May Ayim

Audre Lorde, the highly influential, award-winning African-American lesbian poet came to live in West-Berlin in the 80s and early '90s. She was the mentor and catalyst who helped ignite the Afro-German movement while she challenged white women to acknowledge and constructively use their privileges. With her active support a whole generation of writers and poets for the first time gave voice to their unique experience as people of color in Germany. This documentary contains previously unreleased audiovisual material from director Dagmar Schultz's archives including stunning images of Audre Lorde off stage. With testimony from Lorde's colleagues and friends the film documents Lorde's lasting legacy in Germany and the impact of her work and personality.

The film presents a portrait by Maria Binder of May Ayim, Ghanaian-German poet, academic and political activist. May Ayim was one of the founders of the Black German Movement, and her research on the history and present situation of Afro-Germans, but also her political poetry, made her known in Germany and in other countries. May Ayim wrote in the tradition of oral poetry and felt a strong connection to other Black poets of the diaspora. Poetry gave her an opportunity to confront the white German society with its own prejudices. The film shows the author in performances in South Africa and in Germany. Interviews and poems reveal the search for identity, how and why the term Afro-German was introduced and how a young Black woman experienced the German unification. May Ayim lived from 1960 to 1996. In Berlin, a street which had the name of a colonialist was renamed in 2010 after May Ayim.