With raw, harrowing honesty, photographer-filmmaker Khalik Allah explores the complex relationship between artist and subject as he reflects on his friendship with a homeless addict living on the streets of Harlem.

'The combination is simple: a lot of slow motion portraiture combined with a soundtrack of snippets of people's conversation and interview. This straightforward method yields one of the most powerful and compassionate statements on race, on politics, on class, on policing, on drugs, that I've encountered in contemporary American cinema.'

Part film, part baptism, in Black Mother director Khalik Allah brings us on a spiritual exploration through Jamaica. Soaking up its bustling metropolises and tranquil countryside, Allah introduces us to a succession of vividly rendered souls who call this island home. Their candid testimonies create a polyphonic symphony, set against a visual prayer of indelible portraiture. Immersed into the sacred, the profane, and everything in-between, Black Mother channels rebellion and reverence into a deeply personal ode, informed by Jamaica’s turbulent history but existing in the urgent present.

At night, the streets of Harlem are haunted by lost souls. Bodies that drift around in the darkness and bear the weight of the past on their shoulders. The Haitian man Frenchie is one of them, and his accentuated stutter bears witness to exile and years of abuse. But he is more than just that in Khalik Allah's new, hypnotic film opus, which turns the American tradition of social realist street photography into its own art form. Khalik Allah is an impressive photographer, and with Frenchie and the other characters of the streets in front of his lens, he has created his most ambitious film to date. The variation of formats – 8mm, 16mm and video – remind us not only that the images are the product of a process, but also that the depicted story is fragmented and that any unifying narrative must necessarily come from the protagonists themselves. The sound of the voice is consistently separated from the images of the body to which the voice belongs, no matter who is talking: Allah, his girlfriend, his mother, his family, or Frenchie himself. Allah's film is a space we move in rather than a linear progression through time. A trance-inducing film about love, friendship, religion and the experience of purpose.