Bio
I’m a filmmaker working across narrative film, documentary and commercial projects, guided by sustained research into intergenerational memory, belief and archives.
Writing is central to my process.
I studied a BSc and later an MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Anthropology’s emphasis on participation and embodied knowledge continues to inform how I work with people and places.
This approach extends into my ongoing engagement with urbanism through Freehold Magazine, where I focus on placemaking and everyday interventions into urban spaces.
Alongside my film practice, I work commercially with start-ups, fashion brands and cultural institutions. My commercial experience includes project management, branding, graphic design and creative direction.
Email: brandonstcatherine@gmail.com
Instagram: @beesaintcee
CV
I MOURN THE MAN I NEVER WAS DOC 45456
INFO
SD Video
16:9
Colour
2 minutes, 14 secondDESCRIPTION
I Mourn the Man I Never Was is an archival poem composed entirely of found footage, drawn from disparate historical and geographical contexts and brought into relation through montage. Images of Black life across time and place are not presented as evidence or illustration, but as participants in a shared, speculative thought process. Orphans in the Deep South, Nuer tribesmen in Sudan, and Black cowboys in the American West sit alongside one another, forming a constellation of lives that gesture toward both connection and irreducible difference.
The film is prompted by a poem of the same title, which reflects on how the contingencies of history, particularly slavery, colonialism and displacement, foreclose certain lives while making others possible. It asks what it might mean to imagine oneself otherwise: to consider who one might have been had the major historical forces that shaped Black existence not taken place.
The work forms part of a longer-term engagement with what I describe as retrospective or retrogressive Afrofuturism: an approach that turns to archival and historical material in order to construct speculative futures. Rather than projecting entirely imagined worlds, the film uses real past images to make alternative futures feel tangible, grounded in lived experience and material history.
Rather than proposing a coherent alternative history, the film dwells in mourning and ambivalence. It acknowledges the impossibility of fully imagining these unlived lives, and the extent to which even our visions of “elsewhere” are shaped by colonial fantasy and distance. Through archival fragments, the film holds space for grief, intimacy and speculation, mourning not only an individual self that never emerged, but entire kinships, cultures and futures that were never allowed to come into being.
In this way, I Mourn the Man I Never Was treats history not as a closed narrative, but as an ongoing negotiation between loss, inheritance and responsibility: a reckoning with the lives that were denied, and the ethical demand to live justly within the life that remains.