film

This is highly sensuous filmmaking, not only in its vivid close-ups of flesh, food, and the natural world, but in the varied textures of[ Khalik] Allah's cinematography.

Allah, who directed, shot, edited, and co-scored the film, avoids the literal and the linear to create a beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother's homeland, Jamaica.

Fresh score.

An eternal nurturer, the black mother whom Allah dissects and praises in this transfixing hymn of a movie about the place where the woman that gave him life was born is far more than just a homeland but a direct link to the answers about existence.

Like the culturally complex and often overwhelming island nation itself, Black Mother is a haunting and singular experience unlike any other.

With its almost palpable earnestness and its reverence for the community it's depicting, Black Mother can't help but generate goodwill.

Many filmmakers are journeymen, able to work their craft. A few are artists, who, if they had a different calling, would be painters, sculptors or poets. This New York-born director fits into the latter category.

Allah-who shot, directed, edited and sound designed his film-manages to paint a complex portrait of the island, making his visually unconventional depiction of the land come into sharp focus one provocative shot at a time.

In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself.

Allah-the movie's director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor-assembles a grand-scale and intricately detailed mosaic of personal, civic, and mythic portraiture in a mere seventy-six minutes.

The experience is almost too much to process on a rational level, but you come away with an essential understanding.