From the Margins to the Centre

From the Margins to the Centre is a filmic documentation of racism and discrimination against Black people in Saskatchewan. The project utilizes the popular nature of cinema to raise awareness and deepen Canadians’ understandings of anti-Black sentiments persisting in the prairies, aiming to further steer societal change and positively influence future public policymaking. 

Conceived by our Southern Artistic Director, Ibukun-Oluwa Fasunhan, this project was based on several cases of injustices, racism, and discrimination against Black people that went unreported. Many victims of this discrimination choose to remain silent due to fears of reprisal, mistrust of the system, and systemic bureaucratic barriers to reporting, which exacerbate the deterioration of their mental health among other issues. We only need to look at the recent case of Hodan Hashi to understand the danger of being Black in Saskatchewan.  

For this project, we took an expository and generational approach to understand what has changed in the past 50 years in the fight against racism in Saskatchewan, and to explore recent experiences of prejudice. To achieve this, we created an advisory board who helped us to shape our focus before we started consulting Black people across Saskatchewan willing to share their experience on camera. Identifying interviewees for this project was challenging, as many people declined due to the fear of reprisal or deportation. Of the 8 people that were interviewed, we concealed the faces of 3, to protect their anonymity. 

To truly represent the experiences of Black people in Saskatchewan, it was important to locate interviewees from diverse communities across the province. Although we connected with people from communities like Yorkton, and Estevan to share their experiences, the fear that they would be targeted for speaking out, including the fact that Black people are barely more than 2% of the residents, made them decline. Because of this and a short project timeline, we were only able to confirm interviewees from Saskatoon, Regina, and Prince Albert, which were filmed from May-June 2024. This experience underscores the importance of a project such as this.  

We are still in the process of editing the film, which is scheduled to premiere in Regina in February 2025 to celebrate Black History Month. From the Margins to the Centre aspires to support communities in confronting racism and discrimination, promoting intercultural understanding, and fostering equitable opportunities to participate fully in Canadian society.