Faye Corthésy [F.C.]: Thank you for taking the time to talk about your work, Khalik. You’re both a photographer and a filmmaker. Could you start by explaining how you came to practicing these arts?

Khalik Allah [K.A.]: I started off as a filmmaker first. When I was fourteen, my mother bought me a camera, a Hi8 cassette tape camera called Canon ES190. I’m talking about the end of the 90s, before everybody had a cell phone and could film so easily. I had gotten left back in school, and I was repeating the 8th grade¹. I began as a documentary filmmaker, without even knowing it. I was filming my friends with whom we used to skateboard and to breakdance. I was just capturing our lives and keeping the tapes. I would fill the two-hours tapes up, and sometimes try to edit in the VCR: I would record a piece of the cassette onto a VHS tape, then fast forward to another part, and then record that to the tape, etc. I was making my own little films this way, about us doing things around the way, graffiti, skateboarding, breakdancing, talking, smoking weed. Later it evolved into doing music videos.

But before the music videos, I remember making my first proper film called The Absorption of Light [2005] when I was nineteen. This film is about the Five-Percent Nation, which some people consider like an offshoot of the Nation of Islam and in which I grew up. It’s a culture, a nation of people, that deals with the science of everything in life. It’s my foundation in terms of education, and it was and still is part of the work that I do as a filmmaker and as a photographer, especially early on when I was doing a lot of work with Wu-Tang Clan. I made music videos with a rapper named Killah Priest, a member of a group called Sunz of Man, which is affiliated with Wu-Tang; and another documentary called Popa Wu: A 5% Story [2010]. Popa Wu was the patriarch of the Wu-Tang Clan, he passed away in 2019. I became a photographer after making that film: it took four years to make, and afterwards I was tired of the strenuous process of making a film, especially the way I do it, which is by myself. I wanted to create differently, and that’s when photography came into my life.

F.C.: One of the common threads I see between your photography and your filmmaking is the practice of portraiture. How did making portraits of people become so central in your work?   

K.A.: When I began as a photographer, I was trying to emulate the great photographers from Europe that I was seeing in photo books, and I was shooting black and white film from a distance. I wasn’t speaking to the subjects of my photographs; I wasn’t building relationships. After a while I realized that this wasn’t fitting for me, and portraiture became more important. I moved to Harlem and began to photograph people. I began to see what I liked in my negatives, in the shots. The portraits are what I’m most interested in because I’m really focused on the humanity of the person I photograph, and I feel like you can see the struggle, you can see the energetic field of a person just through their eyes. Also, I think you can see the streets in the faces of the people. And I was really interested in documenting the hood, the streets. Besides hip-hop and Wu-Tang, growing up in New York City really influenced my work.

The films that I made after becoming a photographer were really informed by photography and by my encounter with a man named Frenchie, who became a main character in my work. The shorts Urban Rashomon [2013] and Antonyms of Beauty [2013] are made up of photographs and have to do with portraiture and the streets. Field Niggas [2014] emerged from three and a half years of just taking portraits of people at the corner of 125^th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem; it’s a photographer style documentary.

Sometimes I’m shooting photographs for a while, maybe a couple of years, and then I realize that there’s things that I’m seeing and hearing that are better suited for a motion picture, so I switch cameras. Both practices bleed into each other, and one sharpens the other. I shoot and edit my films: it’s an extension of the way that I see the world, and an extension of my photography.

F.C.: I like this idea that the street can be reflected in a person’s face. Your workshop at HEAD was focused on portraits and the street. How did it go? How did the students react to your inputs? And what did you learn?

K.A.: The workshop was beautiful. I’m not a trained teacher, but I become a teacher simply through the work that I make, the workshops, masterclasses, and especially the Q&As after screenings of my films. It’s a paradox for me to be a person that got left back in school, as I said, and to find myself teaching or giving talks in Ivy League universities in the U.S. for instance.

The learning experience is constant when I teach in schools like HEAD, or FilmArche in Berlin where I also gave a workshop recently. The thing that I get from the students is their eagerness to develop their own voices in whatever field of art that they’re in. I believe I’m a student and a teacher in every relationship; I’m both learning from them and teaching them something. As the Five Percenters say, I’m “doing the knowledge”. We use “knowledge” as a verb which means to look, listen, observe, and most of all, respect.

I remember that the first day of the workshop, it was a very quiet class. I thought, “damn, how am I going to get them to communicate and participate?!” But by the third day, they were fully engaged. With Nathalie [Berger, pedagogical assistant at the cinema department], we showed them excerpts from Field Niggas and Black Mother [2018]. Afterwards, we sat together and spoke about the films. They were all asking a lot of questions, so that opened them up.

