I’ll Be Back!
(2022) 10minutes 54seconds
Digital, 16mm, archival

Commissioned by FACT Liverpool with public funding from Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. Presented in collaboration with Hervisions, supported by The Granada Foundation.

I’ll Be Back! begins and ends with the story of the rebel maroon Francois Mackandal. In 1758, Mackandal was condemned to be burned at the stake, not only for his crimes but for his radical powers of metamorphosis.

Filmed in archives and museums across the UK, I’ll Be Back! explores a series of collections holding objects of colonial violence. Amongst these is a book containing a diagram of a slave ship, a key document in the abolitionist movement widely published for its shocking nature, and a collection of insects gathered in Sierra Leone by a colonial topographer mapping borders and defining British and French territory in West Africa. Shifting across digital, 16mm and archival formats, the film interrogates institutional collecting practices and reconsiders the distances between myth, history and machinations of power.