A lot of times with that quarter-life crisis genre, people are just making enough money to buy the weed and pay the rent, and that wasn’t really my experience,” Mensah explains. “[With] my experience, especially being the child of West African immigrants, there was never going to be an opportunity to kind of coast à la Slackers. So I thought it’d be so interesting to have a character who is experiencing this quarter-life crisis and also is holding it down at work. I don’t think we get to see women be on top of their game in their profession and then perhaps falling apart in their personal life.”
“I interviewed some directors and spoke about the project in the very beginning, and they all had takes that were super interesting, but they just weren’t the film that I was looking to make,” Mensah explains. “I wasn’t doubling down on the strife narrative of what it is to be Black and a woman and from the Bronx. I wanted it to be a little more nuanced – a little bit more dynamic.”
///
Out now on @filmmovement - screening at @thegrandcinema in Tacoma starting August 16, with other national dates throughout the summer.
#NanaMensah @queenofgloryfilm #NewYorkArtist #NewYorkArtists #NewYorkFilmmaker #NewYorkFilmmakers #NYCArtist #NYCArtists #NYCFilmmaker #NYCFilmmakers #BlackArtist #BlackArtists #BlackFilmmaker #BlackFilmmakers #QueenOfGlory #GhanianAmerican #Ghana #GhanianFilm #Ghanian #GhanianFilms #Humor #Dramedy](https://scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/297690839_181512530947907_2538323346777474592_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=1bdpqS_hp2MAX8sDo3x&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=AL-3X8kEAAAA&oh=00_AT9VQ-5dY6edX-gbPLauiLzFNlU8er3ZP4wNOnG5FNbOJg&oe=62FE656B)
