In this essay, curator and researcher Chandra Frank discusses Rehana Zaman’s Your Ecstatic Self, one of the new commissions in our Second Sight film tour exploring the legacy, methods, aesthetic strategies and histories of the UK’s Black Film Workshop Movement.
Jupiter in Aries. Moon in Virgo. Ascendant in Cancer. Mercury in Sagittarius. Venus in Leo. Mars in Gemini.
Rehana Zaman’s Your Ecstatic Self brings us a meditation on ritual, intimacy, and desire. Sajid, the artist’s brother, drives while discussing his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra. The camera lingers on Sajid’s face and we quickly become part of this intimate journeying. Behind Sajid, we catch glimpses of the landscape and buildings through the car window, never quite in focus enough to get a sense of where this journey is taking place. Sajid’s stories takes us to clubs in Brixton, to Egypt, and Pakistan. He talks about astrology, self-discovery, religion, and erotics. In many ways, Your Ecstatic Self can be seen as a companion piece to Zaman’s 2017 work Tell me the story Of all these things. Zaman’s conversations with her family feel like a nourishing communion although each distinct in focus and aesthetic practice. Multiple narrative threads move apart and together. Zaman’s films work through and stretch explorations of place, diaspora, and belonging. With the focus on Zaman’s brother this time, we are asked to think about how we hold questions about religion, desire and South Asian subjectivities? What are the nuances in how erotics are articulated when it comes to brown men? Sajid’s experiences are not offered as a counter-narrative to limited anti-migrant and Islamophobic tropes but simply invite viewers to contemplate spirituality and sexual agency through another lens.
Your Ecstatic Self, dir. Rehana Zaman, 2019