Help the OURIKA! Team Get to Festivals!

Hi, I’m Xenia, an award-winning film and visual artist, and I just made a movie! In the past year, my artistry has grown and blossomed in ways that are so exciting. I was just part of the Blackstar Film Festival's inaugural Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab. This lab gave me the opportunity to make a fully funded short film with support from the festival and the local film community.

My film, OURIKA!, a surreal sci-fi deconstruction of an old french tale, premiered alongside our cadre of filmmakers to a sold-out audience. Along with making a new film, I was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's “25 New Faces of Independent Film ” for 2022.

With all these beautiful things happening, I now have more opportunities to expand the audience of my film and speak to people who would’ve never encountered this work, this perspective, on their own. I have the chance to make major connections and represent my film and artistry at nationally renowned film festivals. But I have to get there.

Why This Film

Synopsis: OURIKA! is a glamorous surreal sci-fi short film that deconstructs the old tale of Ourika from death to life. After being dead for over 200 years, Ourika’s soul is awoken inside of a barren purgatory while her body incubates in a fleshy blob. In the void, she encounters ghosts from her past life and depictions of her likeness that taunt her. She must see her true self to find liberation. Ourika is unaware that two sister scientists, Velinda and Ronnell, twin spirits, have been searching for all the pieces of her soul in hopes that they can bring her back to life.

_______

Before I even sat down to write the script, I knew this film mattered.

This project began when she came to me in an art history class. We looked at artworks tied to the French and Haitian Revolutions. There were so many beautifully crafted depictions of black people, but the one that stuck with me was a young Senegalese girl named Ourika. The more I read about her, the more I found her story so strange…but so familiar.

Discovering her story was discovering myself.

I have felt too many times that my body is everyone’s but my own - to look at, consume, deplete, project upon, and see as an excuse to ignore the person inside.

Ourika was depicted so softly; her story was so tragic, her circumstances were so odd. She was a pet for a French woman, an entertaining object, raised within the aristocracy and educated like any other wealthy girl. But she was allowed to die at 16 because, as a black girl, she could never become a French woman.

She lived as a commodity, and she died as a commodity. A fiction novel about her death and life sparked a movement, Ourika-mania. Plays, poems, costumes, and paintings of a dead black girl were bought, sold, and celebrated. An image without a soul, consumed - it felt familiar. Cyclical.

Making this film was about healing, about liberation, about finding peace outside of the system, not within it.

Why It Matters

As an artist, right now, my work has momentum. People are excited to see what I’ve made and are recognizing the uniqueness of my voice. It’s so touching to see the ways audiences have responded to my work - to know that I’ve made films that are meaningful and impactful means the world to me.

Last year, I graduated with a little film called A Few Things I’m Beginning to Understand. That film was my baby; it was such a handmade labor of love, made about love. I won both a Jury and Audience Award at Indie Memphis Film Festival and got to play at Slamdance 2022 (even though the in-person event had been canceled because of the pandemic). That film was the film that I used as a work sample to apply for Blackstar’s first-ever Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab: a program that offered creative support and funding to four filmmakers in the Philly area. That was also the film that got me noticed by Filmmaker Magazine.

My work is deeply personal and discusses the experience of black womanhood through the surreal, the abnormal, the glamorous, the bodily, the internal, and the sanctified. OURIKA! is a natural extension of that.

Why We Need Your Support

As we begin our Festival run, we are raising funds to assist the Ourika team with:

Please share this if you can’t donate!

What Your Support Means To Me

Your support means the world - from family and friends, to teachers, to classmates, to filmmakers, and even my mom’s coworkers - it means the world to me that you all have supported me this far :’).

This story is one that we’re familiar with, an extremely relevant one, and until we get to a place in this country where anti-blackness doesn’t permeate all aspects of our society, we will need these stories. We need these stories not only to call out but to call in - to be introspective, to take care of ourselves as black people. And it would be everything if you would help me bring this story to more eyes, hearts, and minds.