Overview:
In Nwa (Black), Haitian-French filmmaker Hans Augustave tells a narrative rooted in cultural battle, father-son dynamics, and the seek for belonging as a younger boy navigates identification in a Brooklyn barbershop.
As a scholar on the New York Movie Academy, Hans Augustave struck up a dialog that might lead him down a path of cultural discovery, and finally, to the creation of the movie “Nwa,” that means Black in Haitian Creole. Throughout a writing class, a Martinican peer urged he discover their shared experiences as Caribbean Individuals rising up in america.
“It is best to write about our expertise as Black Caribbeans getting haircuts within the U.S. as children,” his Martinican peer stated to him on the time. That second in 2017 planted the seed for Nwa, a brief movie that Augustave would spend years creating earlier than finishing it in early 2024 and submitting it to festivals.
Nwa just lately screened on the 32nd Annual African Film Festival at Lincoln Heart in New York Metropolis. The brief continues a thematic thread in Augustave’s work—tales that middle Black males, their inside lives and the nuances of identification. In movies like “I Held Him” and “Before I Knew,” Augustave has explored the vulnerability of Black manhood. With Nwa, he shifts the lens to Black boyhood, capturing the quiet weight of turning into in a world formed by race, masculinity and cultural expectation.
The movie follows Frantz, a younger boy tasked with getting a haircut on his personal, with out the steering of his father, who’s elevating him alone. Having to resolve between what his father finds as respectable and what his associates encourage as cool, Frantz has a tricky choice to make: obedience or assimilation.
His father, Mr. Joseph, formed by his personal experiences with racial microaggressions and assimilation, is agency in his convictions. He repeats, like a mantra, by way of the movie, “Someday you’ll be a person, a giant man. Everybody will suppose we’re brothers. It’s my job to ensure to get you to that day.”
Augustave, who was born in France and moved to the U.S. at age 4, was clear about his intentions for the movie.
“I wish to showcase Haitian tradition in a method that hadn’t been seen earlier than, and I wished to speak about issues that we don’t discuss,” he stated.
The parallels between Hans and Frantz transcend their shared German names. Augustave attended a French-language college on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet, simply as Frantz is simply taught to talk French within the movie. In Nwa, language turns into a stand-in for sophistication, identification and emotional distance.
“I wish to present a father attempting to be a father,” Augustave stated, “and I wish to present the connection between a father and a son in a method we haven’t seen it.”
French features as a logo of respectability, English bridges Frantz to his friends, and Creole emerges as a quiet reminder of who Mr. Joseph actually is.
Drawing from his personal experiences and people of associates and cousins, Augustave makes use of Frantz’s want for a “cool haircut” to discover the pressures of coming into manhood.
The selection to chop—or not reduce—a line into his hair turns into symbolic: it’s about being cool, being Black, and being “right here,” as described on a web site Frantz scrolls by way of whereas ready his flip. It’s a second charged with that means, forcing him to think about what sort of Blackness he desires to embody.
Nwa unfolds and not using a clear antagonist. As an alternative, it lays naked the advanced intersections between Black immigrants, Black Individuals and first-generation youngsters—a collision of identities with no single villain, no straightforward heroes. The movie affords no tidy decision, simply layered truths.
“I wish to spotlight the variations whereas additionally highlighting the unity between the communities,” Augustave instructed The Haitian Instances.
With a forged together with each the pro-Black barber archetype and the buttoned-up, doubtlessly conservative Black immigrant father, Nwa affords extra nuance than clear solutions. Augustave avoids caricature, opting as a substitute to point out complexity by way of distinction. Shot throughout Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie neighborhoods, the setting grounds the movie in a well-recognized place, but it surely’s the interaction of gender, race and sophistication that units it aside.
Notably, ladies are virtually completely absent, apart from one cashier. That absence is intentional. Just like the clear line in a haircut, it’s a pointy stylistic selection that facilities male areas and explores how boys and males form each other’s expectations. Whereas manhood is usually outlined in opposition to womanhood, Nwa focuses as a substitute on the inner pressures of masculinity.
The movie surfaces themes of boyhood, fatherhood, friendship, race, language, trauma and assimilation. It digs into intraracial expectations and quiet disappointments.
When requested why audiences ought to watch Nwa, Augustave responded merely: “It’s a great exploration of tradition, and it’s a great exploration into the multifaceted facets of the Black expertise.”
Trying forward, Augustave hopes to broaden Nwa right into a feature-length undertaking. The complete model would delve deeper into Frantz’s world, together with questions left unanswered within the brief, such because the whereabouts of his mom and the deeper motivations behind Mr. Joseph’s parenting.
In simply 20 minutes, Nwa captures a second acquainted to many within the diaspora: some extent the place becoming in, standing out and honoring one’s roots all come collectively in a single selection.