Pelourinho, They Don't Really Care About Us (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2019)

Ghanaian filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu is gradually building one of the most vital bodies of work in the so-called avant-garde. Like many of the best experimental filmmakers working today, Owusu's work is formally challenging but fundamentally accessible, because it faces outward, directly engaging with basic human concerns -- history, memory, and cultural experience. I think her latest film, with the cumbersome but apposite title Pelourinho, They Don't Really Care About Us, is her finest work to date.

The film consists of footage shot in and around the Brazilian historic center of Pelourinho, in the city of Salvador, Bahia. The capital city of Salvador, and the Pelourinho in particular, are contested sites. Founded in 1549 by the Portuguese, this was ground zero for the African slave trade in Brazil, and the Pelourinho in particular was the public square where disobedient slaves were whipped. In modern times, the neighborhood surrounding the Pelourinho evolved into an Afro-Bahian enclave, but conservative politicians gentrified the area and forced the lower-income blacks out. In short, what the Portuguese began, the Brazilians themselves finished.

Owusu's footage of Bahian carnivale and Axé performance is hand-processed, giving it a weathered look. This results in the contemporary images having a simultaneous trace of the historical, indicating that any given expression of Afro-Brazilian culture is always a harking back to long traditions, staking a claim for identity and belonging over time. That Owusu ingrains this element into the very fabric of the film is one of its most subtle virtues.

Pelourinho begins with an epigram from W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, one speaking of the dual nature of African-American consciousness, the value of hybridity. Shortly thereafter, we hear a voiceover reading a 1927 letter from DuBois to the Brazilian embassy, inquiring as to why several African-Americans traveling to Brazil had been turned away, despite having passports in hand. Was this official policy? How, DuBois asks, does the Brazilian government even define "Negro"? Next, we hear the reply of an embassy bureaucrat (in Portuguese), explaining that African-Americans are welcome to visit Brazil for business of pleasure, but the government can turn away anyone it likes. In this case, the current administration had caught wind of an alleged organized effort on the part of African-Americans to "colonize" Brazil.

Owusu ends the film with a final movement in which she shows processed clips from Michael Jackson's video for the song "They Don't Care About Us." This is a powerful and complex gesture. The video was filmed in the Pelourinho, with numerous Afro-Brazilian dancers and musicians performing and surrounding Jackson. This was intended as an act of defiance, since Jackson's song is one of protest (and it has recently been taken up as a quasi-anthem for Black Lives Matter). But Owusu knows full well that the song, and Jackson, are controversial totems. Apart from the myriad issues surrounding Jackson himself, the song caused outrage for containing the lyrics "Jew me, sue me, kick me, kike me." When confronted, Jackson claimed he was making a statement against anti-Semitism (and he went so far as to make the regrettable "hey, a lot of my lawyers and accountants are Jewish!" defense), but many people weren't buying it. Eventually Jackson re-recorded the track with new lyrics.

It's not just that Jackson filmed his black-unity video in Salvador, surrounded by Afro-Bahians. Owusu wouldn't include the clip just because of a mere coincidence. Instead, the Jackson situation is an oblique repetition of the oppression that it was intended to protest in the first place. Just as the Portuguese enslaved the Afro-Brazilians, only for those same individuals to face discrimination within a free, independent Brazil, Michael Jackson attempts to strike a blow for African-American justice while simultaneously invoking anti-Semitic stereotypes. It is difficult indeed to decolonize one's mind.

And part of what makes Pelourinho, They Don't Really Care About Us such an important film is that Owusu is calling on these multiple layers of history in order to remind us of what is happening in Brazil right now. With the victory of extreme right-winger Jair Bolsonaro, Afro-Brazilians have received a clear message: you are not part of Brazil. You don't belong. And so, during the final sequence of Owusu's film, we see several current residents of the Pelourinho area look into the camera and say, in Portuguese, "all I want to say is that they don't really care about us." If Michael Jackson brought a problematic protest song to Brazil, the Brazilians are keeping it, and using it as they like. And Owusu's film is a major work of protest cinema.