Murmurations: The Healing Power of Film

A note from adrienne maree brown: Joie Lou Shakur is a Caribbean trans filmmaker who is bringing their community with them through Comfrey Films, which trains, produces, and develops filmmakers.

It takes a village to create a film.

Many people think about filmmaking as just the people in front of and behind the camera—but there is a whole ecosystem of people who ensure that we can all safely participate in the process of creating a film that we can all be proud of. Inside this ecosystem, filmmakers can reshape community culture, iterating on how to live and lead in whatever villages we belong to. There is a role for everyone, and once the film village is created, everyone is essential.

I am a film producer and director with Comfrey Films, a film training program and production house designed to launch Black trans, gender-nonconforming, and intersex (TGNCI*) storytellers into independent filmmaking and to tell stories woven at the intersection of being Black and TGNCI*. A lot of my work in film revolves around building film villages.

This beautiful, collective experiment is what continues to pull me into filmmaking. You get to be a part of a micro-society, practicing how another world could be constructed—and also how it can end. The film container can hold everything society holds, including violence and healing. And while the physical space of the village might end, the relationships created on set are transferable to our communities.

I’ve had the pleasure of writing, directing, and producing Abandon, a short film. Abandon is a story told from the perspective of a “barrel pickney” (barrel child) reliving the moment she is abandoned by her mother at a bus stop, amidst the wave of forced migration from Jamaica in the 1990s. This film was my way of working through a core childhood wound of abandonment and creating more possibilities for healing my youngest self.

While directing this film, my focus was on the process and the people involved much more than on displaying the finished “product.” It was my first time experimenting intentionally with filmmaking rooted in healing justice, so I decided to start with my own story, my own wounds. Before we filmed a single scene, I brought in a healing justice practitioner who worked with everyone on set to explore their relationships with abandonment. It was essential to ensure everyone consented to be in this space where we would explore this rupture and violent theme over and over. Each person in this film village, cast and crew, had a defining experience with abandonment, and each of us had an opportunity to access healing together. Centering healing justice had a profound impact on me as an emerging film director and as a person using film and storytelling as a way to heal core wounds.

One of the ways we centered healing justice was by experimenting with the autonomy and intuitive response of the characters. Though I wrote this script based on a specific experience of mine, on the film set we filmed a few different endings so that our cast could experiment with each character’s autonomy. In the film, a child experiences abandonment, so we experimented with different ways that this child might choose to respond. Do they cry while being understanding, throw a fit, make a scene, or are they completely unresponsive?

We gave the child actor who played our lead role the autonomy and healing justice support to shape that role and the character’s experience. I was consistently and pleasantly surprised by the emotional range of our young actor, who had her own story to share about surviving abandonment. This production taught me that in moments of crisis we almost always revert to our youngest self. Witnessing this young person make choices for how to respond to abandonment opened deep healing possibilities for me while directing. What does it look like to get familiar with and develop trust with our child self ahead of crises?

This production also allowed us to explore geography and place-based storytelling. The Abandon story is based on my experience of abandonment at a bus stop in Jamaica. Going back to the physical location as a sacred creative space and letting this location inform our new story more than two decades later unlocked something I don’t think I would have otherwise understood: The land holds our wounds—and it also holds the medicine for those wounds.

When I initially experienced this abandonment at age 5, I dissociated completely. This film was an opportunity to reopen that wound in a sacred container and to be present with it. Across multiple takes, I was able to witness and direct one of my earliest experiences of abandonment. Making this film, so intimately based on one of my own core wounds, was one of my most difficult creative experiences. It was a process that triggered my abandonment wounds, and though I anticipated this and prepared for this, it was still emotionally taxing. Yet being present in the filmmaking process with all of these hard feelings is where I found my healing. Filmmaking is a great vehicle for healing precisely because of the village that surrounds each film.

I knew that I needed the support of our remote somatic coach and our healing justice practitioner on the film set. But I also relied on the support of every person in this village—and I believe this magnified and created ripples of healing that everyone within this container could access. It wasn’t just a singular practitioner engaging folks’ healing on set. We all engaged with each other’s wounds and healing processes. I learned never to underestimate the power of the people in a community to heal each other. After all, harm happens in community, so there’s a particular kind of healing that also needs to happen in community.

This sort of healing happened in the small moments, around the craft service tables, in the dressing rooms, and at the end of the night as we tried to make sense of all the worlds we experienced that day. Building film villages that are diverse and intergenerational is essential. Different bodies are conduits to different types of healing—and building this village offers more than what a singular practitioner could provide. Filmmaking and healing both require the support of a sturdy village. Combining both exponentially maximizes the potential for each.

There is no one-size-fits-all for healing-justice-based filmmaking. Each film requires varied applications of healing justice. Some film sets require talk therapists and group debrief sessions, some require somatic bodyworkers, while others require group reiki and yoga to get our bodies limber before or after a long day. This is why, at Comfrey Films, we’ve created the role of the healing justice producer. This is a producer—or team of producers—who think through and prepare for the entire filmmaking process through a healing justice lens. They infuse our productions with opportunities for healing through all phases, from the film’s development through distribution. We invest in healing justice producers because we know this role is essential to creating culture-shifting films and embodying a culture of liberation in this work.

It takes a village to create a film. And it takes a village to heal.

Joie Lou Shakur (they/them) is a Black trans immigrant from Jamaica. They are currently a Southern culture worker, medicine maker, and filmmaker based in rural North Carolina. Joie Lou is the executive director of Comfrey Films, a film fellowship program and production house focused on cultural organizing and narrative power through a Black feminist lens, led by and for Black trans and gender non-conforming people. They speak English and Patois.

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