Sinners: The Breakdown
9 practitioners views on this impactful film
Hey Family,
I love sharing my perspective with the collective, but as a media producer and content creator, I understand that my view isn’t the end-all, be-all. I’ve always been someone who’s been enamored with media. As a kid, I loved magazines, radio, music videos, music, and TV shows. I’d sit and make fake radio shows with my friends on their Casio keyboards. I’d write plays and short stories. I taught myself HTML and web design in high school. I love theater. I love making zines. I love blogging. I’ve started rebuilding my DVD collection. I recently acquired a VCR and have been collecting VHS tapes as well. I worked in television for many years. I did a short stint as an assistant editor for People Magazine. As I’m typing all this out, it makes me chuckle because clearly there is a common covering over my life.
In truth, I’ve always envisioned Soul Things to be the place where I can birth media and content around what it means to be Black, Magical, and Dope. I just love media DOWN. I might have to do a whole post on my love of analog and digital media because they really have my heart in a way that I don’t fully understand.
It was May when I sat down with nine spiritual practitioners. The days were long, the energy was high. Now, as November’s chill sets in and the clocks have fallen back, their words on the movie Sinners feel more resonant than ever. I originally was slated to release this supercut back in Gemini season, but in the words of KC & JoJo on the song Life, “Tiiiiime is slipping away from me! (away from me)” 😭 Ironically enough, Sinners was actually re-released in IMAX last week, and it’s currently back in theaters for a limited run.
While October’s Hoodoo Heritage Month is a vibrant celebration, the wisdom of our ancestors isn’t seasonal. The longer nights invite us to turn inward, to mull over, to discuss. We are being urged to continue the work. This is the continuation.
I had so much fun interviewing all these folks whom I consider to be family. I chose nine guests from all walks of life. Tidewater Hoodoo, Saltwater Hoodoo, Midwest Hoodoo, Ifa priests, lucumi practitioners, mystics, astrologers, mediums, seers, and everybody in between. There are over 9 hours of footage, so each guest will be getting their own standalone episode of HTBM soon, but for now, this is the supercut.
So settle in, grab a snack, and let’s get into the nine different perspectives our guests took from the instant cultural classic Sinners.
I had so much fun interviewing all these folks whom I consider to be family. I chose 9 guests from all walks of life. Tidewater Hoodoo, Saltwater Hoodoo, Midwest Hoodoo, Ifa priests, lucumi practitioners, mystics, astrologers, mediums, seers, and everybody in between. There are over 9 hours of footage, so each guest will be getting their own standalone episode of HTBM soon, but for now, this is the supercut.
Here are a few quotes from this episode from our esteemed guests:
Iya Ajewole Osundara
Priestess of Osun, based in Baltimore, MD.
”The thing that I liked about the hoodoo element, and this is something, as I know practitioners, we contend with, is like how the work will work for some things, but it won’t work for that thing. I thought that also brought a level of realism where it’s like
she’s not the magical black mammy saving everybody.”
IG: _brujabanton
Toni Marriott
Writer, body positive social critic, and hot gyal from Brooklyn, NY.
”Wunmi Mosaku is every fat, black, dark-skinned girl’s vision in a powerful movie, and she is the epicenter of everything happening. I loved it so much.”
IG: fatblackluxury
Giovanni Luna
Child of Eleggua, dreamer and vampire, from East Harlem, NY.
”Smoke had to be violent and calm in his violence so Stack could live freely and be crazy and live a crazy life. And even in the end, Smoke went out protecting everyone while Stack got to live on and party forever and hang out and go to clubs and be a vampire and live in turn and be young forever.”
Gerard Miller
Doula, griot, artisan, Tidewater Hoodoo living in Seattle, WA
”Walk up in Annie’s house is covered in blue. She’s dressed down in blue. Um, whereas like you knew who was going to be the knuckleheads, and you knew who was going to be the even-keeled people from jump. Annie and Cool Blue rocking their Carolinas.
Okay, we like that setup.”
IG: altaredroots
Loli Moon
Medicine woman, seer, and astrologer based in Canada.
“I think that the conversations that we’re seeing now make a lot of sense in terms of the spiritual perspective and understanding that we need to understand who our community is, right? And aligning with people who really are about us and stand for us.
People who aren’t just invite everybody into the spot, right?
And getting very real and honest about who those people are.”
IG: mysticmoonmedicine
Nima Alston
Lucumi practitioner, carnivalian, Hoodoo, and flight attendant from Brooklyn, NY.
”And this idea of like what’s evil or even like the connections to hoodoo and seeing people respond to that in the real world, and how some people were like, ‘I thought it was witchcraft’ or ‘I thought it was evil.’ All these things around spirituality are what stayed cause I thought it was done masterfully, and even the fact that it’s opening all these conversations like that to me was a part of why all of that was introduced as well.”
Ace Blackwood
Folklorist, storyteller, Hoodoo, and filmmaker from the Midwest.
”And Hoodoo is really lineage-based, which causes people to see it as sort of like something unserious. Whereas with a lot of Hoodoo people who have studied Hoodoo’s history or Hoodoo anthropologists, they say, ‘No, Hoodoo is like a spiderweb. We have many branches and subcategories.’ Yes, it’s lineage-based, but if we actually took time to structure it, we would see that cause come on now, African-American spirits are very particular and very well structured. Okay?”
Devante Ferreira
Spiritual Baptist, cultural historian, and Hood Obeah Man from Brooklyn, NY.
”And those kinds of things become a light and attract an attraction to the people who don’t necessarily belong to the people who don’t who aren’t necessarily a part, and they want to be a part because we are a light. We are that great. They want to be like us.
They want to sing like us. They want to dance like us.”
IG: thehoodobeahman
Honey Jupitera
Spiritualist, Hoodoo, writer, and magic maker from Detroit, MI.
”This to me, I got to see this space where we have these blues singers, we have these mythologized figures, we have these ancestors, but there’s a lot of pain attached to them. And we do learn, you know, duality and all this space, but we got to see Sammy live. We got to see someone live to the end of their life with success, with this story, with the transmutation. And to me, it just it was giving life. It was giving it was giving veneration.”