Cameroonian American artist Akwi Njiis preparing to debut her short film, Cor-re-spond-ence. The artist, born in Iowa City and raised in Cameroon, Africa, focuses the film on storytelling with a special emphasis on race and gender.
Nji has researched the history of correspondence — communication via letters and other messages — as far back as ancient Egypt, learning how it has evolved over centuries. The source material for the film, however, is the correspondence she uncovered in her own life.
When her father passed away in 2021, Nji locked herself in his office and poured through all of his letters — letters between her and her father, her parents and other family members. While Nji lived in Iowa, her father still lived in Cameroon. They hadn't spoken to each other in more than 20 years.
From those letters, Nji gained a deeper understanding of her father. She was struck by how the letters uncovered the relationship between her parents in an emotional way she had not seen before.
"They started reading like characters in a book, where these motifs and themes were emerging," Nji told host Charity Nebbe on IPR’s Talk of Iowa.
Nji's film explores writing letters as a permanent view into a version of ourselves in the past. She wants viewers to ask themselves how they relate to one another, and how they relate to their past selves as well as how to become better versions of themselves in the future.
A letter sent between her father and her family usually took six weeks to arrive, Nji said. She explained that the relationship dissolved largely due to the time it took to send and receive mail.
"What would it have looked like if they'd had access to WhatsApp and more immediate ways of communicating with each other?" she asked.
At the same time, Nij questions how her generation takes advantage of instant communication, and how it may be further deteriorating their relationships instead. She writes newsletters and hosts live events that encourage letter-writing.
During the pandemic, Nji mailed letters to herself. She said she was surprised by how much her own words impacted her, being the most honest and vulnerable version of herself.
"There's a difference between the energy associated with written correspondences and spoken words … I think there's a deeper, more spiritual association with honesty and vulnerability when we're writing a letter by hand," she said.
Nji said her short film will incorporate elements that have not yet been seen in this project.
Nji says she felt a multimedia approach would best capture the feelings she had around correspondence and create a space for reflection. She also wanted to incorporate physical movement to represent how people communicate on a basic, human level. She brought in L.D. Kidd, a graduate dance student at the University of Iowa, to choreograph movement for the free verse poetry.
Kidd said he could immediately see what Nji was envisioning.
"This idea of a body being a writing utensil and writing in space," Kidd said.
Nji is also using music in her film in a unique way.
"There's an element of looping and a cyclical auditory experience," she said.
She said the journey of creating a soundtrack shifted dramatically over the course of the project. Originally, the focus was to try and create the sounds of writing, like the clicking of a typewriter and the notification sounds from texts.
The team ultimately decided to try and capture mood through music, rather than effects. L.D. Kidd said it was a different creative experience than he was used to.
"Oftentimes I found myself gravitating towards what was being said and less about the feel of the music, and then there would be another moment where the music would really pull me in," Kidd said.
Nji said the film has a lot of disconnection and she expects people will have a lot of questions — that’s what she wants.
"Ultimately, I want people to consider exactly how the role of written communications and correspondences operates in their relationships, in their relationships with one another and in their relationship with who they are in this moment," she said. "Who they've been."
Cor-re-spond-ence premieres Friday, June 30 at The Chauncey in Iowa City.
