Given the paucity of black and African women behind and in front of the camera, the non-fiction films Ouvrir la Voix by Amandine Gay and Vibrancy of Silence directed by Marthe Djilo Kamga and co-written with Frieda Ekotto stand out in the “mere” fact that they were directed and written by black women and take black women as their subject. In both films, the filmmakers have sought to build an archive of black female lived experience and creative expression, an archive that has been often neglected if not outright silenced.

In Ouvrir, twenty-four young black women take center stage in their candid and eloquent accounts of the challenges specific to living, loving, and creating as a black woman in France. This film, which transforms the typically bland cinematography of the filmed interview format into a gorgeous demonstration of the power of aesthetics, weaves together the responses elicited by a series of questions that Gay, the filmmaker, posed to the women during individual interviews, with occasional clips from performances or community events organized by the same women.

Vibrancy profiles five women living at least part-time in Europe, the United States, and Senegal but who have strong ties to Cameroon—four were born there, while the fifth was born in France to a Cameroonian father and French mother. The women in Vibrancy, all artists and intellectuals, are well established in their respective fields. For each woman, the film offers a fifteen-minute overview of her work, interspersing individual interviews with footage of the women conversing about what they share as black and African female intellectuals and creators.

Both films, then, document the creative and intellectual production of black and African women, and offer examples of that creativity. However, what is even more unique about both films is the directors’ choice to unabashedly maintain black and African women as their primary interlocutors. As a result, Ouvrir and Vibrancy make a remarkable contribution to African diasporic cinema in opening a filmic space where black women celebrate and converse with each other, as the protagonists of and as the primary audience for a story of their own making.

Though the two films share certain aspects with standard educational documentary films, I suggest that film-essay is a more apt term for both, given their shared attention to building an argument through their subjects’ words and the aesthetics of the cinematic image—another contribution to the genre of African documentary filmmaking. This is particularly notable in Ouvrir, which is not structured around specific personalities, presented in a series, but is instead arranged into titled chapters. Each chapter features the voices of several women responding to a question that we do not hear, but that can be surmised given their answers. When each woman appears on camera for the first time, there is no subtitling with her name and profession or origin; the viewer can only know biographic details as each woman chooses to share them. The titles of the chapters—such as “Il va falloir lutter,” “Ils ne se voient pas en tant que blancs,” “Je viens de Limoges,”—highlight a phrase enunciated by one of the women during that particular chapter.

Within and between the chapters, the sharp editing—which condensed over sixty hours of raw footage from the interviews down to two hours and two minutes—creates a natural flow of conversation. Even though the interviews were filmed individually, the women appear to directly riff on each others’ words, or even to interrupt each other in an eagerness to chime in. While each woman speaks, the camera keeps a steady close-up on her face, framing it at a slightly low angle that infuses her discourse with authority. The camera moves only when the interviewee shifts or gestures, attuned to her every word. Filmed exclusively in natural light, the women’s skin glows, and the individual contours of their faces are lovingly captured. At public screenings, Gay has spoken of her desire to deliberately counter the widely-held belief that black skin does not film well, and she provides incontestable proof of this in Ouvrir. This camera work allows for the rich complexity of each individual to transpire through the way she speaks, in the moments when she struggles to find the words she wants, through her humor and facial expressions. Nevertheless, the emphasis is more on the resonances between the women’s words, rather than on their unique differences—on what they say in chorus rather than as soloists.

Vibrancy is less tightly structured around an argument, but what remains at the center of attention is not who the women are, but what they do—the singer Zolan N’Gono indicates as much when she declares “I do what I am, I am what I do.” We see Koyo Kouoh, curator and art critic, installing an exhibition, we see the painter Sabal-Lecco (Ajomo) in her studio, and a sixth woman, Céline Bureau (aka Futur Oublié), though not profiled in the film, provides the soundtrack. The intellectual and artistic production of the five women is directly informed by who they are, the film suggests, but it asks the audience to engage with the women through what they do first and foremost. In Vibrancy, the camera keeps a respectful distance, tracking each woman as she moves through her environment, be that the classroom, the stage, or the art gallery. These are women, the film contends, who are reshaping the disciplines in which they work. Moreover, professional success abroad does not result in an alienation from a culture of origin; the relationships the women maintain with each other and with Cameroon nourish their intellectual and artistic contributions. The five women discuss how the label of “Africanness” is imposed on them when they live outside of the continent, and sometimes refused to them when they are in the continent. By insisting on their attachment to Africanness, Djilo Kamga et al. intervene in what this term signifies, both on the continent and abroad. They demonstrate with force and verve how women philosophize because, not in spite of, their Africanness; how women love other women because, not in spite of, their Africanness.

