The third film of Jacqui Duckworth, A Prayer Before Birth (1991), shot in 16mm and running twenty minutes, might have gathered dust in the context of LGBTQ (sub)cultures and experimental British cinema in the years between it’s completion and the recent revival of interest in it’s director. In the space that emerges between fiction, personal experience and surrealism, A Prayer enacts an avant-garde lesbian aesthetic working to come to terms with being in a disabled body, that places the emotional turbulence of this experience front and centre while confronting affects through which ableism coheres. The film directly addresses the troubles of producing a (crip) lesbian gaze, a perspective that emerges via breakups, the deployment of melodramatic horror, and sitting at the table with emerging challenges of undertaking essential activities in life. It’s also in the space between crip embodiment, emotional turbulence and confronting ableism in which Duckworth’s synthesis of a crip lesbian visual language, through the character of Marsha as played by Adjoa Andoh, seems to encode a disabled black lesbian desire that diverges from Duckworth's autobiography – but more on that later. Centring the film, this essay discusses the substance of this synthesis, alongside the affective possibilities that are carried through it by the Director.

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