Shabier Kirchner’s Love Letter to a Vanishing Antigua
Shabier Kirchner’s Love Letter to a Vanishing Antigua
Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner is having quite the year, with the rapturous reception of his work on Steve McQueen’s Small Axe films, which played at New York Film Festival and will launch on Amazon this Friday. Prior to this breakthrough, he’s steadily built a name for himself thanks to his stylish lensing on a number of acclaimed independent features, including Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen, Annie Silverstein’s Bull, and Matthew Porterfield’s Sollers Point. And two years ago, he branched out into directing with Dadli, an intimate 16 mm portrait of “the Point,” a port area in his native Antigua. On the Criterion Channel this week, we’re thrilled to showcase the film, which offers an immersive document of a vibrant community disappearing into the margins due to mass tourism and economic neglect, told through color-saturated, glowing visuals and a hypnotic voice-over from a young boy named Tiquan, who serves as something of a protagonist. To mark its Channel debut, I talked with Kirchner about the origins of the footage in the film and why he feels it’s so important to tell Caribbean stories on-screen.
Can you tell us about how you came to filmmaking, specifically cinematography?
I have always wanted to break down the way we’ve been taught to tell stories. The Caribbean is so full of untold narratives, and it’s important to share as many as we can with the world. Blurring the lines between disciplines is something that’s always interested me. Growing up we didn’t really know the difference between what a director did and what a cinematographer did; Antigua had no film industry, so we taught ourselves and there were no rules. We just did it all—shot, directed, edited, worked on the sound—mostly all in-camera. With the absence of commercial expectations, it was just freedom, and those early ideas I had still remain foundations in my approach to storytelling.
I feel super lucky and grateful for my journey as a cinematographer. It has taught me so much about my environment, about people and about myself, and about the responsibility of reflecting the world around me. It’s something I hope to continue to do as long as I am able. I also have some deeply personal stuff I need to say, people to explore and celebrate. It’s all rooted in where I’m from, the West Indies. I’ll do it any which way I can, as a director or a cinematographer, or in some other role.
Dadli is such a textured portrait of Antigua and its atmosphere and people. The light there is unbelievably beautiful. How does this film connect to your own feelings about your identity as an Antiguan?
We are very proud people and yet we are so underrepresented on-screen by ourselves. I think Ousmane Sembène said it best: If we continue consuming images solely from abroad, and telling the stories of other people or absorbing others’ perspective of us, we will eventually lose our identity—and I truly believe that. The Caribbean is my home. Our people are the most interesting to me, and I just want to share the truth of who we are through local eyes.
I read that this neighborhood, the Point, was essentially bulldozed shortly after you shot this footage. Did you know going into the project that this was happening and that the film would become such a precious document?
In the pit of my stomach, there’s a fear that one day it [Antiguan culture] is all going to be gone or unrecognizably different or, even worse, forgotten. It’s the way things tend to go. We had a sense that the community was in jeopardy, but we had no idea that it was going to happen so quickly. It was about a year after we shot the footage that the government announced plans to develop the Point and relocate its residents. So, on one hand, we were happy that we had some archive of it, but again, it’s just another reminder of the threats of disappearance that our histories and traditions face.
How did the project get started?
The way Dadli came about was very peculiar, almost backwards. I was in Antigua about to do second unit on Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, which was shot on 16 mm. I wanted to shoot some tests to try things with exposure and processing. It was me, my dad, and a couple friends, with two rolls of 16 mm, and we did it all basically in one day. We just walked around the Point and filmed, trying not interfere with daily life, trying not to think too much about it. People barely paid us any attention; they were so used to us walking around with cameras by this point—I had shot there before, and my friends Justin Nation, Anderson Andrew, and Logiq Pryce, who are local video artists, have spent a lot of time in the community creating work. There was a beautiful sunset and some cold beers, and that’s all that really happened that day.
It was a couple weeks later, when the rushes came back, that I had a completely unexpected and almost physical reaction to the material. It was very emotional because, although I had shot Antigua a lot before, I had never seen it in this way. I couldn’t stop watching it, not in a way that was like “oh, this is some good-looking footage” but in a way that articulated my experiences and my existence but that I didn’t have words for. I try and seek that now every time I pick up a camera. It was clear to me that this wasn’t just test footage to be left on a hard drive to collect dust; we had to craft it into something.
While the film is largely vérité in approach, the recurring footage of Tiquan and his family, as well as his voice-over, sets him up as an anchor, or almost a protagonist. Did you know him already? When did you decide he would play this important role in the film?
Back in New York City, having shared the rushes with [editor] Diego Siragna and [codirector] Elise Tyler, we noticed Tiquan kept appearing, on a donkey, on the football pitch and on the fishing wharf, or with his sister under a florescent light, so we decided to craft a sequence of images around his presence. I didn’t know Tiquan before filming; he was just hanging out and allowed me to photograph him. The rule was to use every inch of footage shot, with the exception of the technicals, and use that as a frame to work within. The more we edited, the more the story revealed itself and the more I discovered what I wanted to say about Antigua.
Diego and his sister, [assistant editor] Cora Siragna, did such a phenomenal job of putting together image and sound. There was no sound recorded when we shot; they rebuilt everything from scratch! The final track of the film was by local artist King Short Shirt, who is actually from the Point, and what he’s singing about are his experiences there.
After a few months of cutting we got it as far as we could but knew that in order to continue we needed to talk with Tiquan. I called my friends Anderson and Justin, who were familiar with Tiquan, and they found him. They actually duct-taped a Zoom mic recorder to the steering wheel of the car and put the phone on speaker; he was just sitting in the car by himself talking into a mic. He must have been thinking, who are these crazy people?! Elise led an incredible initial conversation with him over the phone. We told him what we were up to and asked if he’d be interested in being a part of it, and he was so down! Tiquan is such a beautiful person, very gentle and very poetic. It’s like you can hear a whole other life lived in his voice. We didn’t need to do much. A lot of the things Tiquan talked about were already visualized in the edit. It was all there, and it was honest and didn’t need to be manipulated, so we just played it over the edit with minimal tweaking.
There’s a moment in the film when cruise ships intrude on the community, which feels so aggressive. How has tourism affected Antigua’s culture, its ecosystem, its infrastructure?
It’s such a difficult thing: our economy is so reliant on tourism, and local people lean on it to survive. The cruise-ship industry is a large part of that, but it’s such a massive, vulgar, invasive, capitalist reminder of colonialism. I’m not down with it, but what you gonna do? Communities on the outskirts of these ports, like the Point, don’t really see any revenue from these ships, and yet they are forced to look at them all day. At the same time, now, because of COVID-19, a lot of other people are hurting from the lack of ships, so it’s a complicated feeling.
Have the people in the film seen it?
Yeah, some have, and they quite like it. There have been a lot of laughs and memories of the people who appear on-screen who are no longer with us. I’m trying to organize to get it on local TV so everyone can see it.
What are you working on now, and will you continue to make your own films as well as shooting those of other directors?
I’ve optioned Kei Miller’s book Augustown, which is set in Jamaica in the eighties. While I’m developing that, I’ll hopefully also keep working with interesting directors as a cinematographer. In the meantime, I’m currently back in Antigua, with some cameras and a boatload of film, looking to continue what we started with Dadli in some new shape or form.