Conversation is the filmic method for both Ouvrir la voix and The Vibrancy of Silence; the latter is in fact subtitled “A Discussion with My Sisters.” In Vibrancy, the audience not only encounters the work of each of the women but also listens in on them as they comment on their own as well as each other’s work. Djilo Kamga, Ekotto, Kouoh, N’Gono, and Ajomo are, in other words, not only producers of intellectual and artistic material, but also the specialists of—and primary audiences for—each others’ work. This explicitly refutes the assumption that the (white, male) global north is the implicit audience for the creative production of African writers and artists. The women do acknowledge the prejudices and challenges they face in their countries of origin, especially as women who refuse marriage or who live in same-sex partnerships.

Nonetheless, as creators, Djilo Kamga and Ekotto, along with the women they profile, are primarily interested in paying homage to the oft-forgotten black and African women who came before them, and to the women who will come after them. They speak about the way twentieth-century technologies open possibilities for constructing and recovering non-textual archives that can be transmitted to future generations of black women, in Africa as well as in the diaspora. Vibrancy thus articulates a context of enunciation that is trans-temporal as well as situated in multiple geographic locations, with the common thread being the lived experience of race, gender, and Africanness, both chosen and ascribed.

Similarly, Ouvrir articulates a conversational context wherein black women are speaking first and foremost to each other. As in Vibrancy, there are no outside experts brought in to comment on the situation of black women in France; the film insists that the women are the experts of their own subject position. The camera is angled to capture the women’s faces at a slight profile, which positions the audience not directly in front of the women but off to the side. The audience is not the women’s primary interlocutor; on the contrary, the women are speaking to another black woman—Amandine Gay, the filmmaker—and their conversation is infused with the intimacy and complicity of shared lived experience. They speak as and for black women, never hesitating to articulate contentious points (e.g., subjects such as LGBTQIA identities and depression, which tend to be taboo in black communities, and how white and black men rarely engage romantically with black women as individuals instead of as sexualized stereotypes). This facility to speak intimately was aided by Gay’s filmic method, which included over a year of relationship-building with the individual women and bringing them together to converse with her before actually filming the individual interviews.

However, the audience cannot remain in a comfortably voyeuristic position, because as the women recount individual lived experiences in France, a “they” to which different members of the viewing audience pertain, is continually evoked. The women describe the questions “they” ask black women, the fantasies “they” have, the expectations (or lack thereof) “they” impose. The invocation of “them” fractures across the chapters. At times, “they” implicates the white citizens of France, at times “they” refers to cis-heterosexual men, at times black men specifically, at times the African community in France, at times white feminists. The experiences the women recount rarely paint “them” in flattering terms, and no breath is wasted to reassure the audience that not all of “them” are incapable of recognizing the complexity of black women as individuals. “They” exist but “they” are not the point; instead, the women speak to an “I” and an “us” that is articulated through, against, and next to “them.” As a result, Ouvrir articulates both what is specific to living as a black woman in contemporary France, and also how this subject position runs tangent to various “others,” touching the periphery of various identities at moments but ultimately following its own trajectory.

In the end, Ouvrir and Vibrancy speak to each other through their articulation of contemporary black, female subjecthood as something that is deeply plural as much as it is profoundly individual. This framing of identity resonates with one of the arguments put forth by Frieda Ekotto and Kenneth Harrow in their volume Rethinking African Cultural Production. In the introduction, Ekotto and Harrow contend that cultural hybridity—understood as a mixing of multiple cultures to create a new whole—is not the adequate frame for understanding contemporary creative expression in and from Africa. Instead, they argue, contemporary authors and filmmakers “articulate subject positions that speak directly to doubleness. […] [they] create epistemologies with dual standpoints, both in terms of the past and present and in terms of the global south and global north” (4). I agree with Ekotto and Harrow’s initial premise that the term hybridity misses the mark. However, I suggest that the contribution that Ouvrir la voix and The Vibrancy of Silence make to African diasporic cinema is that they refract this doubleness into a complex web of multi-nodal subject positions. In so doing, these two films create epistemologies that move not only between dual standpoints, but at the same time articulate the multiple contexts of enunciation that exist in the moment of black women speaking out. Moreover, they provide a much-needed model of black women loving women—loving each others’ intellectual labor and creative expression, as well as loving each other romantically. Together, the films challenge audiences, students, and scholars of African diasporic cinema to be silent, and to listen.