This biopic Nikki Giovanni blends the emotion and memories captured in her poetry with present day footage as she reflects on her life and key moments in American history. We break down the Sundance 2023 U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner GOING TO MARS: THE NIKKI GIOVANNI PROJECT by Joe Brewster & Michèle Stephenson in this episode.
Sundance 2023 Section: U.S. Documentary Competition
Distribution: Streaming on Max on January 8th, 2024
From Sundance’s website: “The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.” Legendary poet Nikki Giovanni’s revelation is a launching pad to an inspiring exploration of her life and legacy. Through a collision of memories, moments in American history, live readings of her poetry, and impressions of space, Giovanni urges us to imagine a future where Black women lead, and equity is a reality.
Directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (American Promise, The Changing Same) craft a vision fit for the radical imagination of Nikki Giovanni. Present-day Giovanni reckons with the inevitable passing of time, while an evocative melding of vérité and archival images act as openings into her mindscape, transcending time and place. Brewster and Stephenson’s approach is imaginative and dreamlike, akin to the way Giovanni’s words are hair-raising in their power to summon unrealized ways of seeing. The Afro-futuristic lens honors Giovanni’s complexity and transports us on a journey through Black liberation from the perspective of one of America’s most acclaimed and beloved writers, a profound artist and activist. Next stop, Mars.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All the Way Down, where we're continuing our series on Sundance 2023, looking at the different documentaries. And today we're actually going to be diving into the grand jury prize winner for the US documentary. It was a piece called Going to Mars, The Nikki Giovanni Project by Joe Brewster and Michelle Stevenson. So Michelle Stevenson and Joe Brewster actually did a VR project last year called The Changing Same. I had a chance to talk to them and that was a piece that was taking a volumetric look of looking into the past of seeing how different aspects of slavery were being replicated into modern day culture. And so they're kind of doing this time travel element in that piece. And I'd say that there is a similar type of using these innovative projection map and impressionistic techniques within this piece, but also these themes of time travel of digging into these archives and using Nikki Giovanni's poetry to dig into the past. And yeah, it's a biopic of Nikki Giovanni, who's a poet born in 1943. And she's a part of like a black militant movement, but also just doing different social commentary through her poetry. And yeah, there's certain ways that Joe Brewster and Michelle Stevenson were forced to go back to her poetry to really dig into some of the different emotional parts of her life, to be able to seamlessly weave in the cinema verite footage they were shooting with her with this archival poetry to tell the story of her life. So yeah, I'd love to get some of your thoughts on this project.
[00:01:49.101] Wonder Bright: Well, I want to start by saying that as I was thinking about how I might want to talk about this, I was reminded of our conversation about the tube of thieves, which we've already covered in that the filmmaker, Allison O'Daniel of the tube of thieves, made a film that is extremely unique in that it's asking us to listen to a film and not just with our ears, but with our attention. And that as a person who is able to hear through my ears, it was oftentimes really confounding. And I was aware multiple times throughout the film that this movie was not made for me and that there were jokes that were happening and connections that were being made that I could not make. And that just came to my mind as I was thinking about the Nikki Giovanni project going to Mars, because I think my whiteness also prevents me from really understanding this film in the full context within which a member of the Black American community would. I know that that's the case. And so I just really want to make that clear at the outset that I, in some ways, am reluctant to comment on it, because I think the first comment just has to be that And there are things about this film that are going to just forever remain mysterious for me. And I'm aware that that's where I'm coming from when I look at it. You know, the same thing with Little Richard, I Am Everything, probably should have said it at the outset there as well, to just name that as we enter this conversation. I think it's perhaps especially so as maybe it came to my mind because, you know, when we think about Nikki Giovanni, we have to think about somebody who is thinking deeply about her blackness and about her culture and about what that means. And what that means not just for herself and for the people that she's surrounded by in her time, but what that means generationally from before and what it might mean moving forward into the future.
