In his absorbing short films, Kahlil Joseph (b. 1981) conjures the lush and impressionistic quality of dreams with particular reverence for quotidian moments and intimate scenes.

Fly Paper (2017) is a film that departs from Joseph’s admiration of the work of Roy DeCarava (1919 –2009), a photographer and artist known for his images of celebrated jazz musicians and everyday life in Harlem. Joseph’s film also touches on themes of filiation, influence, and legacy, marking a personal reckoning that intuitively calls upon his connections to the city through his family and in particular, his late father, whom he cared for in Harlem at the end of his life.

Fly Paper’s dynamic yet contemplative mood also builds on Joseph’s sense that layers of lived experience and stories are sedimented in the places that have played host to the aspirations and daily lives of countless individuals. Harlem’s renown as the epicentre of black culture in the US is at the heart of Fly Paper, which builds on an interplay of artistic forms as much as it engages Joseph’s relationship with the accomplished black community who call New York home.

Through various references to literature and narration, Fly Paper also probes how the literary imagination parallels that of film and how the ordinary act of storytelling shapes larger histories and enduring myths. Fly Paper also moves beyond the visible by expanding Joseph’s practice into sound, unfolding a complex acoustic environment throughout which sonic textures and original compositions resonate.

As a rich and polyphonic portrait of black art and culture in New York City, Fly Paper invites a meditation on the slippery nature of memory, reverie, and the photographic image.