The films that emerge from this ‘Black Gaze’ are often gestures that (re)visit history with ‘other eyes,’ attempting to inscribe hidden aspects of the past into the dominant narratives. ‘The Black Gaze’ fills gaps in official memories of life and history, enriching the artistic, social and political lexicon and thus functioning as a device of historic reparation.

‘Equatorial Constellations’ (2020) evokes the year 1967, when the Biafran War of Secession and the resulting famine wiped out thousands of lives. Half a century later, the film analyses what remains of those events through the voices of survivors and recollections of the air bridge that then linked Nigeria to the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe.

The wave of refugees, the precarious survival of women and children forced out of the conflict zones, forbidden access to spaces of refuge, the silence of the colonial administration, the repression by the Portuguese dictatorship and life on an archipelago still marked by centuries of slavery and enforced labour are the elements that structure this account. Silas Tiny interweaves observation, testimonies and buried archive images to reconstitute the memory of the civil war that broke out on 30 May 1967, following the unilateral declaration of independence of Biafra.