The London film world (and its media) have been turned to the 2012 Berlinale. As film critics and journalists flock to Germany for the annual festival, complaints about the Teutonic cold are routine, as are the proclamations heralding a new masterpiece of world cinema. This year’s programme featured a few interesting releases by African directors.
Twelve years after ground was first broken on an oil pipeline between Chad and Cameroon, the documentary film, Quel Souvenir explores the impact of this World Bank sponsored project on local communities from inland Chad to the Cameroonian coast. While the World Bank and oil companies like Exxon and Chevron promised local development along the lines of clean drinking water, school buildings and electricity, the filmmakers find displaced farmers, environmental degradation and local communities left in a state of disarray. Demonstrating a “cautionary tale” of a so-called well intentioned development project gone wrong, the film walks the thin line between presenting the talking heads who can speak to the context and politics of the situation, and everyday farmers, fishermen and families that live day to day with the consequences of the project. The film is currently in its final stages of post-production. Last summer I saw a rough cut of the film here New York City and asked the director Danya Abt (DA) if I could interview her. Together with one of the film’s executive producers, Valéry Nodem (VN), they answered my questions. Before we get to the questions and answers, here’s the trailer. [Read more...]
The German writer Norman Ohler described Johannesburg’s Ponte City, Africa’s tallest residential building, thus: “Ponte sums up all the hope, all the wrong ideas of modernism, all the decay, all the craziness of the city. It is a symbolic building, a sort of white whale, it is concrete fear, the tower of Babel, and yet it is strangely beautiful.” A new documentary by Ingrid Martens, Africa Shafted, adds to the wide variety of cultural and artistic interest in Ponte, home to around 4000 people in Hillbrow, on the edge of downtown Johannesburg. The film purports to look at xenophobia through situating itself in the intense and somewhat claustrophobic surrounding of the tower lifts, which link the 52 stories, housing nationalities from all across Africa. In these lifts, the film encounters residents and their feelings toward one another. The trailer does indeed look interesting.
It has recently been announced that Roland Joffe, (Londoner and) director of films The Mission and The Killing Fields has cast Forest Whitaker to play Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his upcoming film. In an adaptation of Michael Ashton’s play inspired by the events at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the film — titled The Archbishop and the Antichrist — imagines a meeting between Tutu and ‘boorish white mass murderer’ Piet Blomfeld. Shadow and Act blog did some digging and found this synopsis of the play, which points toward somewhat banal complications of the TRC already addressed in a variety of other films, such as the questioning of rehabilitative justice instead of punitive justice, the subjective notion of ‘truth’, and redemption and reconciliation for whom exactly?
John Akomfrah’s new film, The Nine Muses, continues the powerful cine-cultural tradition inaugurated by the Black Audio Film Collective in Britain in the early 1980s. Similarly to his earlier films, Akomfrah handles archival footage with a profound sensitivity; he does not interrogate the history of migration through the archive, nor pore over ‘celluloid fossils’, rather, as cultural critic Kodwo Eshun has suggested, Akomfrah delicately weaves an archival assemblage, with the care of ‘midwives handling an archival fragment as tenderly as if it were a premature infant.’ [Read more...]
Rumours are circulating on various Hollywood gossip and film blogs that Stringer Bell also known as Idris Elba — the East London boy made good in Hollywood — is next in line to play Nelson Mandela. Surfing on the mammoth success of his character in The Wire, his relatively popular series Luther on the BBC (but so shocked were we that he actually has an English accent it was difficult to concentrate on the rest), a brief role in Thor and the excited buzz (and fear) of Ridley Scott’s upcoming Alien prequel Prometheus, Elba is rumored to be the chosen one for an ‘official biopic’ of Mandela’s life. If the rumors are true, our beloved Stringer, the towering be-tracksuited crime underboss turned businessman will join a line of famous black actors who have attempted to incarnate the great Mandela. But do they incarnate, or impersonate? Lets have a look at their efforts. [Read more...]
In December, the Global Film Initiative announced ten award winning narrative feature films to represent their Global Lens 2012 series, a collaboration between MoMA and the Global Film Initiative, which will tour the world as a traveling film exhibition. The series aims to coax filmmakers in emerging film communities into action by showcasing the talents of contemporary global filmmakers. The films selected for this years collection come from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Rwanda and Turkey — a truly exciting cross section of recent world cinema output. Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Matière Grise (Grey Matter) was one of the films selected, following a fantastic reception at various film festivals. The first film made by a Rwandan, living in Rwanda, and shot in Kigali, Ruhorahoza’s film premiered at Tribeca in 2011, and portrays life in Rwanda today, merging fantasy and reality through the confused lens of memory and trauma to depict the aftermath of the genocide. [Read more...]
In a recent article in The Guardian, Phil Hoad writes that ‘maverick’ Nigerian director Jeta Amata is perhaps ‘Nollywood’s gift to Hollywood’, for Amata’s recent feature is a Hollywood-friendly big budget epic, delving into the horrific situation in the Niger Delta and the havoc that the oil industry leaves behind. Hoad’s article is a nice survey of Amata’s current status, yet it fails to truly explore how Nollywood could affect a wider cinematic context. Hoad is writing about Amata’s upcoming feature Black November, a gritty epic of oil-fuelled conflict, collusion and unrest, which features an all-star cast, both from Hollywood and Nollywood (Billy Zane, Vivica Fox, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Anne Heche, Hakeen Kae-Kazim and Razaaq Adoti).
During the summer I was interviewed for a new film about how a group of American fans experienced the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, including the qualifying leading up to it. I think I made the cut. The trailer for the film, “Laduma” is now on Youtube and it is hitting the festival circuit (it’s showing tomorrow night in Philadelphia, at a film festival in Pennsylvania next month and I know there’s a New York City screening also lined up in the near future). You can see my man Tony Karon, who co-teaches a regular ‘Global Soccer, Global Politics’ course (Fall 2011 syllabus here) with me at The New School, in the trailer above. Other talking heads interviewed in the film include ESPN’s Bob Ley and Sports Illustrated’s soccer writer Grant Wahl. Here’s the Facebook page for updates.
