The Film Verdict: African Cinema Jan 12,2023

AFRICAN CINEMA

Weekly Critics’Choice

LOOKING AT AFRICA, THINKING ABOUT AFRICA

JUJU STORIES

VERDICT: While still clearly finding their voice, three young Nigerian directors serve up entertaining vignettes of African life derived from popular made-inAfrica superstitions.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, October 12, 2021

In the anthology picture Juju Stories, a group of young people welcome the supernatural into their lives in ways that at first appear to be harmless. The end point, though, is anything but.

In the first story, Love Potion, directed by Michael Omonua, boy meets girl but there are no real sparks flying, at least to boy well, until girl amplifies her appeal by supernatural means. Love is warfare. And the weapon for Mercy, the girl, as suggested by a friend, consists of menstrual blood saved, boiled, and transformed to tea. It works but maybe it works a bit too well, especially when Leonard (Paul Utomi) moves in and real-life butts in.

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There aren’t a lot of African films playing at the world’s big festivals. Part of the problem is the shape of the world of cinema: it invariably points westward. Another part is a culture of filmmaking, across countries, focused on making films for almost exclusively domestic

audiences. Change is slow in both cases. But it is happening. One of the continent’s most festival-feted filmmakers, Kivu Ruhorahoza, had his latest feature Father’s Day welcomed at the Berlin Film Festival. It examines masculinity and its expectations in post-war

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JUJU STORIES (Continued)

Yam, the second film, directed by Abba Makama, opens with a wealthy family at breakfast, then moves to a street hustler whose life changes forever after he picks money from the ground as he goes about his day. His fate is entwined with a pair of lovers seeking a solution (or resolution) to an unwanted pregnancy.

LOOKING AT AFRICA (Continued)

Rwanda. As is usual with the auteur, the film is clearly low budget and the story barely linear. It is, however, his most accessible and, one might argue, enjoyable work so far.

In West Africa, a trio of young filmmakers from Nigeria (tagged the “Surreal 16”) showed their 3-in-1 project on Nigerian superstitions, Juju Stories, at Locarno and received a prize from the festival. CJ Obasi, one of the three directors, is heading to this month’s Sundance Film Festival with a feature film entitled Mami Wata. The day the film is screened at a festival venue in Utah, Obasi will make history as

In the third juju story, CJ Obasi’s Suffer the Witch, which also feels like the most substantial, weird student Joy (Nengi Adoki) is accused of witchcraft by fellow students, most of whom are scared of her and her supposed abilities. She befriends Chinwe (Bukola Oladipupo) who happens to have a boyfriend who doesn’t quite like their friendship. The tension between all three leads to violence.

At the heart of this anthology, which on occasion looks like the work of talented student filmmakers, is the Nigerian concept of the spiritual and how it manifests in the lives of ordinary people. Unlike the America Hollywood often puts on the screen which mostly has a relationship with the spiritual that shows up as horror (in films like Rosemary’s Baby or Evil Dead) or as fantastic (as in any number of fantasy films) or as mythic-comic (as in Marvel’s Thor series), Nigerian cinema has never really separated the physical and spiritual.

Full Review

LOOKING AT AFRICA (Continued)

the first homegrown Nigerian director to show competitively at the storied American festival. It is cause for applause.

Although it has its own politics with the continent, Europe has long been more welcoming to African auteurs than the U S. It surely could do better, but it continues to be important to, at a minimum, a slice of African cinema. In the Netherlands last year, one of the standout documentaries at IDFA was Lena Ndiaye’s Money, Freedom, A Story of CFA Franc, a critique of the weird financial system that puts a group of African countries under the thumb of France. Because of the urgency of the film’s argument, Money, Freedom offers more than the Western Hemisphere’s fetish for Africa’s peculiar politics, long-lasting poverty, and brutish violence. In other words, where is the joy?