Not every student who participated in the workshop was a filmmaker, or even a photographer. Some of them were into fashion for instance. But I gave them an assignment to go into the streets, learn how to speak to strangers, and interview the people that they found interesting. It’s a big part of my work and I could only really teach what I know from my own experience as an artist. Many of the students came back with really good material. I also told them that if they don’t want to film a stranger, they could film a family member. My grandfather for instance is a big part of Black Mother, and that’s important too – just for their own archives and family history.

I was impressed with the editing that many of them did. I think this generation is aware of many different approaches to filmmaking; they’re influenced by social media, by YouTube, etc. Ultimately, the workshop was a really good experience for me. Also, I should say that I was blown away by the level of fashion of the students – I had never seen such stylish students!

F.C.: Aside from filming your friends, you started by making music videos as you mentioned before. I know that some students at the cinema department at HEAD make or used to make music videos too. How did music videos influenced your work afterwards? I’m thinking about how you edit images and sounds, especially voices: they’re connected but not synchronous in most of your films.

K.A.: Music videos definitely had an inspiration on me in terms of editing: finding ways to chop things up in a in a way that is on beat or that complements a song. I worked with a rapper named Masta Killa. He’s a very quiet, low-key Wu-Tang member. We did a music video together called Things Just Ain’t the Same [2012]. I remember he told me he wanted it to be “busy.” And I knew what he meant: something visually very choppy. So, I edited it in a very on beat and choppy kind of way. There’s a lot of cuts in it and a lot of different visuals to it. I brought that kind of aesthetic into my films, but without the music.

F.C.: It’s the musicality of the editing.

K.A.: Exactly. It’s a feeling, editing in a rhythmic way. Making a film that will hold people’s attention is not easy. For the sound editing, I really trust my boy Josh Furey, the editor with whom I work. He’s from Calgary, Canada. I met him over YouTube many years ago: I just liked some of his music and wrote to him. We became friends, and he’s worked on my projects. In Field Niggas and Black Mother, there’s not much music. I didn’t have anybody scoring these films. For Field Niggas we used a 1950s chain gang song that we licensed, and that we layered in different parts of the film.

My most recent film I Walk on Water [IWOW, 2020] is the first project I’ve ever made that has a lot of music in it. It’s also the longest film I made. To me two hours is long, but then to make a three hours and twenty minutes film… Usually I write a lot of notes as I’m making my films, but for IWOW, I just wrote one word: “effortlessness.” So even when it came down to the editing choices I had to make, I just went with what felt right for me. I just wanted to go back to filmmaking as pure expression, without expectations. I made a film that is okay if people close their eyes during it, or if they don’t pay attention to every detail. Actually, holding an audience captive, or keeping their interest at all times wasn’t even the main concern for me.

F.C.: Coming back to the asynchronicity of sound and images in your films, there’s of course a very practical reason to it: you shoot alone and cannot record both at the same time. But it also creates a very strong effect, a form of transcendence – the voices are somehow above the bodies of the people you film.

K.A.: I love that view of it. For me words are powerful. Some of the people in my films are homeless, they may be in old clothes they’ve been wearing for months. But they have a voice just like the wealthiest man in the world has a voice. When you separate the body, and you just utilize the voice of a person, all you’re hearing is their heart; in my films, it’s more about the heart of the person rather than anything like physical possessions that ultimately are meaningless. Using the voices in my film, the idea of transcendence and these spiritual notions have a lot to do with my outlook, when it comes to filmmaking.

I’m interested in somebody watching a film like IWOW and then going out into the world and having a more expanded vision of life, especially because a lot of young people watch my films. At the HEAD workshop, I showed some excerpts of the film to the students who were around 20 years old. Many of them came up to me after the discussion we had about the film and told me it was like a therapy session. That was a very deep talk, I’ll never forget. And I’m grateful that my work is being used for that purpose. It’s not just about art, about the lighting, the framing, the colors. Those things are means to an end, but the end is always opening minds or opening hearts or sparking somebody creatively to go out and do their own thing.

F.C.: You talked about IWOW, which is your last film. You got a lot of attention in the film world with Field Niggas, and even more with Black Mother. To make IWOW after that, a more than three hours essay film, is an interesting move. You know when you make it that it won’t fit the industry “standards.” It’s a freedom you take.

K.A.: I came in the game with a film called Field Niggas, and I made that film directly from the heart. I wasn’t expecting that it would lead me to having a career as a filmmaker. In that sense, there were no expectations and no type of self-censorship or trying to play it safe. Even with the title: had I understood the industry, the world that I would be entering, maybe I wouldn’t have titled it that way.² I’m happy that I was unaware and that things went exactly the way that they went.

