De Los Angeles, her mother, and her grandmother—three different generations of a family—represent a triptych of constructive conflict, reflection, and care that are necessary for healing.
“What happens to brown girls who never learn how to love themselves brown?” The question is a line of poetry, the voice of an omnipresent narrator. It is also the inquiry that the short film “The Ritual to Beauty,” directed by Shenny De Los Angeles and Maria Marrone, seriously attempts to answer. Their work depicts De Los Angeles’s family—three women from the Dominican Republic—and the beauty rites they practice that honor their cultural and racial identities.
In an early scene, De Los Angeles scours a bathtub and builds an altar, on which photos of her mother and grandmother wearing their hair natural and a copy of Ntozake Shange’s “” sit in a place of honor. She is cleansing the space, performing a ritual inspired by a religion that she practices called Lukumí. As she continues the ritual, a voice addresses the viewer, speaking a poem that De Los Angeles wrote, which inspired the film; its speaker is theYemaya—the “mother of seas.
When De Los Angeles trims her grandmother’s salt-and-pepper hair, wispy strands fly into the air. In another scene, a curling iron presses tight against her mother’s roots. De Los Angeles’s poem rolls on. “If our ritual to beauty is setting our crown on fire . . .
Hair is a talisman in the film, a symbol of so many elements of identity. “I found photos of my mom at twenty-one when she did go natural, and I could see a biracial girl for the first time,” De Los Angeles said. “I think now I have a better understanding of a lot of the privileges I hold being racially ambiguous. . . . We also experience our Blackness different. Me and my mom don’t share what my grandmother shares in her body.
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'Honor their identities' !!!! WTAF does that even mean?
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