#Blackmendream
2014, 44 min, Black and White#Blackmendream is an experimental documentary that explores the emotional interiority of Black men, a subject often marginalized in public discourse. Featuring nine men with their backs turned to the camera, the film foregrounds intimate reflections on depression, neglect, and racial trauma.
Using social media as a participatory tool, the project invites viewers—particularly Black men—to engage through the hashtag #Blackmendream, fostering collective reflection and shared vulnerability.
A landmark in socially engaged film practice, #Blackmendream offers a rare portrait of tenderness, transformation, and self-recognition. The film is held in the permanent collection of the Wroclaw Contemporary Art Museum and has been presented at institutions including MoMA, the Seattle Art Museum, Morehouse College, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A Drop of Sun Under the Earth
2017, 8 min 44 sec, ColorDirected by Shikeith, A Drop of Sun Under the Earth is a poetic, experimental short film that follows a shy Black boy as he experiences a moment of tenderness that begins to transform the emotional and sexual traumas inscribed in his body. Through dreamlike imagery, the film conjures visions of “otherwise” love—imagined possibilities for healing, intimacy, and becoming.
The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of the Black Intimacy film series curated by Adeze Wilford, and has since screened at international festivals including Inside Out (Toronto), Rio Festival de Gênero & Sexualidade (Brazil), and BFI Flare (London).
Credits:
Director, Writer, Cinematography, Post-Production: Shikeith
Co-Writer: Paul Daniels II
Cast: Daniel Cunningham, James Udom, Sana Sarr, Erron Crawford
Adapted Dialogue: Danez Smith, from “A poem in which one black man holds another”
Original Score: Trap Cry
The Black Boy and The Tree
2016, 4 min 49 sec, ColorWritten and directed by Shikeith, The Black Boy and The Tree follows a man (Michael Oloyede) as he ventures into the woods to coax a mysterious Black boy who has made a tree his home back to the ground.
An allegorical exploration of interior emotional worlds, the film is both haunting and sensitively wrought. It prompts viewers to consider the solitude and longing that often accompany Black male desire and emotional retreat.
The Black Boy and The Tree premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been screened internationally, including at the GLITCH Film Festival in Scotland and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia .
Credits:
Directed by Shikeith
What’s Tea?
2020, 3 min, colorOriginally commissioned by T: The New York Times Style Magazine for their Fall Men’s Fashion issue, What Tea? is a meditative short film that brings together a circle of young, Black, queer individuals—artists, writers, and musicians—to reflect on intimacy, community, and care.
Drawing inspiration from Marlon Riggs’s seminal 1989 film Tongues Untied, What’s Tea? honors the emotional and artistic legacy of Black queer expression. Filmed with a soft, glowing intimacy, the work captures a group of peers—many of whom had admired one another from afar—as they gather to share tea and conversation.
Through poetic pacing and lush cinematography by Jomo Fray, the film offers a glimpse into a space of collective recognition and tenderness. What Tea? stands as both a celebration and affirmation of Black queer interior life, challenging dominant narratives by presenting joy, softness, and kinship as vital forms of resistance.
Credits:
Directed by Shikeith
Cinematography by Jomo Fray
Altar (Held After)
2021, Single-channel video, color, sound; 3 minutesPresented within the intimate architecture of a modified prayer kneeler, Altar (Held After) invites viewers into a tactile, embodied encounter with the screen—one that requires kneeling, closeness, and submission. This three-minute video collage fuses filmed and found footage into a psychic montage, weaving together scenes of Black men undergoing rites of tenderness, vulnerability, and transformation. Set against the ambient backdrop of crashing waves and ghostly images of ships once used in the transatlantic slave trade, the work unearths a submerged lineage of spiritual and erotic reconciliation.
Sweat, water, touch, and ruin become recurring elements in this dreamlike progression of images: a man writhes in bed, another is baptized in a tub, a couple shares a kiss beside crumbling church ruins. Through these gestures, Shikeith troubles the boundary between the sacred and the profane, envisioning the Black male body as a site of paranormal agency, radical tenderness, and healing.
As the viewer physically enacts a gesture of devotion to witness the film, Altar (Held After) becomes both shrine and portal—an invitation, in the artist’s words, to “surrender to a history that is our own.” The work insists on the emotional fullness of Black men, offering a vision of emancipation through the reconciliation of body and spirit, the erotic and the divine.
to bathe a mirror
2018, Five-channel video installation, audio, 18:50 minutesto bathe a mirror is a five-channel video installation that unfolds as an immersive and fractured environment, where no single image, screen, or sound offers a complete story. Installed across suspended screens, walls, and the floor, the work invites viewers to move with it—circling, crouching, pausing—to experience the montage as a choreography of fragments. The installation resists fixed perspective and linear time, asking the body to join the search for meaning.
Across its nearly 19-minute loop, archival and original footage move between scenes of boys boxing, Black men dancing, sweating, resting, and being baptized. A chrome figure is lifted from the surf; a body lays still on a wooden floor, glistening with perspiration. These images unfold not through narrative but through rhythm and rupture—cuts that blur the sacred with the erotic, the ecstatic with the exhausted. The accompanying soundscape stitches together club anthems, hip hop, gospel, and spirituals, creating a sonic environment that pulses between late-night basement parties and early Sunday morning worship. This oscillation enacts a kind of spiritual and bodily fugue, where the division between secular and sacred collapses.
Sweat appears again and again—not just as a sign of exertion, but as evidence of spiritual labor, of presence made visible. It becomes a kind of residue, marking thresholds of transformation and intensity. Movement here is not only physical but emotional and metaphysical: bodies tremble, dance, and float through scenes that refuse to resolve neatly into meaning. This is not choreography for display, but for disorientation—a set of gestures that fragment space and open up new affective registers.
to bathe a mirror is not a document of Black masculinity but a ceremonial unraveling. It makes space for interiority—for blue space—as a site of freedom, vulnerability, and psychic complexity. The work does not offer answers but sensations. It perspires, breaks, and spills. It calls the viewer into a process of surrender: of looking, feeling, and being moved otherwise.