With that film and Black Mother, I’ve been all around the world, I went from Rome to Kosovo, to all places in the U. S. At some point I didn’t understand who I was speaking to anymore. It felt like I was speaking to everybody and nobody at the same time. There were times when I was in the process of making Black Motherthat I participated in workshops. Some people in the workshops told me for instance not to name my film Black Mother because that’s too exclusive; they said: “Is that gonna be only for black women to watch?” Come on! I felt like people were trying to dull me or try to make me lose my edge. Or I would go to festivals, and I would see how safe many people were playing it.

When I made IWOW, I was going against all those limitations. I wanted to make a film for certain people, if that makes sense. I made it for my deceased friends. Around 2019, right before COVID, people that I was close to for over 20 years physically passed away for different reasons. Filmmaking was a form of therapy for me: I just leaned into my camera. It was a fearless project. I even present myself in that film in ways where people could judge me. I wasn’t interested in doing things that check a box for film festivals, or to make a film at a certain duration that is acceptable to everybody. I feel like good art is not about the consideration of being provocative or being safe. It’s just about being real with oneself as an artist, looking inward and seeing what’s valuable inside your own mind and then bringing that out. People can lose themselves by trying to boost their career. I’m okay with being unknown, I’m not trying to get into this game to be famous or to be celebrated. I came into it to make work.

F.C.: Something I find fascinating in your films is their brutal honesty, especially how they expose the conditions necessary to make a documentary film. In Field Niggas for instance, we see some people reacting to the pictures you show them, and they sometimes give you negative feedback. The fact that you sometimes pay Frenchie, and that this is part of your relationship with him, is present in IWOW. Your work is not hiding its own contradictions.

K.A.: Thank you for seeing that. There’s so much fake stuff in filmmaking, even in documentaries, which are supposed to be “real.” Documentaries are fiction, especially in the way that people edit them, in what they choose to include or exclude. You have to trust your audiences when you make a film, but sometimes you also have to hold your audiences’ hand. In IWOW I sort of gave away the keys of my filmmaking technique.

I’m not afraid of the world, of living in the world. The main fear that I believe people have is being judged. Even people who aren’t filmmakers, just as human beings, we tend to reserve ourselves or hide aspects of ourselves. As I said, I wanted to make a film where you go ahead and judge me. It doesn’t matter because from a spiritual point of view, I’m in touch with the power that’s beyond this world. So this world is minuscule, it’s meaningless in terms of any ego identity that we carry here, that we try to protect and defend. I wasn’t defensive in that sense, I felt like I was free. The main thing for me though is that I have to make sure that I’m not hurting anybody. Am I hurting people? What is my intention? What do I expect? What do I want people to feel when I take a photograph or make a film? Those are crucial questions.

One of my biggest inspirations is Ol’ Dirty Bastard from Wu-Tang Clan. That was a brother who was so raw and fearless, who had many struggles, but he had nothing to hide. Growing up with his music and under the Wu-Tang was very formative. I only met him twice, but I look up to him. Papa Wu was his older cousin, and we walked together for many years.

F.C.: Would you say that making films is a way to make friends, to connect with people, from the start of a project to its distribution? At the beginning of the interview, you talked about when you started filming your friends as a teenager; I feel that your films today are somehow still made in that same spirit.  

K.A.: It’s indeed all about connections: to make a film in the streets, and then to build friendships with the people I’m photographing or filming; to complete the edit of that film, and then meet people like distributors, or film festival programmers, who then serve as a catalyst to bring that film to a wider audience; to screen the film and do a Q&A, and see that the film resonated with people, and then build a friendship with them. And it just continues, as you said, it’s a beautiful thing. I love being in the art world where I feel like I can be myself. Of course, there’s also a lot of bullshit there, but Masta Killa told me once: “Stay sucker free.” [laughter]

Ultimately, we’re all indebted to each other. We seem to be separate, but we’re really one. And being that we’re one, we touch each other and affect each other in a way that sometimes we don’t even recognize. We’re always teaching and learning. All behavior teaches the beliefs that motivate it.

F.C.: Teaching and learning, both at the same time, that’s a great way to finish the interview. Thank you, Khalik.

K.A.: Thank you! Peace.

1. The equivalent of the 11^th grade of the “cycle d’orientation” in Geneva.
2. The title of the film comes from a speech Malcolm X gave in 1963, in which he distinguished between the “house Negro,” the slave living and working in the master’s house, and the “field Negro,” the slave working on the plantation. By calling his film Field Niggas, Allah suggests a connection between the history of slavery and the contemporary state of racial dynamics in the U.S. The argument of a continuity between slavery and the prison system has been made for instance by Angela Davis in Are Prisons Obsolete? (“Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison,” New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003, p. 22-39).