SoulCenter, a black centered content development space in Atlanta, GA, is producing the first film of an inspiring new filmmaker and writer, Aaliyah Simms. This project is led by a cast and crew of Blk southerners and queer led producing team. This film will be shot in Atlanta, GA.

Erotic Awakening centers on the transformational process of reckoning with oneself: the exploration of one’s wounds, intergenerational trauma, and internalized taboos surrounding gender and sexual identities, especially for womxn identified folks. Ebony, a dark-skinned black girl, contends with the stories she has swallowed surrounding her body--colorism, anti-blackness, and the ascribed sexualized ideas of what it means to be at the intersection of blackness and womanhood, as always hypersexual and readily available. Through communing with herself and her ancestors, we see Ebony begin the process of unlearning these stories that seek to constrain and limit her through her romantic partnership with Raheem. It is in this space--and a culminating conflict with and subsequent transformation of Raheem--that Ebony comes to truly understand what it means to reclaim oneself in the space of erotic power.

 

Erotic Awakening is deeply inspired by and in conversation by the work of poet, writer, and black feminist Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Writing from the position of a black lesbian, Lorde offers us a way to rethink cisgender and heteronormative understandings of power through her notion of the erotic as a source of power. Erotic power, as defined by Lorde exceeds and troubles the assumption that the erotic is about the pornographic or domain of sex or sexuality, but about the “resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpected or unrecognized feeling” and the “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” It is a place from which one is disoriented, and then created anew. Drawing on a queer lens, that is playing outside of the lines of normativity, both in terms of storytelling and the textual and visual aspects of the film such as movement/time/dialogue/ancestors, and heteronormativity (interrogating assumed gender roles and behaviors), Erotic Awakening brings forth an opportunity for a timely and deeply important dialogue about the kinds of care and liberation we craft for black femme/trans/queer womxn.

Written by: Aaliyah Simms   
Director: Olamma Oparah 
Cinematographer: Colbie Fray 
Developmental Producer: Dr. Shanya Cordis 
Special FX: Darion D'Anjou
Exec. Producers: Erin Michelle Washington, Toran X. Moore, Dr. Shanya Cordis