You won’t really find it in Rafiki Fariala’s We Students, a documentary that follows a group of students from the Central Africa Republic. It’s about young people who should maybe be basking in their youth but if that was the story, would it receive a Berlinale screening? Its serious social concerns are all valid, but so is the evolution of the group’s interpersonal relationships as the students grow. The framing, though, is mostly about corruption and the bleak prospects facing the country’s youth.

Fortunately, the light-hearted South African film Daryn’s Gym about competing gym businesses

showed at Locarno. Ery Claver’s Our Lady of the Chinese Shop is political but goes about its story in a rather unusual manner, which puts beyond the strictures imposed by the festival-complex-forAfrican-cinema.

No one, though, should consider two trees as sufficient for a forest. More films in that spirit and perhaps from the sub-Sahara would have to show in the West to change the sentiment. This is not to say that politics hasn’t earned its place. It has but the bias can be quietly overwhelming if you care to look.

And yet, in a time when migration is front page news, how can anyone escape the politics of race and inequality? The award-winning Saint Omer tells a story of a Senegalese woman in France with the politics that the protagonist’s situation deserves. You could say that the question posed by the film’s plot is impossible to escape for Africa, Africans, and anyone contemplating the continent and its countries today: What happens to an African immigrant in the West? A slight inversion of that question requires its own investigation. What happens when those who leave their home for years return? In the documentary Golden Land, which screened at Thessaloniki and was directed by a non-African, a man returns to his birth place after learning about the natural resources beneath the land of his ancestors in Somaliland. Politics ensue and, although unexplored, there is potential for conflict, the sort that can ignite violence and engulf a region.

All these films showcase a continent with ambitious filmmakers seeking audiences outside of their countries. The stories they tell are unique but accessible even to outsiders. There are more such stories, and other filmmakers from Africa are making or willing to make films from these stories. The yetto-be-answered question is this: Are outsiders willing to see films from African filmmakers, especially when they go beyond preconceived narratives?

JUJU STORIES

MONEY, FREEDOM, A STORY OF CFA FRANC

non-initiates a peek behind the curtain.

For anyone interested in the relationship between France and some of its former colonies, Lena Ndiaye’s documentary is a mustscreen. After its bow at IDFA, it should have no problems finding other festivals across Europe. TV networks might also want to look into acquiring a documentary that rewards multiple viewings, packed as it is with in-depth research into that most important entity, money.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, November 16, 2022

In one of the early scenes of Money, Freedom, a Story of CFA Franc, a speaker says that the financial system has been made difficult to understand but yet has

a power so extensive it is kind of supernatural. It’s hard if not impossible to disagree with that assertion. And yet, from time to time, something happens to give

It should probably come as no surprise that money in countries formerly under the control of colonial powers is linked to those old empires. But whereas some have broken those chains, others, for some reason, have not. To get us through why this has been harmful for those countries yet to be weaned, Full Review

VERDICT: Lena Ndiaye's documentary may be the most important contemporary document on Francophone Africa's malignant economic relations with France.

SAINT OMER

VERDICT: Alice Diop’s superb fiction debut is a marvel of control and depth, using the trial of a Senegalese woman guilty of killing her infant to honestly explore the complexities of motherhood while foregrounding it all within France’s racist currents.

Jay Weissberg, September 7, 2022

Issues surrounding motherhood are so charged that it’s exceedingly rare to find a treatment that delves into the darker currents so nonjudgmentally: the fears of expectant mothers, informed by memories of their own imperfect maters, the notion that

you’re forever linked at the cellular level to another being, with all the beauty and terror this implies. That’s a large part of Alice Diop’s extraordinary first fiction feature, though it also feels limiting to reduce such a complex, 360-degree film into one broad concept. Saint Omer takes a simple court procedural format – a Senegalese woman in France is on trial for drowning her infant – and ever so slowly builds it into an overwhelming rumination on motherhood and racial expectations, not via the usual showy courtroom drama, which is all talk, but through silences and gazes as well as words.

