Crime - Page 3 of 3

Bantu Mama (Dominican Republic) – Pan African Film Festival 2022

In Bantu Mama, a French-Cameroonian woman is arrested in the Dominican Republic for attempting to smuggle drugs back home. However, she’s rescued by the Dominican underworld, sheltering in one of Santo Domingo’s notorious neighborhoods with a semi-orphaned family until she can make her escape.

It’s clear from the start that Bantu Mama is meant to appeal to the audiences at Western film festivals. Like European film festival fare, the images look dark and gloomy, and they carry the bulk of the narrative weight, with the sparse dialogue only covering the basic gaps the images can’t provide. There’s also a lot of movement in every shot, with no tripod or steadicam shots, and the short shot length and fast cutting verges on the speed of montage, especially in the opening. All these stylistic choices match the lean, moody looking standard of the big film festivals in Europe and North America, contrasting with the slower paced, dialogue focused African films that dominate the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.

This is not to say that Bantu Mama is unoriginal; it is. Firstly, it’s incredibly efficient, telling a complete story with limited dialogue in just 77 minutes. Secondly, it’s propelled by a brilliant soundtrack of regional African music and Dominican trap. Both genres mesh together to represent the cultural dialogue with Africa that Emma, the French-Cameroonian fugitive, opens to the Afro-Latino children that shelter her. The soundtrack also creates one of the film’s most memorable moments – a visual example of this cultural link – in which Cuki is transformed into a Maasai dancer with the help of African music and Emma. In this moment, the music transports them from their dangerous neighborhood to an imagined Pan-African utopia. This is just one moment in a handful in which the soundtrack and Emma link the Dominican Republic with Africa. The cultural dialogue they create make Bantu Mama unique.

If you’re a fan of film festivals in North America or Europe and want to see a lean, music-powered cultural exchange linking the underworld of the Dominican Republic to Africa, Bantu Mama is the film you need to watch.

Check back to our Pan African Film Festival 2022 page for more reviews coming out of the 30th edition of the festival.

The New Girl (Argentina) – Cinélatino Film Festival 2021

Jimena lives day to day in Buenos Aires, scavenging whatever and sleeping wherever she can find. In search of a better life, she smuggles herself on a bus bound for Rio Grande, a small town on the island of Tierra del Fuego in southernmost Argentina. It’s an area known for its manufacturing jobs and it’s also where her estranged half brother, Mariano, lives.

Jimena gives off a quiet meekness. She doesn’t share much with her brother or the locals – least of all her life as a transient in the city. Despite this, she’s welcomed warmly by both her brother, who sets her up with a job at the manufacturing plant he works at, and by her new colleagues, that invite her to work socials. She’s given space to settle in and adapt to her new life.

As the movie flashes through brief moments in Jimena’s first few months in Rio Grande, it’s apparent she’s becoming part of her new community. She connects with her brother’s love interest, bonds with the workers at the union meetings, and starts to help her brother out too. However, her brother, guessing the nature of her previous life starts to implicate her in his own illicit trading business. He knows he holds some power over her whilst she’s living in his apartment and not quite settled in the region. He also knows she relies on him as her only relation. As the economic backdrop kicks in, Jimena has to choose between helping her brother or supporting the union strikes – family or the community.

The New Girl packs a lot into it’s relatively short run time. It quickly provides context for Jimena’s arrival in the remote South of Argentina and her growth and coming of age in Rio Grande, to set up the climax. It highlights the privilege of crime – contrasting her experience stealing out of need vs. her brother’s smuggling to get rich. This, plus the arrival of the union mark the anti-capitalist thread of the movie. The union symbolizes the community and its strength in organization, whereas Mariano’s one-man illegal business represents the flaws and selfishness of unrestricted capitalism.

The New Girl is an engaging coming of age story as well as a protest movie, along the lines of Made in Bangladesh and Salt of the Earth. Not bad for a 79 minute movie.

Zinder (Niger) – CPH: DOX Film Festival 2021

In the city of Zinder, Niger, in the heart of the Sahel, young people form gangs to deal with the lack of work and prospects. These groups called “Palais” come from the Kara Kara district, historically home to lepers and outcasts. Zinder-born director and activist Aicha Macky returns to her hometown to tell the story of this disenfranchised youth. She talks with these men, whose bodies and the territory in which they live are scarred by the violence that has passed through them – a pervasive violence – the roots of which go back to the time of colonisation.

Zinder focuses on Siniya Boy, a member of the “Palais Hitler”, who wants to set up a security company with his fellow bodybuilders; and Bawa, a former Palais leader who turned taxi driver, haunted by memories of the atrocities committed. They live off black market petrol, smuggled from the Nigerian border.

The first scene is intended to shock the western viewer. It’s not everyday you see black men flying Hitler’s name surrounded by swastikas. That’s exactly what the “Palais Hitler” gang does, however not for the reasons we’d expect. They ‘heard he was an invincible warrior from America,’ which if it were true would make him a pretty good choice for weightlifting gang’s mascot. The director doesn’t correct them on their oversight. Just as viewers from outside of Africa probably don’t know much about Niger, it’s weirdly refreshing to find out that these Nigeriens don’t know much about U.S/European history and aren’t stuck on the U.S./European news cycle.

They’re definitely not perfect people. The taxi driver recounts his memories along the lines of the Indonesian genocide perpetrators in The Look of Silence. He speaks of the terrible crimes he committed and the young girls he and his gang raped. However, they’re also portrayed reformatively in the present. In this sense, the characters are a bit more like the life imprisoned inmates in The Prison Within. We see them for the crimes they committed as well as the reformed person they are now. By entering their feared neighborhood and giving them space to talk, Aicha Macky humanizes them.

In the present, they’re still being imprisoned, but imprisoned for their identity: both their past life and where they come from. They’re labeled as criminals because they’re from the Kara Kara neighborhood. The scars they carry from their previous lives only help the police and others to mark them. They inhibit their ability to get medical treatment, move across the city in taxis, and find work. Just because they were born in a rough neighborhood.

The personal tone of the documentary shows the failure of society to recognize them as anything but criminals. Their fierce reputation conflicts with how the director portrays them. Through the unrestricted access to their stories, we see that they’re just regular people forming ‘gangs’ for community and friendship. They seem warm and eager to talk and tell their story. We don’t see any fights or violence on screen, just many close up scars from the past. The only current proof of crime are the palais members currently in jail, but even this is up for debate as they argue they’ve been rounded up for past crimes.

Aicha Macky’s Zinder is an intimate tribute to the youth of her country. It offers a hopeful portrayal of those marked by the neighborhood they were born into.