Some films are likened to essays. This one is more of an epic poem: a raw, dense, impressionistic odyssey through Jamaican identity, national, personal and spiritual. It is a real original, both in terms of its images and voices and the way they’re presented.

Film-maker Khalik Allah (who also worked on Beyoncé’s Lemonade visual album) already demonstrated his singular technique with Field Niggas (2015), a survey of predominantly African American poverty in East Harlem. He favours visual portraits of people on the street – filming their faces for several seconds as they pose as if for a still camera. Allah is not seeking the picturesque or the aesthetically acceptable, his approach is more ethnographical in nature. Subjects here include sex workers, beggars, hawkers and children. Some are beautiful and young, many are disfigured or ravaged by poverty and disease.

Often we hear the same subjects talking on the soundtrack, out of synch with the images, interspersed with fleeting snapshots of the landscape, collaged together more in the interests of rhythm than narrative. The opening segment, for example, captures sex workers on the streets at night, overlaid with real-life negotiations between the women and their prospective clients. The effect is disorienting but hypnotic.

Into this mix, Black Mother also weaves a meditative family history (presumably the film-maker’s own), drawing on what appears to be a trove of home movies, and the reminiscences of a dignified, elderly patriarch. And the ensemble is structured around the pregnancy of an unnamed woman – which presages an ending of both birth and death.

Between them, Allah’s diverse subjects touch on issues of Jamaican history, landscape, religion, race, sex and femininity, often passionately and powerfully. The experience is almost too much to process on a rational level, but you come away with an essential understanding.