[00:03:50.745] Kent Bye: Yeah. I think there's certain films where I watch and then I look at the director's statements to be able to get a little bit of that additional context. This was one of the films that I did want to dig in and read a little bit more because I think there's certain aspects of her poetry that is worth just going back and reading it in its own right. At the end in the credits, there's a listing in chronological order, the poems and some of the poems are repeated multiple times. But at the end of it, there ends up being 17 different poems that they're using. And there was also this section of director's statements in terms of the different obstacles they had to overcome in doing this conversation with Nikki Giovanni, because there was a certain amount of wanting to have Nikki Giovanni go back into the past, go back into her emotions and that she kind of just refuses at some point. And I wanted to read this one section of this conversation where Joe Brewster is asking, what were you doing and waking up at 11? And she says, well, you want something that I'm obviously clearly not ever going to give you or anybody else so you can find another question. And she laughs. And so she's basically saying, I'm not going to answer your question. And she continues on later saying, but you're wanting me to go to some place that I'm not going to go because it'll make me unhappy. And I refuse to be unhappy about something I can do nothing about. And so you see this block of Nikki Giovanni not wanting to sort of dig into this past. And so I'm going to send you a little section to read here because this is a thing from Joe Brewster where he's talking about what they had to do to kind of overcome this resistance to dig into some of these things.
[00:05:36.018] Wonder Bright: So Joe Brewster is speaking. Michelle and I encountered many serious hurdles telling Nikki's story. So we start the film with her acknowledgment of some of these hurdles. Nikki is losing her memory, and Nikki doesn't talk about emotions much. We begin the film by putting these obstructions up front. And we found interesting solutions to all the hurdles. She can't speak granularly about a lot of events in her life. But if you read her poetry, everything she has ever felt is in her poems. We searched for those words and stitched them together to create an emotional arc that is going to Mars. Similarly, Nikki refuses to access some of the emotional pain of her childhood, and foreshadowing this refusal was important to acknowledge in the beginning. We engage with that through our poetry. Nikki's obstructions pushed us into a narrative structure that was very different and exciting.
[00:06:28.004] Kent Bye: I think hearing that helped me understand how they were weaving together different aspects for poetry because there is this confrontation where she's basically saying, I'm not going to go there. Other people have asked her at other times, what did you remember about the day that Martin Luther King died? She was like, already written about that. That was one thing that I just noticed in terms of just making sense of this film. There is a lot of richness into her poems that are included and it helped me to look up some of those titles and to read through them again about her poem about Rosa Parks or her poem about MLK. There's a lot of poems that she's talking about her relationship to her father, so that's something that is a recurring theme. She refers to his father as Gus and She doesn't really explicitly talk about it, but she has talked about it in these public lectures that she was giving, but also in her poetry. There's a bit of the filmmakers having to stitch together all these things, but also use a lot of these creative impressionistic projection mapping and other ways to kind of give this visual expression of what they were exploring as well. Yeah, I think as I was watching this piece, it was a bit of trying to piece together all those puzzle pieces. And I had never heard of Nikki Giovanni, so I'm being introduced to her for the first time. And there's other archival footage of her conversation with James Baldwin. That's very interesting. And yeah, I think as I was digesting it and reading through this Q&A afterwards helped to also tie together some of the other narrative threads that helped make sense of what I just experienced.
