heist - FilmRoot

Coming From Insanity – Pan African Film Festival 2020

In Coming from Insanity a poor Togolese house boy becomes a rich counterfeiter in Nigeria. It’s a well-made rags to riches heist thriller that will keep you engaged throughout.

The film starts with Kossi being trafficked across the Nigerian border from Togo in the 1990’s. He’s only 12 when he arrives, but he’s already forced to work as a house boy for an upper-middle class family living in Lagos. Fast forward to the present day and Kossi is still stuck in the same position; slaving away for the well-off family he grew up working for. They don’t care about his dreams, and without an education he’s unlikely to reach them. As far as they’re aware, he’ll always be beneath them.

Fed up with being downtrodden, Kossi resorts to crime. He uses his inventiveness to start counterfeiting dollars and soon becomes the best counterfeiter in Lagos. He slowly scales up his operations like Breaking Bad, employing a cast of people like him to help run his business. However, with a larger operation Kossi picks up the unwanted attention of a determined police agent, sparking a Catch Me If You Can style chase which thrillingly carries this film to the end.

If anything, Coming from Insanity is a testament the production quality of Nollywood. Compared to many of the lower budget productions that featured at the Pan African Film Festival, Coming from Insanity feels like a tent-pole Hollywood film. It stands out because of the following:

It features a cast of established names that have all gained acting experience from previous Nollywood productions instead of an amateur cast.
It has a substantial production budget allowing the crew to effectively film a diverse range of challenging scenes taking place in a very busy city (Lagos), as well as at sea and on the road.
As well as a lot of time spent in post-production that:
- Evened out the sound levels throughout the film.
- Matched the images on screen to a soundtrack with the same tone.
- Edited the shots together to efficiently tell a story without losing the attention of the viewer.

These are all things that we take for granted when watching films from countries with established film industries, such as the U.S, India, and Nigeria. They have the backing of an industry with the capabilities and experience needed for film-makers to make a great looking film, something that other African countries simply don’t have. That’s why Coming from Insanity feels so much more polished than films like Gonarezhou: The Movie and My Village. It has the backing of an industry with the capabilities and experience to make a great film.

That being said, industry backing isn’t everything, as we’ve seen from a number of big budget Hollywood flops in the last few years. Luckily, Coming from Insanity isn’t one of those, it’s polished look only helps it’s tight script to succeed.

Head to our Pan African Film Festival Hub for more reviews from PAFF 2020.

Ashakara – A Togolese Post-Colonial Pharma Heist Movie

ASHAKARA FILM DIFFICULTY RANKING: 2

An African doctor finds a miracle cure to a deadly virus and decides to mass produce the drug at low cost in Africa. However, a pharmaceutical multinational finds out and sends an agent to Africa to sabotage his plans to maintain their position in the industry. Ashakara is an entertaining pseudo-heist movie that pits African medicine against the imperial nature of the big pharmaceutical companies and capitalism.

From: Togo, Africa
Watch: IMDb, Kanopy
Next: Black Girl, Coming from Insanity, In Search of Voodoo

The Breakdown

Ashakara starts with multiple narratives featuring different characters with different intentions regarding the new miracle cure. There’s the African doctor who wants to spread the miracle cure across Africa; a foreigner that has been sent to the country by a big pharmaceutical company to sabotage to ensure their continued profitability worldwide; as well as the African doctor’s assistant who wants to sell the secret recipe of the miracle cure for instant riches. Each party represents a different part of Post-Colonialism: the Doctor represents Africa’s hope for true independence from continued European imperialism, represented by the foreigners of the big pharmaceutical company, whilst the doctor’s assistant represents the global net of capitalism that drives greed and corruption. It’s a film that emphasizes African sustainability, both in the power of African medicine vs. ineffectual western medicine (the prison guard’s constant headaches and the rare disease are only cured by the African fetishist), and the community driven financial support available in tontines vs. the predatory nature of the money lender and big pharma company representing global capitalism. Capitalism and Imperialism drive the villains in this movie.

The initial exposition phase is livened up by the upbeat Togolese music layered in the film and stock shots of the busy Togolese capital city. It imbues the film with energy to keep viewers attentive (including a few musical interludes added for extra effect). The musical presence fades as Ashakara moves into the second half of the movie as the action kicks in to keep the viewers attention.

