Short Films by Darol Olu Kae

The films of Darol Olu Kae assume a free-flowing, almost musical structure to tell richly textured stories of Black family, community, creativity, and inheritance, dissolving time to connect cultural memory to the living present. I RAN FROM IT AND WAS STILL IN IT interweaves archival fragments with home video to interrogate the personal experience of loss; KEEPING TIME plays like free-jazz improvisation as it portrays the interplay between multiple generations of musicians honoring and building on each other’s legacies; and BLUR draws on family memories to tell a radiantly tender story of connection and caregiving amid the AIDS crisis.