Jade O’Belle’s short film Birthright (2022) opens with the image of swirling, foaming waters. From there, we’re initiated right into a dazzlingly and decadent world; a metaphysical space where time and memory collapse and turn into embodied through ritual.

Having shared the trailer last yr, Dazed now presents the digital premiere of the complete short film. O’Belle, who wrote, directed and starred in Birthright (Girls In Film Productions), tells Dazed how the project was born from from a desire to reconnect along with her body. “I used to be doing these intuitive rituals to attempt to connect with myself,” she says. Following her intuition, she found herself drawn to certain colors, textures and pictures. “I used to be selecting blues and silvers and burning candles, and I used to be really into the number seven,” she says. The image of a lady, unknown to O’Belle, lingered in her mind. On a last-minute trip to Portugal, she stumbled upon a Catholic ceremony during which images of saints were carried on boats and brought out to sea. Recognising the lady within the image because the Virgin Mary, she didn’t think anything more of it until she encountered the figure a 3rd time and something clicked… she realised this woman was the Yoruba orisha Yemoja.

Yemoja is derived from the Yoruba words “Yeye – Omo – Eja”, which translates to “mother whose children are the fish.” Governing over rivers and bodies of water, Yemoja is a water spirit celebrated within the Yoruba pantheon because the giver of life. “It was interesting for me to go together with a sense after which find references afterwards that belonged,” says O’Belle. Within the film, she plays Yemoja, a homage to her ancestry because the daughter of a Yoruba-Nigerian father.

While she researched Yoruba religion and Yemoja specifically, her process was driven by her intuition. “I didn’t wish to heavily research because intuition was the fundamental point of the practice of this work,” O’Belle explains. She asked her family questions and worked from memory, starting with hand-dyed textiles she sewed by hand around a mould of her body. “My grandma had just passed away and she or he was an enormous matriarchal figure in my family,” she tells Dazed. “It made me feel closer to her and have more of an actual understanding about her and my family.” The resulting designs – intricately woven bras inspired by Yoruba hairstyles and patterned bodysuits – adorn the film’s characters.

After which there’s hair, O’Belle source material. Her practice as an artist originates within the years she worked as a hairdresser. “That’s how I began creatively,” she explains, recalling entering hair competitions and art-directed photo shoots. “I put all my creativity into attempting to create different worlds inside hair, to grasp people and to bring out their characters.” It was all a way for the artist to permit people to “see and connect with themselves”.

O’Belle’s love of glamour pervades the film. Gems and glitter abound. Watching, you’re feeling as if you’re inside a diamond. One reference, Belle tells me, is “the sensation of being at my family’s house on Sunday and the TV shows I’d watch…. Hollywood movies, how they’ve this hazy glamour to the shots.” Two movies specifically served as sources of inspiration – Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mystical The Holy Mountain and Sergei Parajanov’s poetic masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates.

“I used to be doing these intuitive rituals to attempt to connect with myself. I used to be selecting blues and silvers and burning candles, and I used to be really into the number seven” – Jade O’Belle

Birthright is layered with references. “Having multiple perspectives when attempting to access something could be very vital,” the artist and filmmaker explains. That is partly informed by her multicultural upbringing; her mother is Tamil-Indian and O’Belle also identifies as South Asian. “I desired to have a diasporic perspective when taking a look at this work,” she says. “That’s where it began from. [I] want[ed] to see all these different references put together – all of the things that feel alive in my mind – and like they’ve meaning.” 

The casting of the film unfolded naturally, with an uncanny synchronicity. The artist’s cousin Yinka Adeyoka plays the High Priestess within the film, a job O’Belle found fitting. “I actually wanted to start out the film along with her because I can see my grandmother in her, although they’re different in some ways.” The casting of Ebun Sodipo because the Reflection got here about after a probability encounter during an evening out. “The whole lot that she is embodies that character. In her own work she uses plenty of reflection and sound,” O’Belle says. “All of it unfolded in a extremely beautiful way.” 

O’Belle has yet to go to Nigeria, India or Tibet, where her mother’s side of the family are from, but her physical self  – the knowledge that arises inside her body and that she channels – keeps her connected to her various homelands. For those within the diaspora, turning towards the body will be transformative. “It’s vital to tune into ourselves and check out and channel the data – that alignment – we do have, otherwise you may get swayed and lost in something that doesn’t belong to you. Though we reside in that and we do contribute to it, it’s not completely ours,” she tells Dazed. Birthright unearths the facility of formality, the way it drops us right into a threshold space where wisdom and connection are found. 

Take a leaf through stills from the film and watch the web premier of Birthright above. 

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