BlackStar Film Festival and HBO present Terence Nance's 'Random Acts of Flyness'

As a regular at a festival whose past guests have included such luminaries as Spike Lee, Nefertite Nguvu, and Ava DuVernay, this relatively young filmmaker might not be where he is today if not for cultivation and support from this community. At 36, Nance helms his own HBO series, Random Acts of Flyness, which debuted August 4, 2018, at midnight.

This is America

According to HBO, the six-episode series is “a fluid, stream-of-consciousness examination of contemporary American life.” I attended the show’s world premiere at BlackStar last weekend (mere hours before its official airdate) and can attest that it delivers what it promises and so much more.

Random Acts of Flyness is a sketch show with multiple interrelated vignettes and content that should be required viewing for Trump’s America. It may be tempting to draw comparisons to Chappelle’s Show or Rick and Morty’s “Interdimensional TV” episodes, but Nance’s series extends far beyond the realm of comedy in its hard-hitting critique of white supremacy and institutionalized violence against communities of color.

Surrealist and funny at times, actual videos showing incidents of police brutality are woven into the pilot episode to ground its audience in the daily realities faced by black and brown Americans. One segment, titled “Everybody Dies,” is shot with an analog video filter meant to reference the production style of 1980s public-access television.

While many in the BlackStar audience initially laughed at the absurdity of “Ripa the Reaper” singing a children’s song about death to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” the tone quickly changed when she began listing prominent police-killing victims on her “murder map.”

Episode two delves into a few different themes related to sexual violence, including rape culture, transphobia, and socially reinforced gender roles. In one particularly poignant segment, a female character plays an arcade shooter game where she blasts away at catcallers and white feminists. A series of interviews interspersed throughout the episode shows people who experience body dysmorphia for different reasons; it’s impressive for its intersectionality of gender and sexual identity.

Learning to sing

As show creator, executive producer, writer, and director, Nance retains an incredible amount of creative control. During a question-and-answer session, the series’ fellow executive producer, Tamir Mohammed, described the show as “a point of view on what is happening topically, through Terence’s lens.”

Nance, in his always poetic style, quipped, “You’ve got to learn how to love the sound of your own voice to really learn how to sing.” He later described the show’s layered and fractal nature as a portrait of his subconscious.

Whether or not millennials have a shorter attention span than previous generations, there is no doubt that the immediacy of internet culture and social media has permanently altered the way we consume video content. This show is one of the most creative and effective attempts I have seen to replicate, in a traditional television format, the experience of watching bite-sized video clips. I greatly look forward to watching the rest of this series.