Diop’s documentary We challenged audiences to recognize the way people of color are unconsciously perceived in France (and by extension, Europe and the U.S.), where the urge to qualify descriptions, such as “articulate black woman” or “well-dressed black man” reveal a smothering blanket of racism that impacts daily lives. Saint Omer, based on the real trial of Fabienne Kabou, brilliantly channels this constant undercurrent throughout the clean, rigidly structured script, using the original case to interrogate perception, truth and the complex binds of motherhood. Full Review

DARYN’S GYM

VERDICT: Brett Michael Innes' third film, set mostly at a gym in Johannesburg, goes down easy and would be fun for the family as long as you keep the kids away.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, January 27, 2022 There’s something a bit wrongfooted about Daryn’s Gym from South African director Brett Michael Innes. It concerns a corporate battle between gyms across the street from each other. One is run by a man and the other by a woman. And if that isn’t quite politically charged enough, the former is of mixed race and the other is a black woman. That they are in a contest, no matter its fictional nature, would be a tricky thing to manoeuvre in many countries; in South Africa, it has explosive potential. So it is a bit of a surprise that, somehow, the country’s larger racial issues do not show up overtly. It’s a relief in some ways, but it is also easy to see how it can be fashioned as criticism. Innes, who is also the screenwriter, navigates the potential explosiveness of his material by relegating the political aspects so far, they’re offscreen. In

place of the politics, he plays the comedy to absurdist levels. There is a scripture-quoting beefcake (Sivuyile Ngesi) who loves Jesus for purely religious reasons and beyond. “His muscle to fat ratio in those old Renaissance photos is inspirational. Hashtag goals,” he says. There is a gym staffer (William Harding) who “milks prostates”. And, of course, when someone gets tasered, he pees on himself.

The titular character (Clifford Joshua Young) is thirdgeneration in a line of gym owners. He isn’t quite a cutthroat businessman. He isn’t a gym rat either. So when the multinational Starz Fitness Centre shows up on the other side of the road, its killer CEO, Funeka Ndlovu (Hlubi Mboya), figures it’ll be easy to get the competition to roll over and die.

For his part, Daryn is struggling under the weight of his family’s legacy. He is aware the business is failing. But his attempts at raising revenue are rather laughable he drives a taxi and has started a massage parlour and a car wash. We see him manually reset a customer’s rising erection. In other words, Funeka isn’t exactly wrong about the rival business. Nonetheless, an initial offer to buy Miller and Sons fails. What’s left to do but try some good ol’ fashion underhand moves?

The style used is faux-documentary and reality TV. Viewers are shown everything, including analyses of various situations by the characters, but the characters themselves do not quite know everything about each other. Their cluelessness is a source of humour, but the comedy mainly comes from the characters and their lines. Innes is a novelist who has chosen a style that works quite well for a text-first director. Full Review

OUR LADY OF THE CHINESE SHOP

VERDICT: Complex and a bit obscure, Ery Claver's directing debut is a clever contemplation of religion, power, and politics in Angola.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, August 11, 2022

The team behind the Angolan production Air Conditioning, which was well-received internationally, is back on the festival circuit with Our Lady of the Chinese Shop, premiering at the Locarno Film Festival. Producer Jorge Cohen is responsible for both films and Ery Claver, who co-wrote Air Conditioning, is the writer and director of the current film.

Our Lady of the Chinese Shop tells overlapping and non-chronological stories across chapters. There is a couple consisting of a seriously ill man, Bessa (David Caracol), and his grieving wife, Domingas (Claudia Pucuta). There is a young man who had loved their daughter; there’s his father, Man Pelle (a well-cast Divino Salvador). There is a young man with violence on his mind wandering Luanda, Angola’s capital city and the setting of these stories. There is a Chinese merchant whose business is one of the fulcrums of the plot. And there is a Chinese narrator who speaks in a mixture of poetry and anthropology about Angolan society although each of the subplots and each of the film’s characters, in their own way, make a statement about the country.

