Distant Relative is a reconstruction; somewhere between schoolroom, cinema, and court of law. It is a site of shared and elusive personal histories. Since 2014, British moving image and performance artist Michelle Williams Gamaker has been developing ‘fictional activism’: the restoration of people of colour performing in 20th century British and Hollywood studio films from marginalised characters to central figures, who return in her works to challenge the fictional injustices to which they have been historically consigned.