Hope Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and visual anthropologist from Manchester, UK. She is currently concerned with archival response, black feminist thought and postcolonial ecologies, based around a practice rooted in care and collaboration.

I'll be back! (2022) explores Black metamorphosis alongside institutional collecting practices and colonial violences: questioning how to exist and thrive beyond the borders, categories and constraints that these systems of power create and enforce. The film shifts across digital, 16mm and archival formats, interrupting conceptions of time in order to question the distances between myth, fabulation and machinations of power.

The essay below inspired Hope's research behind I'll be back! (2022). She says: "This conversation piece relates to an essay Marbeouf wrote on a 'de-speaking cinema', through which he explores many things: thinking through different potentialities of cinema to act as a place not yet there, as a cinema for Black life. I found this quite tricky to grasp but what really stuck with me was the story of Mackandal as something that offers a line of flight in some ways, a passageway through into something bright and alive."

Read Essay

I'll be back! (2022) is currently being submitted for screenings in a range of summer film festivals and be be back online to watch this Autumn, 2022!

Find out more by heading to Hope's website at hopestrickland.com