[00:08:01.828] Wonder Bright: What I found really interesting about the way both the filmmakers and Nikki Giovanni herself approached her memory loss is that it seemed to be, especially when you contrast it with the other film about memory loss in this slew of films, which was The Eternal Memory, But the way that the filmmakers in Going to Mars approached it and the way that Nikki Giovanni approached it is something that they were thinking about, not just in terms of this individual human life, but in terms of how this Black woman situates loss and the loss of memory against systemic harm caused generationally by forces that they have no control over. So what happens in the narrative arc of going to Mars is there's actually this redemptive power that occurs through the imagination. Giovanni doesn't want to remember the painful parts of her past. She wants to reclaim them in a way that is redemptive and creates new possibility in the future. which I think is, as far as I'm able to discern, is sort of at the heart of Afrofuturism and is why Octavia Butler, for instance, is so exciting to read. Because there's this opportunity to not just get dragged down and weighted by the harm that's been caused or that has been suffered, but to actually create something valuable and useful and use it to thrust us into a future where where new things become possible, where a new experience of being is revealed. And I loved Giovanni's bold proclamation. I'm not doing that. She has this book bag that is featured in two seconds of the film, which is black with bold print on it, all caps. I would prefer not to. It's from Bartleby. My mom actually also has that book bag. So when I saw that book bag, I just really loved that defiant expression from somebody born in 1943. You know, just this adamant no, right? This is such an important word for anybody to have, but especially a woman, especially a black woman to be able to like really sit in that now and mean it and have this like extreme definition through it is so powerful.
[00:10:39.577] Kent Bye: Yeah, Afrofuturism was a theme that came up in their press release. And, you know, there's this element of her having a son that she's slightly estranged from at certain points, he's featured in there. And so I don't know to what degree that their in relationship again, but he has also had a daughter, so she's in relationship with her granddaughter and that's a source for great joy for her to be connected to those future generations and to have these different discussions with her. And there is this quality of imaginativeness into her poetry where she's using this idea of going to Mars and reflecting on what's it mean for black women And how do we think of black women as being perfectly suited for going into Mars? And again, I don't know when she wrote that, but it's certainly before this current discussions as we are actually having NASA talk about going to Mars in the film of The Longest Goodbye. And I had mentioned that Nikki Giovanni was also using that as a metaphor to kind of explore these different aspects of blackness. She's actually always been really fascinated by space travel. So there is this element of casting Nikki Giovanni as the space voyager and traveling through time at different points. There is this moment in the film where Nikki Giovanni is shown from 20 or 30 years ago, maybe 40 years ago, reading this poem called Ego Tripping. It starts off saying, I was born in the Congo. I walked the Fertile Crescent and built the Sphinx. I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every 100,000 years falls into the center giving divine perfect light. She continues on talking about her identity in that sense and that's juxtaposed with her reading it in more of a contemporary setting within the last five years or so and people introducing her as like one of the original carriers of the black girl magic and reading this into a young crowd of people of this generation and cutting out of her reading it today and going back in time. So again, playing with this sense of the archive of time and the timelessness of some of these different poems that she has. and also through the visuals of this aesthetic style that is very impressionistic and stylized that we see these B-rolls with different projection mapped and different creative treatments of her as well. So yeah, I feel like the aesthetics of all that sort of tying back into casting Nikki Giovanni as this space woman.
[00:13:09.308] Wonder Bright: an astronaut, a cosmonaut. Yeah. And when we were talking about her, when we were covering the longest goodbye, what was showing up was the thing that the longest goodbye is about is long space flights and what is involved in helping people psychologically prepare for leaving the earth and being disconnected and untethered and how do they stay tethered? So, this extraordinary capacity that Ngegi Giovanni has to both be untethered, to be othered, to be outside of the norm, not only as a black person, not only as a woman growing up in American culture from 1943, but also as a queer woman. and her capacity to stay in that outsideness, that exiled space, that other place, and yet be so tethered to this earthly realm that she's able to connect people to themselves and to her and to one another through these pieces, which are so lyrical and heartfelt and powerful. A true cosmonaut.
[00:14:22.620] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'll include in the show notes the different poems that were listed so folks can go check them out ahead of watching the film because I do think that there is something about reading the poems and then hearing them in the context of the film that starts to pull through this narrative through line.
