About this Video
Inspired by Cheryl Dunye and Audre Lorde, this documentary short film explores the history of mockumentary and the role it plays in black queer lives. It's important for me to tell this story because we have to tell our own histories, even if we are pulling from fiction in order to make it feel true. It's a matter of retrieval and preservation.
Creator
Juniper Johnson
Creator
Juniper Johnson is a West African-American screenwriter and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, CA by way of St. Petersburg, FL.
Guided by a personal adaptation of Sankofa, her practice is rooted in memory work, how culture is preserved, distorted, and passed down (and who shapes it.) For Juniper, this means treating art-making as both retrieval and preservation.
Across fiction and documentary, Juniper moves between the intimate and the overlooked. Their narrative work explores identity, place, and Blackness through a dramedy lens, while their documentary practice lingers with underbelly communities, what has become of Floridian preserves, Black Southern culture, and hidden culinary and cultural practices that rarely receive archival care.
Their long-term vision is to collapse the distance between filmmaking and museum spaces, creating living archives where independent films exist as cultural testimony rather than ephemera.