Seeing Red: Jade Jackman

*This article was originally published in Bricks Magazine Issue 5*

Red is an evocative colour. Red is sex, violence, love, danger. Red is bold and bright and aggressive and striking. Red is Asian fairy tales and Communist Russia. Red is a refusal to go unseen.

The neon light behind Jade Jackman’s shoulder is red. It melts over her face, across her red lips and brushes onto her red tassel earrings. She lifts her arm to reveal a black ‘V’ tattoo –  an ode to Viktor Vosolov Shamraeff, her grandfather who fled Russia during the 1917 revolution. Hanging just next to it, sat on her chest, is a jade necklace, a nod to her Asian heritage and namesake. Her hair is dark and long, her brows are arched and her makeup is minimal. Visually, she is striking, like the hot villain in a Tarantino movie. I’m both intrigued, intimated and a little bit in love with her already.

The 24-year-old award-winning filmmaker and law graduate is sat opposite me at a café in Shoreditch, not far from where she lives. She’s talking about her current project, Station - a hybrid documentary film about sexual violence and the process a victim goes through before deciding not to report an offence to the police. 

She tells me she’s feeling anxious today, but she exudes a confident, yet erratic energy. I imagine she’d be a great partner in crime on a night out.

Her work covers themes of sex, violence and scenes that often go unseen, whether that’s in a club, a detention centre or in someone’s bedroom. Over the course of two hours, we talk about fusing art with politics, her Chinese grandmother, Russian grandfather, and her hopes and dreams for the future.

For those who don’t know, can you tell me a bit about the films you’ve made and your work so far?

I guess I’ve been quite a hardcore documentary filmmaker. I went to do a shoot in Afghanistan about women's rights; I shot in Mexico about blind photographers; I was at Vice for a bit and covered stuff from drug policies to Pussy Riot; I made films about revenge porn and I recently went to Puerto Rico to make a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Maria for the Guardian. I’ve made music videos and fashion films as well, like my recent collaboration with Hanger.

The film that I won Best Young Director for at the British Film Institute in March, was a film about Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre, which is obviously very political and contemporary, but the aim of that was to amplify the voices of the women who were inside there.  

When I was 18, I remember saying to my friend that I really wanted to go out with a guy who makes films like these. My friend said ‘why don't you be that person?’ and I just never thought that women could. It just shows me how times have changed. I see so many women who are smashing it in the creative fields all around me, but when I was 18, I didn’t see them anywhere. I always say that you cannot be what you cannot see, which is why I always think representation is so important.­­

What made you want to tell stories?

My first active memory of wanting to document stories was when I was nine. My grandfather had bought me Anastasia, the Disney tape, and I was obsessed. I loved Rasputin and all of these weird characters and the magic of it all. My grandfather lived through the beginning of the Russian revolution. He told me they had to flee when the revolution came because his Mum had taught some of the Romanov dynasty; they would have been killed when the revolution came. I made him write it all down and I used to write letters to him. I’ve still got them all, it was literally hundreds of pages because I wanted to know everything. I was just so fascinated by the fact that he had this story and that he was the only person who could tell it.

My grandma is Chinese and was given away at birth because it was unlucky to have a firstborn girl. I grew up with a lot of Chinese fairy tales and then my Russian grandfather would tell me all these mental Russian fairy stories. So, I was growing up in this weird mix. My imagination was definitely sparked.

So, where did your love for film come from?

My grandma used to document everything and I think that’s an immigrant thing, especially if you’re separated over borders. She would always take loads of photos and had this VHS camera. I think that’s where it started.

Even though I’ve done a law degree and I write, words have never really made sense to me. I’ve always just been really inspired by visual stuff because I think that’s just how I understand the world and how things fit together within it.

I’ve always watched so many films; the ones that really influenced me the most were Larry Clark’s Kids and Enter the Void, very visual, quite experimental and weird films like Gummo. I always felt like they were documentaries in a weird way, that they were documenting someone's reality or their own expression of society. With my documentaries, I'm not trying to present you a news-view of reality, I’m trying to present you with my visual perspective. My new film is going to be about the memory of sexual violence and not being able to report these things to the police, these are not things that you can film in live action, and so you have to find another way to tell that story.

Tell us more about your new film Station – why did you want to make it? Why the way sexual violence is handled by police?

I have been sexually assaulted and I have never gone to the police. It's taken me years to even tell anyone, but it has taken years off of my confidence - from wearing what I want, to believing that I deserved for it to happen. Obviously when you feel isolated, or you feel shame, you always think you’re by yourself, because that's where the power is, in other people enforcing silence on you. I knew that other people would be in similar situations. It happens so frequently to different people and barely anyone reports it.

I wanted to make a film about all of the things that teach people throughout their lives that they are not going to be believed. I feel like the pressure on you to be a certain person to be believed, means that you can’t have a sexuality, you can’t be drinking, you can’t take drugs, you can’t party, you can't wear certain things. I really want to get to the core of this whore/virgin dichotomy. The good victim and the bad victim, because I'd definitely be a bad victim - dark hair, big eyebrows, openly talks about x, y and z.  When I’ve been in those situations, people are like ‘well you probably did something to provoke that’ or ‘maybe you shouldn't have worn red lipstick’ and I’m like, well actually, I studied a law degree and these things shouldn't really have any bearing on whether I’m believable or not.

