Three Short Films by Darol Olu Kae

Three Short Films by Darol Olu Kae

3 Episodes

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.

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Three Short Films by Darol Olu Kae

3 Episodes

  • I Ran from It and Was Still In It
    10:50
    I Ran from It and Was Still In It
    Episode 1

    I Ran from It and Was Still In It

    Episode 1

    Directed by Darol Olu Kae • 2021 • United States

    Director Darol Olu Kae repurposes materials sourced online and interweaves them with images from his personal archive in an effort to wade through the deep emotions surrounding his father’s death and the sudden relocation of his children. The resu...

  • Keeping Time
    32:32
    Keeping Time
    Episode 2

    Keeping Time

    Episode 2

    Directed by Darol Olu Kae • 2023 • United States

    The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (The Ark) has been a legend in Los Angeles’s avant-garde jazz community for over sixty years. But since the death of its founder, pianist and composer Horace Tapscott, the band has spent the last three decades ebbi...

  • Blur
    20:19
    Blur
    Episode 3

    Blur

    Episode 3

    Directed by Darol Olu Kae • 2025 • United States
    Starring Michael Rowles, Jacqueline Frazier, Kamara McDaniel

    Gloria sits quietly at a bus stop, waiting, when memories from her youth suddenly overtake her thoughts. What unfolds is her dreamlike recollection of Dre, a young man experiencing an in...

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