From: Benin, Africa Watch: Trailer, JustWatch, Hoopla, Kanopy, Tubi, Amazon Prime Next: Batuque, Golden Fish, African Fish, N!aiContinue reading “In Search of Voodoo – An Educational Documentary of Voodoo Culture”
Have you read Mia Couto’s brilliant post-colonial novel Sleepwalking Land? If you haven’t and you love reading, you should check it out now. If you haven’t got time to read, you can watch the film which does a great job at translating the novel onto the big screen. Check out the film here (Amazon).
Sleepwalking Land starts with an old man (Tuahir) and a young boy (Muidinga) walking down a desolate dirt track. We are not told who they are or where they are going, but we can tell they are in danger. Not because, they are being targeted, but because they are roaming a war-torn country. They hide in the bushes as a gang of men bragging about killing people walk past and then reemerge to find a burned-out bus full of dead bodies. They decide to remove the bodies and call it their temporary home.
If you’re ever read or seen Cormac McCarthy’s The Road you might recognise this environment. In both The Road and Sleepwalking Land there’s an old man and a young boy roaming a desolate land trying to survive. But contrary to The Road where we know the two protagonists are father and son, the connection between the protagonists in Sleepwalking Land is never made clear.
However, we get a clue to their past lives from a journal that Muidinga finds by the burned-out bus belonging to a man named Kindzu. Each day, they read an extra chapter of the journal and immerse themselves in Kindzu’s story. For Tuahir, Kindzu’s life probably reminds him of his past life, which he has blocked from his memory. For Muidinga, Kindzu’s life gives him a possible explanation to his past which amnesia has prevented him from remembering.
Teresa Prata’s adaptation of Mia Couto’s film is a worthy of your time. The main problem it faces is cutting the novel into 90mins, so if you’ve read the book you might think that the film crams in too much in too little time.
If you want to watch more films like this with characters wandering through desolate landscapes check out the post-apocalyptic The Road, which is good but bleak. You should also check out the art-house film Mimosas following wanderers from different centuries through the Moroccan mountains and deserts.
Or if it’s great African films you’re after, check out Abouna from Chad, a story about two sons searching for their lost Dad. There’s also Timbuktu, an Academy Award nominee from Mali where you’ll see the effect of the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism on the Malian town.
Indigenous Batswana films aren’t easy to find, so if you know of any, please contact me here. In the meantime, check out N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (the exclamation marks represent click sounds). It’s a documentary made by an American anthropologist, so it’s by no means a true Batswana film. However, you will get to see the impact of the white government on the independence of the !Kung people as portrayed through the life of a !Kung woman named N!ai.
From: Botswana, AfricaContinue reading “N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman Before and After Independence”
Watch: Trailer, Kanopy, Rent on Vimeo
Next: Another Country, Black Girl, Smoke Signals
A Taste of Our Land is the first narrative feature I’ve seen that speaks to the rising Chinese influence in African countries. It’s inspired by the director’s experience working in a Chinese mine in Rwanda, where he saw a colleague beaten so badly he was hospitalized. His crime? To ask for his pay.
A Taste of Our Land features a similarly brutal Chinese-run mine in Uganda. It’s operated by a Chinese convict named Cheng that brutally beats his employees for any acts of dissent. He works for a Chinese company that don’t appear in the film. We only hear them on the other end of Cheng’s phone, emphasizing their disregard for Africa and it’s people. They’re extracting Africa’s wealth from abroad with the help of a criminal. It paints a surprisingly blunt picture of the exploitative motivations of China in Africa
The victim of this film is an older African man called Yohani who struggles to provide for his pregnant wife. He tries to get compensation for the Chinese mine which was built on his land without permission. However, because the local authorities he appeals to have already been paid off, there’s nothing he can do. The African authorities have sold him out for temporary wealth.
When Yohani discovers a nugget of gold on his land, he becomes an obvious allegory of the world’s exploitation of Africa. Three protagonists are after his new found wealth, and each one of them representatives a different world power.
Credit is due to the filmmakers for avoiding the conventional African film tropes of war, HIV, and witchcraft to focus on the growing Chinese influence in Africa. It’s rare to see an African film implicating other national powers and religious institutions so blatantly in its demise. However, A Taste of Our Land’s bad acting makes the allegories a bit too obvious. It highlights the heavy handedness of the script and lack of production quality of the film (it’s made on a spartan $12,000 budget). As a result, what could be a subtle implication of religious and national powers in Africa’s exploitation comparable to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, ends up feeling a bit stereotypically comical.
Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.
In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Supreme Court stripped the citizenship of anyone with Haitian parents, retroactive to 1929. The ruling rendered more than 200,000 people stateless, without nationality, identity or a homeland. Stateless follows Rosa Iris, an attorney with family who have been exiled by the country’s recent laws, as she mounts a grassroots electoral campaign to advocate for social justice. But it also follows her antithesis, Gladys Felix, an outspoken supporter of the nationalist movement, fighting for for stricter immigration control.
Like Softie, Stateless is an observational documentary that captures an activist from outside of the system fighting against corruption. Through Rosa’s story we’re exposed to the emotional trauma of the country’s recent anti-immigration policies. Simply put, they’re racist, and this is obvious right from the opening scene in which Rosa is representing a client in a government office. Her client is applying for an updated citizenship card but is being denied by the officer because “he doesn’t speak clear Spanish”. This is not an isolated incident. Rosa’s activism is also justified by her personal stakes. She has the same Haitian lineage as the people she’s representing that the country is persecuting. So she runs for government to represent people like her exiled because of their race.
However, unlike Softie, which focuses solely on Boniface’s family life and his campaign for government, Stateless also documents the other side of the fight against racism by following Gladys Felix, a member of the country’s anti-immigrant nationalist movement. We follow her as she spews racist rhetoric about the nature of Haitian immigrants and gaslights the experiences of Haitians she meets at a government built camp for sugar cane workers near the border. Whilst it feels odd to have their stories running alongside each other, it makes Stateless stand out. It allows us to see how present the threat is – not just to Rosa and her cousin Teofilo, but to all Haitian immigrants and Black Dominicans. Gladys adds a face (and very present reality) to the sometimes invisible state sanctioned racism of the Dominican Republic. She gives the audience something visual to root against.
If you’re looking for a documentary that examines racism in the Dominican Republic’s past and present through two women campaigning at either end of the political spectrum, this is the film you’re looking for.
Check our Pan African Film Festival 2021 page for more reviews coming out of the 29th edition of the festival.
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