Genre
Synopsis
LOOKING FOR TCHAIKO is an intimate feature documentary in development by Creative Capital Award-winning director Tchaiko Omawale. The film interweaves Tchaiko’s present-day struggle to raise her young son through divorce, hidden disability, climate crisis, and economic precarity with the sweeping revolutionary love stories of her Pan-Africanist parents and comrades.
When the Eaton Fires force Tchaiko and her child to flee their home, she feels echoes of her own childhood, spent moving through civil wars and coups across eight countries by age sixteen. Disillusioned by her failed marriage to a man who could not match her ideals of shared liberation, Tchaiko asks: How did her parents sustain revolutionary love and community across decades of fascism, exile, and loss — and what does it mean to parent well in an age of rising authoritarianism and climate collapse?
Offered the chance to develop a radical performance piece about her family, Tchaiko travels through time and place: interviewing elders, reconnecting with comrades’ descendants, and unearthing rare archival footage to understand how revolutionary movements shaped bodies, health, and relationships. She finds that women’s invisible labor and care work were at the heart of these liberation struggles, yet so many of her aunties and cousins carry the toll in their own bodies — cancers, miscarriages, ruptured families.
Blending vérité scenes of Tchaiko’s precarious life in Los Angeles with stylized reenactments, ritual dance, and layered visual archives, LOOKING FOR TCHAIKO becomes a living conversation between past and present. Polyvagal Theory and new understandings of intergenerational trauma guide Tchaiko as she unpacks how war, racism, and displacement shaped her nervous system — and what she might pass on to her son if she cannot break the cycle.
In the end, this is more than a story about revolution — it is about the quiet, radical work of re-parenting oneself and one’s children. As Tchaiko digs for answers her parents can’t fully give, she finds healing in community: the only place big enough to hold grief, care, and the stubborn hope that we can build the worlds we deserve.
Against a backdrop of ecological disaster and attacks on historical truth, LOOKING FOR TCHAIKO asks us to remember, reckon, and repair — because the future depends on it.
Bio
Tchaiko is a writer/director whose filmmaking is influenced by growing up in 8 countries by age 16. Themes of living in and in-between, fill her work. Her impulses for fantasy connect to African indignity and the healing powers of body and spirit. Tchaiko most recently used etudes to create her action short film, 2 MOTHERS. Her debut feature film SOLACE is streaming on MGM+, Prime, and KweliTV. It won Special Jury Mention for Best Ensemble cast at the LA Film Festival and an Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival. Tchaiko's recent episodic work includes QUEEN SUGAR, CHERISH THE DAY, SACRIFICE, BMF, and GOOD TROUBLE. Her feature documentary LOOKING FOR TCHAIKO is in development and has been supported by Ford Foundation. Her second feature film, also in development, is a fantasy/horror biomythography called BEAST. It is a recipient of the 2024 Creative Capital Award.
