Afronline – The Voice Of Africa

“Boneshaker” — the latest film by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, a Ghanaian filmmaker based in New York City — follows a Ghanaian immigrant family taking a road trip to a Pentecostal church in Louisiana to cure their violent daughter.

As the family journeys to a tent revival at the ends of the levee-less Louisiana delta, they discover the complications of trying to perform a traditional ritual away from home. Boneshaker is a short but ambitious film that focuses on feelings of homelessness, landlessness, and rootlessness that accompany migration. I spoke with Frances Bodomo at the start of the 2012 New York African Film Festival.

Boneshaker starts on the road in a car — a place usually associated with notions of freedom and sovereignty. So before I saw the film, I was preparing myself for a kind of long, Odyssey style epic that tests the possibility of human freedom, and ultimately leads the characters back home. But actually, you’ve given us this very compact, tight ten-minute action driven story. A sick girl enters a small African revivalist church in the middle of this swampy forest. She tries to submit herself to the healing that her grandmother knows will cure her. And that’s it — even though no one is completely satisfied by the outcome. There is a very interesting contrast between the epic framed by the road trip, and the almost microscopic journey that takes place within that frame. It is very straightforward storytelling that leaves a lot for the audience to sort out. Can you talk a little bit about your decision to tell this story around a car?

Frances Bodomo: Boneshaker could be a long epic about an immigrant family’s everyday struggle in America. It could be about all the micro-aggressions (and overt aggressions) they face. But that’s a trope and that’s not the story I want to tell. I like the idea of telling the story at the end of the trip because, in a ten-minute space, you can read all the history of their struggle and yet watch it at its most active moment. That’s what film is good for! 

As for the car: in this small, confined space things reach a boiling point. The car is a wonderful microcosmic space that condenses the immigrant story to a moment of eruption and crisis. It makes the story about migration itself. And that’s a whole other set of questions and problems: who am I? Where do I belong? what happens when we move away from what is, or at least should be, familiar? I’m interested in exploring this rootlessness and confusion.

For me, these are very personal questions. I was born in Ghana to Ghanaian parents, but I grew up on all corners of the earth. My parents tried to take me (and later my sisters) to Ghana as often as they could. They wanted us to know that we were from Ghana and that it was home. For me, this felt arbitrary at best (in a powerful, painful kind of way).

But I don’t think you have to have a migrant childhood to ask these questions. The “country mouse moving to the big city” story is a varied one. As long as there have been cities there have been these stories that question a concrete sense of home. If you’ve moved, you’ve felt it. What seems distinct now is the radical acceleration of travel. We’re moving so quickly and to such varied places that the cultural mixes/juxtapositions make us feel like characters in the weird world of some absurdist play. Alice in Wonderland has very often been an inspiration for me — for Boneshaker, but also for a film I made in college called Coming To Coca-Cola Land.

The grandmother and father have such different frameworks for understanding the world; they fundamentally disagree about the cause of their daughter’s illness, and they argue about how to help her. The sick daughter is in a particularly tough situation because of this. There is a scene where she is looking out at the water, and she asks her sister how long would take to get home…

Yes! Blessing does not have roots in any tradition and, on a day-to-day basis, she won’t notice. But in these moments of crisis, when shit hits the fan, she doesn’t have the answers that a community identity would provide. The question becomes, what is she going to do next? Quite literally, how can she take her next steps when the land she’s standing on is shaky? Blessing — played by the wonderful, clairvoyant Quvenzhané “Nazie” Wallis from Beasts of the Southern Wild — is a little girl who is in over her head in ways no 8-year-old should be. We want to remember our childhoods as the time when we peacefully played in whatever landscape we grew up in (sandboxes or sand dunes). But I feel like it was also a time of crashing worldviews (Santa Claus’s non-existence, for example) were an everyday thing.

Your previous work has featured doppelgangers, imaginary friends, ventriloquist dummies, and other unstable people break our understanding of our society. I wonder if you see Boneshaker’s protagonist as one of these people? And how bringing an African experience to the forefront of the discussion of globalization changes our understanding of globalization as accelerated movement.

This is definitely an African experience of globalization. It’s set in the American South, so right away you have all these issues to talk about with the history of forced migration, slavery, and racism. At the same time, I think it is also a more universal problem.

I think we are used to ascribing human beings to sectioned portions of earth, giving them a place that is holistically and naturally theirs (the same way we are used to thinking that a person has a soul that cleanly lives in a body). But this understanding of home is culturally specific and has a history, which means that it changes and is changed over time. Something about a home-space feels obsolete nowadays. To organize ourselves in terms of nationality or homeland feels obsolete. But there is still a desire to have that. We haven’t quite made the paradigm shift. Something feels lost, but I can’t tell you what we have to replace it with. And that feeling is all I want to convey in this film. It’s a question, not an answer.

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