Quenton Baker’s we pilot the blood considers the position of blackness and the ongoing afterlife of slavery in this cinematic adaptation of their poem by the same title, crafted from redacted U.S. Senate documents detailing the 1841 revolt of enslaved people aboard the brig Creole. “Quenton Baker’s redactions are Black redactions,” writes scholar Christina Sharpe, “to make documents…speak something that they were never meant to reveal.” Those revelations are intercut in a meditative visual mix with the sea—alive and moving, closeup and tender—and paired with Baker’s transporting vocalization—at once, urgent, slow, visceral, and prophetic. A world premiere in Good Symptom.
Directed by Quinton Baker