Director-editor Maureen Gosling is a longtime East Bay resident and has remained one of the significant local artists in the area for the last 50 years. She began her career as one of the key collaborators working alongside maverick Berkeley documentarian Les Blank, whose films—often eccentric portraits of communal living full of food, dance, and song—are significant time-capsules of the ethos of ‘70s American counterculture. (Gosling edited Blank’s 1982 film Burden of Dreams, documenting the troubled production of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, for which she was nominated for an award by the American Cinema Editors society.)
Her latest film, Bamako Chic: Threads of Power, Color, and Culture (2023), keeps the legacy of the ‘60s alive in its own way. Its focus is the Malian tradition of bazin, a patterned fabric that, since the 1960s, women have dyed with bright, distinctive colors that have become a signature staple of West African fashion. Gosling and co-director, Maxine Downs, follow the supply chain from the factories in Germany, where the cloth is initially produced, to the diasporic communities in New York and, finally, Oakland (where Gosling currently resides). Throughout, they consider the bazin’s importance to women’s economic independence, the need for more ecologically-friendly strategies for dying, and how the colorful, starched fashion staple keeps the West African diaspora in contact with their home communities abroad. The striking floral patterns and bright colors inspire one German artist to decorate the walls of a factory with this unique design; they may also bring to mind the similarly colorful “flower power” of the American youth culture of Gosling’s generation.
Bamako Chic: Threads of Power, Color, and Culture screens next Wednesday, October 8, and Thursday, October 9, at the Smith Rafael Film Center and Sequoia Cinema, respectively, as part of the series “Shorts: Life’s Like Poetry” at the 2025 Mill Valley Film Festival.
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