Jail

Bird in a Peacock Chair

A film by James Gregory Atkinson
featuring Black Cracker
2021

European Premiere 10.02.2022 - 20.02.2022

Berlinale
72. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin

Forum Expanded

Jail Bird in a Peacock Chair centers the history of the iconic Peacock Chair to interrogate contemporary social contexts and historical concepts of identities. The film engages the chair’s origins in forced prison labor in the Philippines, status as an internationally traded “exotic” commodity, use in portrait photography and associations with Black radical activists such as Huey P. Newton—to explore ideas of Black masculinities and resistance. 

Through its filmic choreography of body and architecture, this work interweaves a nonlinear, experimental commentary on the American prison-industrial complex and the concept of the panopticon, and reflects both individual and governmental states of emergency. 

For further information please visit:
www.berlinale.de