At this point, a warning is fair: the politics of Claver’s film is complex but relatively easy to grasp; it’s hard to say the same for the synopsis, especially as key information is withheld until very late. This probably means that while Our Lady of the Chinese Shop might attract a larger audience than Air Conditioning, members of that audience will have to be attentive and willing to sit through the film’s rather dry and obscure opening moments. If the idea is for the visuals to, at first, reflect the drudgery in Domingas’s chores and the sickly immobility of Bessa, it does that, but it’s a choice that keeps the viewer at arm’s length.

Full Review

Pixel Ray Studios to Develop Studio in West Africa

DFM 2023 Call for Projects in Development

Chaperone Videos from Moonlighting Co.

Ask any South African producer which crew they call first. Right up there with the Art Director, DP and other key crew are the chaperones.

The National Film Authority of Ghana signed a landmark partnership agreement with Pixel Ray Studios LLC which will lead to the construction of a full-service world class film studio in West Africa.

The agreement plans for constructing an estimated 150,000 square feet of production space including 10 sound stages on over 200 acres of property in Ghana. The multi-use facility will include state-of-the-art production space and equipment, post- production suites with globally trained and locally based crew to serve all production needs.

The establishment of Pixel Ray Studios in Ghana is a testament to the company’s expansive experience in production, distribution, and entertainment.

Pixel Ray founders include entertainment entrepreneur Audu Maikori, ESQ (Founder, Chocolate City Group), Franklin“Twizz” David (Chairman, Twizz Talent Management), Ojoma Ochai (Managing Partner of The Creative Economy Practice at CcHUB), and Hollywood Production & Development Executive Danielle Johnson.

The Durban FilmMart (DFMI) has opened the various call for live action projects in development for the 14th annual Durban FilmMart.

The annual Durban FilmMart is a Pan-African finance and coproduction market designed to create partnerships and further the development and production of African cinema, the DFM was named in UNESCO’s 2021 Film Trends in Africa Report as ‘the continent’s best film market’. The next edition of the Durban FilmMart will return fully as an in person event in Durban, South Africa in July 2023.

“Over the last 13 years, projects pitched at DFM have attracted attention from both the local and international film industry, DFM Alumni projects continue to have success on both small and big screens,” says Magdalene Reddy, General Manager for the Durban FilmMart Institute. “We are committed to providing filmmakers with a platform which gives access and creates opportunity for growth.”

Click here for details

What does a chaperone do? Let’s start with tour-guide, driver, friend, butler, production assistant, personal shopper, therapist, safespace, production liaison, surf instructor, precision driver… slightly more than the oft-misconstrued assumption of being just a drive

Moonlight Co. offers a series of intimate short films, Up Close and Personal with our chaperones.

Moonlighting Films is a leading film production company in Africa.

WE STUDENTS

VERDICT: Rafiki Fariala's history-making film shifts to a more intimate story towards its end, which one wishes he had pursued from the start.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, February 11, 2022

“Corruption over here, corruption over there,” says a young man at the start of the documentary We, Students! (Nous, Etudiants!). It is a line that can be used for nearly every country in Africa. In Rafiki Fariala‘s film, the country is Central African Republic. But change the country to any other one in subSaharan Africa and the statement would likely still apply.

The documentary follows some students at the University of Bangui, the country’s capital city. We see them express their displeasure at what the future holds, their admission into university being an indication of their personal ambition. But they can see that out there in the world and even while in school, their country doesn’t care, an indifference they attribute to the lack of youth representation in leadership. What passes as the film’s soundtrack which in true no-budget style, is sung by one of the film’s subjects partly on camera indicts the aging leadership. (President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, 64, has been prime minister before.)

We see the students at their classrooms, at their hostels, with their lovers, and all of these scenes are united by an aesthetic of paucity. It is one sign that the documentary’s subjects are not the offspring of the elite. And if you can’t tell just by looking, the soundtrack plainly states that the children of the elite are not to be found at their university. Asked what is needed to overcome their problems, a lecturer says they have to take initiative, otherwise they would graduate into just “hanging around”.

