The Other Queen of Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee. Rapper Lachat (Chastity Daniels) takes us through different narratives, her own, to guide us in this city filled with ghosts and dreams.

Memphis, outdoors, cold. The first Queen is Tash, an idolised local rapper with gold teeth. At the driving wheel, she guides us through her winding story, which is a little like this city, or at least the vision of it that she wants to convey to us. Riding alongside her, the film agrees to lose its way and quite quickly turns into an opaque quest: recounting Memphis’s rapper community, the successes, blind spots, inspirations, disappearances, joys and violence. Here, Tash is sovereign, she drives her stories to the locations involved and through this mysterious drift she becomes a secret queen, the queen of the ruins she uncovers for us. Yet, although the film draws on an encounter, it shuns portraiture. Behind the first queen, from out of the invisible, her double is spawning. Another rapper, the other queen: Gangsta Boo. Immense but destroyed by this city and its stories. It would be overstepping the mark to say she’s a ghost, she still exists through Tash, who reveals her. This other queen is a little like Tash, a little like this city, still there but at the same time not really. What better than a film from a moving car to tell the story without saying too much: go fast, develop the mystery and find your right distance. The supreme frame, the right distance, would be that of the car window: a frame within a frame cut as an American shot. A passing frame that stops on people, their rules, their music, our fantasies, their unspeakable lives, their teeth, and their stories in gold. 

Clémence Arrivé Guezengar