Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker, and visual artist based in Berlin who gathered the stories of three Berliners of the African diaspora who created spaces of care and healing, despite experiencing racially motivated medical neglect. The documentary starts with a compelling statement by Lee: “Black people find care through community here. This is absolutely my experience: care through exchanging knowledge, care through exchanging skills. Very little of the care that I have seen black people receive has actually come from medical professionals.” Lee goes on, telling their experience of systemic racism they experienced consulting with an endocrinologist in Berlin. Goitseone, another interviewee, shares the rituals she practices, like lighting candles with oils or burning sacred plants like mpepo to cleanse and connect to her ancestors when she feels down or seeks clarity on an issue. Importantly, her rituals are grounded in ancestral practices and emerged to counter the healthcare system’s built-in biases that prevented a psychologist from listening to her, and instead decided her sadness was not depression. As she explains, at one point, while she was going through “dark trenches” beyond depression, “I remember going to my doctor, and he did not believe me, and that was really hurtful. I realize how much it elongated my healing.” Indeed, it took Goitseone three years to see a therapist. According to her, being a black and stay-at-home mom was a determining factor that prevented the health care professional she saw from doing his job. Still, she found care “mostly in black spaces,” and more importantly, she “found understanding, or better yet, a diagnosis of the proper care I need.” Caritia, the third interviewee, goes on to explain how she has created her own rituals for healing when systematic factors have resulted in medical neglect. Her rituals include workshops with others involving embodied practices like “impact play” and “sensation play” and the use of organic materials like jute ropes. Significantly, though, there is a sense of care that involves both, the collective and the individual, for as Caritia explains: “part of my care is also recognizing that I need to ask for what I want, to find what I need, to find a balance between all of the external stuff and what is actually happening to me internally.”

Listening to these stories, seeing the interviewee’s facial expressions, one can feel empathy for them and perhaps even for health care providers who might not even be aware of how their own biases prevented them from fulfilling their basic duty of care to a patient. Yet, the testimonies of Lee, Goitseone, Caritia, and the attuned work of Onuoha, does not leave us there, stuck in an unproductive place, but instead invite Black and non-binary folks to move together beyond systemic blockades, for as Lee says to their students during a yoga session in the closing scene: “You are a being of light and energy, you are allowed to take up space.”
 

Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her research explores monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States, asking: How do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform, and why? Her work has shown at the Museum Folkwang, the Museum of Modern Art Shanghai, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery and won awards at the XPOSED Queer Film Festival and theKurzfilmFestival Hamburg. She has published chapters in: Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage: A Berlin Ethnography, Censored? Conflicting Concepts of CulturalHeritage, and Owned by Others: A Map to Possession Island. She is recipient of a 2023-4 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, the 2023 Amadeu Antonio FoundationPrizeand a 2024-5 Krupp Dissertation Fellowship. Nnenna is currently a binational doctoral candidate in Media Anthropology at Harvard University and Global History at the University of Potsdam, and a Research Associate in the Digital Provenance Lab at the Leuphana University Lüneburg.