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she got ironic tattoos on ha back

@airyindividual

23,Gambino Girl 4 Eva, Jade.
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innocenttmaan

Shengsi, an archipelago of almost 400 islands at the mouth of China’s Yangtze river, holds a secret shrouded in time – an abandoned fishing village being reclaimed by nature. These photos by Tang Yuhong, a creative photographer based in Nanning, take us into this lost village on the beautiful archipelago.

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pulp-diction

There is an indelible kindness to Miss Juneteenth. This is not to say it is a film about the ease of life: as we follow Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie) trying to prep her daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) for the titular pageant, we see things constantly piled in her way. She has to raise the funds for all the pageant costs and the special dress she wants Kai to wear, her estranged husband’s bond, the power bill. Any step that Turquoise takes is laden with burden, threatening to throw the balance of her world out of whack. So Turquoise does what she always does: she makes it work. 

A film with a namesake like that could crumble under the pressure of representing all Black life. But Miss Juneteenth delightfully curtsies at it, choosing instead to narrow its focus on the life of a woman and her daughter struggling to get by. It keeps its story gentle, and its stakes relatively small, but no less important. 

While the world of Miss Juneteenth is delicate, it belies a fighter’s edge. Turquoise, we’re lead to believe, has not had the life expected of a pageant winner, working a collection of odd jobs to make ends meet. Beharie is the crux of the film, folding in a world-weariness that is still hopeful for her daughter into every interaction, every moment of solitude. It’s through her that the resilience is gently laced into the fabric of the film, radiating out to the rest of her community: All around her people are finding ways to scrape money together to get a bit of the world that’s theirs. It’s a community that runs on mutual aid, celebrating it even when it can breed individual struggle. 

“I just want something that’s mine,” Turquoise says when she turns down a suitor. It’s a galvanizing statement, but Nicole Behrarie speaks it with all the world weariness of knowing that nothing in life comes easy—not pageants, not work, and certainly not ownership of anything. It’s absolutely lovely that the biggest stake of the film comes from the relationship between mother and daughter, struggling to figure out how to connect to each other when they both just want the best. It’s a deeply kind and human perspective that benefits because it refuses any grandstanding and instead just lets the people in the film be. 

It’s a confident first showing from writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples, who gives the whole affair a sincerity that makes it more than a slight slice of life. She allows for moments of quiet in Turquoise’s life, leaving room in the specificity for identification but not judgment. There’s a naturalism to her shots—not only in the way they softly gaze in on the world, focusing on the mother/daughter pair, but in the natural colors, the subdued tone that so much of Miss Juneteenth takes. This is not the vivid desert, nor the Texas of a major city. This is small-town, hard-won Texas, for better or worse. Though Kai and Turquoise’s relationship wrinkles and rankles each other at times, they are a pair, a duo, a team against the world, in sickness and in health. 

In the end, Peoples zigs when she could’ve zagged, eschewing either a neat and tidy ending or a predictable blow-up. It is a small slice of life, but it is not unimportant, and Turquoise has finally accomplished her need, if not her want. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, a ray of kindness in a tough, tough world.