We The People

Zwarte Ibis (Black Ibis) is a short poetic film by Black Speaks Back, Belgo-Dutch grassroots collective and platform for Black experimentation, founded in Brussels in 2016 and now based in Amsterdam, portraying a young Black woman’s quest for intimacy in a world where the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the political and the personal, the past and the present, become ever blurrier. The film is an Afro-surrealistic reverie, poetically re-imagining our contemporary conceptions of relationships with the self and with imagined communities through a questioning of historically and culturally imposed views on Black people’s intimate lives in the diaspora. Early last year, Africadelic and Caribbean Creativity hosted the film’s world premiere in Amsterdam, and since then Zwarte Ibis has screened at numerous film festivals worldwide and received several awards, including Best Experimental Film at the Afrofuturist Femmes Film Festival, Best First-Time Filmmaker at the Silicon Valley Queer Film Festival, Best Cinematography at the All African Independent Film Festival, and the Innovation Award at the CaribbeanTales International Film Festival. The special screening of Black Speaks Back’s award-winning short film at We The People Poetry Night is curated by Africadelic and Caribbean Creativity.

Since 2018, we’ve been an Amsterdam-based platform and community for poetry, spoken word, and performance art. We center migrant, PoC, and queer voices as the norm, and our longest-running event is 'We The People Poetry Night'.