Ashakara also includes a homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the European pharmaceutical agent’s portable artificial intelligence system named VAL (a riff on HAL). The agent carries VAL around in a case throughout the movie and uses it to connect with his demanding boss back in Europe. He also uses it to solve the crime and win his independence from his boss. It’s a surprise Sci-Fi addition to this heist movie that makes the European Pharma company seem even more villainous and perhaps compares Europe’s treatment of Africa as an ‘conquerable area’ to the Space colonization in 2001.

If you’re looking for an African film with plenty of Pro-African themes mixed with a few sci-fi and Voodoo elements backed by African music, dance, and dress, you need to watch Ashakara. It manages to pull together a number of narratives and characters into an entertaining heist movie that pits European imperialism and capitalist greed against indigenous African medicine and culture.

What to Watch Next

If you’re looking for more Post-Colonialist African movies, check out Black Girl from Senegal – one of the most famous films from the continent – or The Burial of Kojo from Ghana if you’re looking for something a bit more experimental.

Or if you’d like to see more films that celebrate indigenous medicine over Western medicine watch Embrace of the Serpent which follows a shaman in the Amazon or In Search of Voodoo to find out more about Voodoo culture in Benin.

Lastly, for more African heist thrillers, go seek out Coming from Insanity from Nigeria.

La Chimera (Italy) – Combining Time-Travel with Classic Cinema

La Chimera Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Time-travel is a key ingredient of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. It holds an unnatural power to change the future and the past, adding the driving plot behind the Back to the Future and Terminator series from the 1980s and a few modern Christopher Nolan films. Over in Italy, Alice Rohrwacher has mastered the ability to use time-travel naturally. Instead of using it as the driving force of the plot and drama, it is the icing on the cake. She has combined time-travel with wholly Italian influences; De Sica’s Neo-realism and Fellini’s Surrealism, to make her own fantastic style.

From: Italy, Europe
Watch: Trailer, JustWatch
Next: Happy as Lazzaro, First Cow, Caro Diario

La Chimera – The Breakdown

La Chimera starts with a dream. Sepia-tinted snippets of a woman in a garden evokes the feeling of warm nostalgia. The dream is interrupted by a train conductor asking for tickets, which introduces us to our dreamer: Arthur, played by Josh O’Connor. He picks out a very old looking train ticket the size of a postcard and his train-cabin-mates pick up on his unusual accent and ask where he comes from. “Far,” is his one-worded answer, coding the mystery of his character.

So who is Arthur, and has he come from another era? He doesn’t reveal anything obvious on the train. It’s not clear where he’s going or coming from, and as per his one-worded answer in the paragraph above, we don’t know who he is or where he is from either. A few puzzle pieces are inferred from the following scenes, but these do not give us a complete picture. We find out that:

He’s English
He’s been in jail – likely as the fall guy for a troubadour group of associates
He’s looking for a woman
He has a special skill at finding treasures from the past

Whilst these attributes build his character, they also all add to his mysteriousness by leading to new questions:

Why is an Englishman in rural Italy with a group of grave-robbers?
What led to his capture and was he turned in?
Who is he looking for and what happened to them?
How did he get his supernatural skill?

This mystery makes him appear like he’s been picked up from another world and time and plonked into rural Italy.

Time-travel has popped up before in Alice Rohrwacher’s films. In her previous feature, Happy as Lazzaro, the titular character falls from a great height, blacks out, and reappears in a modern era, portaling from his previous life in feudal Italy. Whilst the time-travel is more metaphorical than literal, Rohrwacher makes the jump more believable by situating Lazzaro (the lead character) in a location stuck in the past; a small rural Italian town with old, decaying houses, no modern infrastructure, and no signs of modern technology, before transporting him to the modern city. The town that Arthur finds himself in is exactly the same setting as Lazzaro’s decaying town. His house is a DIY shack on the outside of the town wall, he visits the crumbling house of his lost lover, and electronic screens and electricity itself are practically non-existent. This setting, combined with Arthur’s mystery makes viewers accustomed to Rohrwacher’s films feel like Arthur is from another era and place, and has got lost in old-town Italy whilst searching for his lost love.

Conclusion

If the time-travel and mystery haven’t already sold you on watching La Chimera, know that watching La Chimera is like watching a bubbling pot of Italian Cinema influences whilst witnessing a new talent find their stylistic voice. There’s pieces of De Sica’s neo-realism in the poverty-stricken characters and tough world they exist in, fragments of Antonioni’s mood-driven mystery in their vague backgrounds and existence, and a large chunk of Fellini’s surrealism and panache in the bombastic scenes and cinematic magic. Rohrwacher in La Chimera manages to bring together all these influences whilst building on the natural time-travel of Happy as Lazzaro, forming her own style from the embers of the Italian classics.