Stationary Peaceful Protest (2020)

In the summer of 2020, as the world looked on as yet another Black man was murdered by the police, global protests in support of Black Lives Matter took place, with the intention of calling out overt and systemic racism wherever it resided. We are honoured to show Stationary Peaceful Protest, an animated film by jazz musician and composer Xhosa Cole and Birmingham based animator Shiyi Li, as it looks at Xhosa’s experiences of attending a BLM protest in Birmingham. It inspired him to pen a monologue about his thoughts on his own personal experience of the occasion. Intertwining his own music into a recording of the monologue, he then collaborated with Birmingham-based animator Shiyi Li - the two of them then worked together to produce a beguiling, free-flowing, and absorbing short film which is both powerful and evocative.