[00:14:39.465] Wonder Bright: Also, we have to include a link to her conversation with James Baldwin, which is so beautiful and powerful. One of the things that Giovanni talks about is ancestry and being connected to your roots, you know. And of course, this is one of the key components of astrofuturism, which is how can we connect to our ancestors when we have been stolen from our ancestors, when they've been eradicated from our memory? And so that poem, Ego Tripping, is really about that reclamation, that memory for something that Black Americans who have come to the United States through the slave trade have been separated from. And yet they can reimagine it and they can create it anew and they can own it collectively. through finding those words for it. And so that experience of ancestry and mentorship comes through in this interview with James Baldwin, where they're having this conversation and he's older than she is. And he's really taking this sort of like paternal space with her, but not paternal in that horrible paternalistic like notion that we might have about it and are decimated. culture where ancestry is only good for throwing away, but in that experience of like really passing on a torch and you then contrast it with scenes with Nikki and her granddaughter in this film and you see her doing the same thing. You see her holding this torch and passing it on. You see it when she's at this stage in an Afrofutures festival and she's reading her poems to this audience of like ecstatic young people. It's just this passing of the torch and the reclamation of history and the willingness to be common ancestor with your descendants as you're still alive. It's really rich, powerful experience to watch that reclamation. And it's hard to imagine anyone more powerfully situated to provide that experience than Nikki Giovanni.
[00:16:53.140] Kent Bye: Yeah. And some of the descriptions are calling her a black feminist before there were black feminists around and coming from that intersectional perspective. And I'll have to go back and watch more of that James Baldwin conversation in its full there are moments where they're butting heads and disagreeing and Baldwin is kind of advocating for certain aspects that I can't tell whether or not Nikki Giovanni is in the right of kind of pushing against some of the more paternalistic, as you describe it, perspectives that they're disagreeing at certain points. But it is a meeting of these two huge intellectuals that are going at it in that way, sparring with each other and exploring these different ideas. So yeah, I found a video of that online and started watching some of it. Is there anything else that you wanted to dig into?
[00:17:38.916] Wonder Bright: Yeah, there is one thing. We do have birth data for Nikki Giovanni, and Lois Rodden rates it an A. It's from the source notes on Astro Data Bank's site, Contemporary American Horoscopes. So I don't know who collected it or how they got it, or if she's aware of this birth data. I would have to find that book and look it up. But for the birth data that we do have, we have a cancer rising at five degrees, which cancer is dominant in the United States founding chart and cancer is known for home. And it's also an extremely reactive sign. So when we have it on our ascendant, we have someone who is extremely emotionally reactive and responsive to things. And in Nikki Giovanni's chart, Mars is in Aries in the 10th house. So it's the planet that is the highest overhead. It is culminating towards the mid heaven, which is more or less where the sun would be at high noon. So Mars is directly overhead and it's squaring her ascendant, which indicates, first of all, what's emblematic in her book bag, I would prefer not to her ability to say no, her ability, even though James Baldwin is 20 years her senior, and he's being paternalistic with her, and he's trying to like give her sound advice. And she's like, No, James, that doesn't work for me. Even then, even when she's not even like, you know, she's just going through her first Saturn return, she's, still got that like clarity of like, well, that doesn't work for me. This is how I'm thinking of it. And I think that's part of what's wonderful in their dialogue is that tension of discovery and the fact that they're both still holding one another with such regard and such love that they can have that conversation. It doesn't diminish the conversation or diminish the passing of the torch. It sort of adds to it. The younger generation should push back. They should have something different to say. And the older generations should still push forward their perspective and should still say this is how it is and this is how I see it. And now Nikki is in that place and she's still what she is and who she is. And her son has some resistance. It's clear even in the film that there's a tension there. And yet there's also this grace and this giving way and this like capacity to to join So it's just very interesting to see Mars in the culminating spot in her chart when this is her statement that we're now going to remember her for because of the Going to Mars film. And because she made that statement so early on. Black