Christopher Harris’ first explicitly (meta-)autobiographical work, God Bless the Child, is an experimental nonfiction feature-length film about an abandoned child descended from abandoned African peoples in the colonized Americas. Through the prism of an expansive autobiographical account utilizing a personal archive of photos, official documents, newspaper columns and ephemera, God Bless the Child explores a complex web of layered, transhistorical, and transglobal connections between child services as a carceral apparatus, the family structure as both idea and institution, the transatlantic slave trade, and the role of the French Catholic Church in the colonization of West Africa and North America. Interweaving his personal archive with footage shot in six cities in five countries across North America, Europe and West Africa, Harris represents the foster-care to prison pipeline as a reverberation of chattel slavery and overlays an absent birth mother with the dispossession of colonization to frame his hometown of Saint Louis, Missouri, and Saint-Louis, Senegal as colonized fraternal twin cities.