VERDICT: Following a man from Somaliland who journeys from Finland back to the country of his birth, Inka Achte’s documentary is engaging and often entertaining with an unexplored darkness lodged within its heart.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, March 16, 2022

The story told in Inka Achte’s Golden Land could launch a thousand thrillers. A man receives a call from his uncle concerning a group of Chinese investors who are offering half a million dollars for his ancestral land. It turns out that beneath the land are gems, which immediately suggests two options: sell to the Chinese for less than its worth or do the mining yourself. Handsomely shot by Jarkko M. Virtanen, the documentary will please festivals, fit in the curriculum of certain universities, and should end up spurring discussions in European homes with TVs.

Mustafe, the man who gets the phone call, lives in Finland and receives his uncle’s call from East Africa, which Mustafe fled as a child during one of the many wars that have plagued the Horn of Africa. An initial solo inspection proves that his ancestor’s land is indeed super-valuable and, months later, Mustafe arrives with his family. He quickly learns that nothing with so much money at stake is ever straightforward.

That lesson splits the Golden Land in two: Mustafe’s negotiations with the state, and his children’s navigation of a new place. The latter gives an insight into the ordinary differences between Finland and Somaliland; it also gives the project’s supporting character Jasmin, one of Mustafe’s daughters, an exquisite opportunity to shine. The filmmakers rightly elect her as the one child through whom mundane differences will be conveyed. Full Review

FATHER’S DAY

VERDICT: Through a triptych of stories, Kivu Ruhorahoza offers a critique of masculinity and patriarchy in his most accessible film to date.

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, February 15, 2022

Back in 2015, around the time his second feature film came out, Kivu Ruhorahoza carried around a very self-conscious director’s statement consisting of ten points. One of them read in part, “Am I afraid of winning the Most Pretentious Film Award?”

Well, if anyone was going to receive that award, it might very well have been the Rwandan filmmaker, whose Things of the Aimless Wanderer was about as impenetrable as its title. Luckily for the many people who thought his willfully obscure film obscured a remarkable talent, that aspect of his work has been tempered over the years as can be seen in his new film, Father’s Day, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

It’s not like he has abandoned all his quirks. The new film, like his sophomore feature, is again a collection of three tales which intersect narratively and surprise thematically. The title hints at the writerdirector’s intentions, which in his trademark style are hardly straightforward. Yes, all three stories have fathers in them, but none exactly calls for their celebration. One father is chronically ill, one is bereaved, one is a thief. These are fathers chiefly in a biological sense, although the bereaved dad’s status could be questioned.

The film opens with kids. One throws pebbles into a muddy stream, a few others skate. In the next scene, the pebble-throwing kid loosens the bolts from a truck’s tyre and heads into the arms of a man we later learn is his hustler father. Full Review

AWARDS clips

Cesar Awards Announce Presenters

The Academy of Film Arts and Techniques and CANAL+, coexecutive producer and exclusive broadcaster of the 48th César Ceremony, are pleased to announce that Leïla Bekhti, Jérôme Commandeur, Jamel Debbouze, Léa Drucker, Eye Haïdara, Alex Lutz, Raphaël Personnaz and Ahmed Sylla will present the next César Ceremony, on Friday Next February 24 live from Olympia.

love of cinema and celebrate the duration of this great event, those who made it shine this year.

The artistic direction of the ceremony will be provided by the director Éric Lartigau.

The Ceremony will be broadcast on Friday, February 24 on CANAL+, live and exclusively from Olympia, and will also be available on myCANAL.

SAG Award Nominations

A collegial and joyful presentation in support of cinematographic creation, a collective mobilization at the service of a renewed ceremony that will highlight the diversity and richness of cinema in France.

Artists, Masters and Mistresses of Ceremony, who will share their

Jérôme Commandeur

Leïla Bekhti