Educational Media Reviews Online

The film Wax Print, like its namesake fabric, is a richly woven tapestry that tells multiple stories. The film is ostensibly about textiles and the textile industry: the origin and history of wax print or Batik fabrics, the impact of “fast fashion” and mass-produced fabric copies on the African textile industry, and how Batik and Kente textiles came to represent a significant part of African culture. These topics are engaging and thoroughly covered, making this film perfectly at home in any institution’s fashion design or textiles department. It is a delight to follow the filmmaker as she travels across continents and speaks to fashion designers, textile weavers, cloth factory workers, and textile archivists and historians to learn about how wax print fabrics are made, the individual patterns and stories that each wax print fabric conveys, and the wider impact that these fabrics have had for consumers.

Where this film stands out, however, is its bold and nuanced treatment of the complex history that these textiles represent. Wax print fabrics are commonly associated with Africa, but as the filmmaker asks throughout the film: Are they African? What makes them African? What does that mean? The answers take us on a centuries-long journey through multiple eras of colonization and cultural appropriation. We learn that a fabric that is so closely tied to Black African identity actually originated in Indonesia, and eventually made its way to Africa due to colonization by the Dutch and the English. These textiles are now so valued, so iconic, that there is an entire industry of mass-produced knockoffs coming in from China and East Asia, diluting the local African markets and making it difficult for African creators to make and sell the textiles that are now so thoroughly embedded in their local cultures and commerce. What begins as an attempt to trace wax print’s history through time eventually evolves into a field trip to Elmina Castle, a stronghold in West Africa where Black Africans were interred until they could be sold into slavery in the West. Wax Print is difficult to watch in these moments, and this is precisely why it is so important. The film is at its most impactful in the scenes where the filmmakers talk with other Africans about the past, present, and future of their African culture and what it means for a person, or for a fabric, to “be African.”

A film that is, on its surface, about a small subset of the fashion industry, slowly reveals an even deeper story that asks difficult questions about multiculturalism, race relations, and cultural identity. This dual nature makes the film versatile and valuable across many different academic subject areas, including sociology and socioeconomics, international studies, cultural studies, and African history. I would recommend this film for purchase and viewing in a wide variety of library types and contexts, and it would make an interesting contribution to discussions that touch on any aspect of fashion, the textile industry, race, history, and culture.

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