Jacinte Armstrong

Black Salt Water Elegy

Solomon Nagler

Jacinte Armstrong, Cory Bowles

A short film that weaves together original and archival material to create an ethereal narrative texture, Black Saltwater Elegy intimately links the discordant threads of a popular history of dispossession (Africville) with the solitude of its protagonist's graveyard-shift fantasies. After opening with disquieting archival footage of the demolition of Africville, the film shifts to an austere observational portrait. A palatable sense of the duration of midnight work slowly shifts into subtle gestures that hint towards choreographed events. Eventually, a breech occurs as the protagonist fuses with an emergent dreamscape, where ruined landscapes and a resurrection of an extinct community intertwine. Using the protagonist's disembodied point-of-view, the audience floats above a reconstructed Africville, one forever present, nesting in a bed of saltwater fog.