"This World is Not My Own" - SXSW Documentary Review
Within the first three minutes, This World is Not My Own asks a question about immortality. How is it possible that a human being can live beyond the physical form? Is it possible? Why would anyone want to? These are all questions that Nellie Mae Rowe (voiced in animated form by Uzo Aduba) likely asked herself throughout her lifetime. She’s a self-taught folk artist who was born on July 4, 1900, and lived until 1982. While Nellie’s art received some national attention during the last six years of her life, it’s posthumously that her work has flourished.
Nellie often said she was born in the year of freedom to parents who were born into slavery. She grew up making dolls and quilts, then explored drawing, painting, and sculpting. Nellie created a playhouse in her front yard and another inside her home in a small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a magnificent playground forged from scraps, knick-knacks, and what’s generally considered garbage.
Art by Nellie Mae Rowe. Photography by Lucinda Bunnen.
The beauty of Nellie’s art lives in its freedom and hopefulness. She grew up in the shadow of slavery and in the contemporary world of segregation. Her art was a place of escape, a world of her own creation that valued love and peace above all else. It’s a theme that runs through Black art to this day. It’s commonly known as Afrofuturism, and uses elements of science fiction to imagine a world where Black people were able to live without hundreds of years of violence, abuse, and racism. While Nellie’s art doesn’t include the same technology as Black Panther’s Wakanda, her drawings are joyous in their uninhibited style.
Not only is This World is Not My Own a touching reflection on Nellie’s art and a scathing look at America’s landscape at the turn of the century, but the documentary creates art of its own through animation. Nellie is seen through archival footage and photographs, but that’s not the only way she’s immortalized in this documentary. Opendox created intricate, sprawling sets that are recreations of Nellie’s playhouse. Her living relatives reminisce about the warmth they felt when they visited her and the oddities that existed within Nellie’s house. Chewing-gum sculptures, dolls, and scraps of wood decorate the walls and the yard. Her house and the art it contained are gone, but This World is Not My Own allows it to live on in another form. This miniature version also has its own 3D animated Nellie who bustles about, talking about art, wrestling, and life.
©Opendox, Photography by Petter Ringbom. Character Animation & VFX by Kaktus Film
As the film ends, immortality makes its presence known again. Nellie never thought of herself as an artist in the sense that she didn’t feel the need to perfect the study of her medium. She spent as much time as she could making art for the simple reason that she loved the act of creation. It was never about fame in the traditional sense, but about cultivating community and love. That’s the answer to immortality. It’s in how you treat people, how you create, and how you nourish yourself with art.
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