Discussions around sexual violence are becoming increasingly prevalent with the Times Up and Me Too movements, how are you approaching the topic?

I think there’s a really weird void in our understanding between sex, sexual violence and consent. A couple of guys said to different friends of mine, ‘oh I would never date Jade because she would call me out for being a rapist’ and they’re like ‘no…she’ll only call you out for being a rapist if you rape her’. It just feels sad that something that’s really violent has become conflated with intimate sexuality. I'm really interested in looking at sexual violence and sexuality and oh my god, I sound like a fucking Dizzy Rascal song, where all she cares about it sex and violence…

But, I really wanted to immerse this film with nightlife, because real life happens in clubs. Real life happens when you go out. Real life happens in the way that you choose to dress sexually or the way you're scared to be sexy. The reason that I’m really excited about the new film is that I’m collaborating with a DJ from Discwoman. Nightlife is one of the things I’m most passionate about - I want to tell stories to things that I relate to, and I think that’s where documentaries about these issues are sometimes off.

Is that your main goal with this project - to open the conversation up?

Yeah, definitely. This conversation should be for everyone. I think when you've got issues that affect so many people in society, for example, one in three women are victims of rape in the UK and two women a week are killed by domestic violence. These aren’t abstract issues, but we’re led to believe that they are. I think it's about having people who are affected on both sides of the debate, and it's framing it in a conversation where we can all discuss where we fit into it, rather than making it polarised. I just hope that people who wouldn’t usually watch a hardcore documentary about sexual violence might watch this, because it’s set in a club, because they love the soundtrack, or the actress, or the colour scheme.

Who or what inspires you?

My grandmother was disowned because she was really beautiful and they wanted her to marry this really rich old guy, she said ‘if you make me marry him, I’m going to bite his dick off’. And she just ran away. My grandma is now 89. No one said shit like that in those days. That’s just been in my consciousness. I don’t know if it’s necessarily inspiring because it’s kind of terrifying, but that bravery to speak your mind helped to build my character.

When you’re doing documentary film, you’re always inspired by the reality, which is amazing because it’s really easy to stay motivated. I’ve had some people tell me about the most unimaginable shit, especially with the new film I’m making. When I knew that people really thought that I could carry off that film, I knew I had to get money for it, I have to make this work because people think I can do it. Even if I feel pretty shit and unconfident - which I do a lot of the time, I still feel like I’m going to shit myself when I walk onto set – like, why should I be telling people what to do when I have no idea what to do myself? But they’ve trusted me, so I have to take up the baton in this relay.

You originally trained to be a human rights lawyer, but then began to use creativity as a way to facilitate the change you wanted to see, what sparked that change?

I think I was in Paris, I can remember the room I was in and I watched this video on the Guardian of Mos Def, the rapper, being force fed on camera to show the treatment of those in Guantanamo Bay. It was this weird fusion between him being a famous rap icon and him doing something very political, in this completely different video setting, it was really powerful. I remember this moment so clearly because I was mind-blown. I think if you have a skillset that you can use to marry arts and politics, it is really amazing.

As a society, we have really devalued creativity and I think I was quite indoctrinated by that. It’s like, you cannot be a creative filmmaker and talk about politics or law because no one is going to take you seriously. I think it’s because creativity has the power to make people see completely outside of themselves in a way that law can’t. When it’s done well, creativity is probably the most powerful thing. When people are in prison, they always take away literature first, it’s all about control; my grandfather told me about that with him. That’s why arts and politics fusing together is vital, because people who have totally different lived experiences can share their stories. 

What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

My future is going to be spent hand-in-hand with a really obedient Afghan hound, and we’ll have matching hair. And, I’m going to be able to afford lots of really nice, weird silver jewellery. I'm going to have a really hot and sexy open relationship with a long-term partner and we're both going to enjoy our lives very much. I’ll get to make work and we’ll get to go on holiday and it’ll be cute.

And this is going to sound really basic, but I’m really close to my grandma and I really hope that she’s proud. She used to be a model and did a campaign for Volkswagen, she’s really beautiful. She told me how she had always wanted to look like these white, female Hollywood stars. I hope that not seeing yourself represented for people in my family or my community of female friends, stops being a thing. I hope we all see ourselves somewhere.

When I look at what I want to do next, there's some more stuff I want to talk about. I want to talk about how legal-aid cuts are impacting domestic violence shelters in the UK, but then at the same time, I really want to make music videos for electronic artists. I don't really know where I'm going. I feel like I’m ricocheting, like a ping pong ball, and I'm not really sure where it's going to spin off to. That's what my brain is like, just a little bit hyperactive. If I get too stressed I have to literally take myself for a run or do some drawing.

Are you optimistic about the future?

I feel very positive when I look at my community of female and non-binary friends, not necessarily the male ones, although I'm starting to see a lot of them like change in different ways. When I look around me at the moment, right now, London, 2018, I'm just so gassed by how many amazing women and non-binary people are just smashing open so much stuff that was never possible. I don't think I would be half as inspired if I hadn't met all the women in my life. From my grandma, to the women in London and the women in Yarl’s Wood - women everywhere keep me going. I'm stressed at the moment, but when I look around and see what all my community of friends are doing, I'm like okay, it's fine. We're here.  

Jade’s new film will be released in 2019. You can find her on Instagram @jadeshamraeff.