2019, 20 min, co-directed with Lonnie Holley

A collaboration with artist and musician Lonnie Holley, a sci-fi documentary set to his devastating song “I Snuck Off The Slave Ship”

Lonnie Holley has been adrift across the timelines for longer than he can remember. Using advanced technology of his own design, Lonnie 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 Lonnie 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 film accompaniment to Holley’s song I Snuck Off the Slave Ship adds a new frequency to Afrofuturist time travel. Shot around Lonnie’s 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 Lonnie’s encounters with the slave ship “America” and a testament to imagination as resistance.

Select Festivals / Screenings:

Sundance Film Festival

Criterion Channel (streaming)

Biennale de Dakar, Senegal (2024)

McEvoy Arts Foundation, San Francisco

BAM CinemaFest

BlackStar Film Festival

Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University

New Orleans Film Festival

Atlanta Flim Festival

Cosmic Awakening at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

WOMEX Festival, Finland

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Directed by Lonnie Holley & Cyrus Moussavi

Produced by Brittany Nugent & Matt Arnett

Edited by Joy Elaine Davenport

Cinematography by Charles Autumn

Cast:

Lonnie Holley

Brother Theotis Taylor

Edeliegba Senior Dance Ensemble

Christopher Willis