As a double bill, Brandon Wint’s poetic, whimsical, and introspective documentary My Body is a Poem/The World Makes With Me pairs perfectly with Alex Eskandarkhah’s hard-hitting sports documentary Coaching While Black. Both films offer distinct commentaries on Blackness and its prairie intersection, complementing each other seamlessly.

Wint’s smooth poetry, accompanied by a dreamy, jazzy score, holds us with care while he bares his soul—immersing us in what it is like to live as a Black disabled man with Cerebral Palsy in Edmonton. By using a kaleidoscopic pastiche of animation, archival maps, family photos, and documentary-esque footage of himself, he explores white supremacy, colonialism, artistry, activism, and pleasure by grounding these themes in how his body occupies space, while simultaneously transcending it.

Eskandarkhah’s film works in contrast by offering a different facet of Black masculinity as he outlines how divisive a thriving Black college basketball team proved to be to rural Albertan communities in the late aughts and early 2010s. Through archival game footage, interviews with former team members, and the team’s former coach, Donald ”Tex” Phillips, Eskandarkhah retells a dramatic and heartbreaking story steeped in racially-based discrimination.
Both films prompt us to reconsider our bodies' significance in relation to space and challenge our politicization of bodies. These filmmakers courageously present a thought-provoking pair of films that should not be missed.