Intertidal presents moving images from South Florida artists that play a vital role in defining Miami’s identity on-screen. While popular entertainment celebrates Miami as an exotic frontier town built on vice, the works selected for PAMMTV’s Intertidal series explore South Florida’s multifaceted regional character.
Keisha Rae Witherspoon, Monica Sorelle, Cristine Brache, Faren Humes, and Kevin Contento illustrate the complex crossroads between our histories, agency, and cultural memory. Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s 1968 < 2018 > 2068 (2018) unravels Western models of linear time through the lens of “Black Quantum Futurism” to probe how memories and trauma alter relationships across past, future, and present. Throughout Sorelle’s Reeds/Wozo: Movement Study I (2022), a Haitian woman enshrouded by the unknown performs physical labor in various bending positions paralleling the durability of reeds, while historian Bayyinah Bello expands on the role of women in The Haitian Revolution.
Cristine Brache’s CARMEN (2023), then presents a haunting portrait of the intergenerational imprints of domestic violence, as the protagonist loses her cool while helping her unstable mother run risky errands across South Florida. Meanwhile, Faren Humes’ Liberty (2019) melds narrative and documentary conventions to tell the story of how two dance teammates in their teens navigate life upheaval amid the forced redevelopment of Miami’s Liberty Square. Kevin Contento’s From Fish to Moon (2022) further entwines place, cultural memory, and choice. Throughout Contento’s experimental documentary short, a small supermarket interior reveals its community history as staff negotiate the present moment by restocking the shelves, trying to read poetry in peace, and sometimes even getting lucky on the slot machine amid the hum of late capitalism in the Pahokee Florida backwoods.
