Matt's Gallery, MattFlix: The Dissolution Trilogy by Michelle Williams Gamaker

The Dissolution trilogy comprises House of Women (2017), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018), and The Eternal Return (2019). The films form part of Williams Gamaker’s series on Fictional Activism, which explores British studio films made during empire.

Conceived as an antidote to cinema’s propensity to classify and typecast individuals, particularly the historical (and ever-present) side-lining of actors of colour, Dissolution revisits two marginalised figures from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 film Black Narcissus: Kanchi, the silent dancing girl, and Sabu, the prince, played by Krishna Istha in all three films. Fascinated with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Williams Gamaker contemplates the notion that over time her brown protagonist would be mutable and reincarnate with each shift in location and context. The gender non-binary fluidity Istha embodies enabled Williams Gamaker to write characters who defy categorisation through continuous change.

​www.mattsgallery.org/mattflix/the-dissolution-trilogy