women are the ones who should take us to Mars. We're the ones that have the capacity to travel to outer space and encounter aliens. and to befriend people who are unwilling perhaps to befriend us. We are the ones who can go long distance journeys, travel alone, and we are the ones that can collaborate with our fellow cosmonauts and create a new world that is brave and futuristic and bold and daring and adventuresome. And we can still come back. So I feel like this Mars expression in her chart where it's culminating on the midheaven with this Cancer ascendant is a really powerful call to that expression Yeah, and that going back to that moment where she's telling Joe booster No I'm not going to go to that emotional place because I'd prefer not to I don't want to it's gonna make me unhappy and I prefer not to be unhappy and
[00:21:26.419] Kent Bye: There's also this capacity as a poet to do a recording of those emotions and to write them down and to almost like a message in a bottle where she actually did record her reaction to MLK dying or her reaction to honoring not just Rosa Parks, but the Pullman quarters where in order for her to honor Rosa Parks, she goes backwards in time and talks about the black men who were servants on the train and the way that they were in relationship to these different boys and Emmett Till and how that led to Rosa Parks refusing to stand up and move. So she took a stand by sitting down as one of the lines in her poem, but she's casting this broader relational dynamic of that story. You have woven throughout the entirety of this film, those moments of capturing those emotions so clearly in a way that are able to be woven in through this film. I guess as I think about this film and what I'm bearing witness to and taking away is the capacity of poetry as a medium to be able to capture that depth of lyrical synthesis of these deep intense emotions that maybe were captured in the moment, but aren't as meaningful if they were recounted from an intellectual place later. They're written down, they're captured, they're distributed. I've done that. I don't want to revisit it. If you want to refer to my writing, go ahead and do it. That's kind of her approach, and it's also just a lesson that as we look at these different dispatches that people come out, there's these different zeitgeists of a moment where you're able to capture and articulate something, but then you kind of move on from that. I think Nikki Giovanni is doing that in spades here in terms of knowing what her limits are and setting those clear boundaries. And the filmmakers, they talk about all the different obstacles they had to overcome, but it forced them into this new mode of creative exploration of these innovative structures that end up winning at the grand jury prize here at Sundance. So what are you bearing witness to in this film of going to Mars, the Nikki Giovanni project?
[00:23:29.917] Wonder Bright: I also want to bear witness to her refusal to go back through things that she's already shared. It's sort of an interesting echo of the film that we reviewed, I guess, is that what we're doing? It's sort of an interesting echo to the film that we reviewed earlier, It's Only Life After All, about the Indigo Girls, where Amy Rae speaks about how she would do things so differently. It's different because Amy Rae is expressing regret about having said these things or having expressed herself when she was young the way that she did. And she's not going through memory loss and she's 20 years younger than Nikki Giovanni. But the similarity is that Amy Rae doesn't need to revisit that experience. She's already done it. right? Nikki doesn't need to stay on the earth. She's ready to go to Mars. She doesn't need to stay in the past because she's already cathartically released the wounding. You know, like it may be this thing that has driven her that she has been in reaction to her whole life as the filmmakers suspect and wanted to bring out in the film itself. But perhaps that was just the launching pad. That doesn't mean that's where the rocket is going. It's just what it needed to do to get off the earth. And I just really want to reflect the journey that the Nikki Giovanni rocket ship has been on ever since and where it may go with future generations. And I just feel like so enlarged having watched this film and having encountered her in this way. And like you, it has made me curious to explore her work. I was familiar with her name only and not with her work. And now I really want to have a direct experience of her words.
[00:25:21.947] Kent Bye: All right. Well, that was Going to Mars, the Nikki Giovanni project by Joe Brewster and Michelle Stevenson. It won the grand jury prize for the US documentary competition at Sundance 2023. At this point, I don't think it's got any distribution, but hopefully there'll be a picked up at some point and be made available for folks to watch. If you enjoy this podcast, you can check us out at Story All The Way Down. You can go to storyallthewaydown.com to find out ways that you can support the podcast and find out more information about this episode and other projects that we have going. Thanks for joining us.
