Imraan Christian
Filmmaker
As a filmmaker whose major work is rooted in activism, Imraan Christian succeeds in visualising a future in which the oppressive structures of today have been overthrown and also depicts the pains of those with whom he identifies.
Using a deeply personal spiritualism, he has created work across the spectrum of near-future sci-fi, conceptual and documentary photography and narrative-based film photography.
He hopes for “specifically young people of colour to dream wildly, freely, beyond constraints of oppression, so that we can rebuild the truth of ourselves that has been forgotten and erased”.
Christian’s star began to rise with his globally published coverage of the #FeesMustFall student protests in late 2015.
In early 2016, he found critical acclaim and widespread audience uptake of a searing exploration of exclusion and a refreshing portrayal of skateboard escapism among Cape Town’s much-ignored youth in a coproduction of his titled Jas Boude.
For the rest of 2016, he set to work
creating visually affronting conceptual photography of state violence against student protest in a series titled Death of a Dream and created a multiple narrative-focused photo series reimagining portrayals of Capetonians of colour, sometimes involving Tone Society, a transformative-style collective he helped to found.
On top of that, he managed to inject his spiritually politicised vision of transformed representation and storytelling into a variety of brand content, to the obvious benefit of the subject matter and the quality and positive effect of the material.
Even as a relatively young culturemaker, Christian has a clear focus on ploughing whatever he has gained in insight, skills, access and experience straight back into other young creators of colour like himself.
He hopes the audience sees that his work is “merely at the forefront of an awakening generation”.
The work of this generation, and his own work, is clearly a deeply personal “process of catharsis and self-exploration” that “is replacing colonial constructs with something that is true to ourselves”, driven by a desire to imagine “what we would create if we were truly free”.