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...]
Rwandan film part of prestigious traveling film exhibition
Music Break. Corneille and La Fouine
Kinyarwanda goes online
In January 2011 director Alrick Brown’s feature “Kinyarwanda”–a film about “6 people struggling through the Rwandan genocide”–won Sundance’s award for “World Drama” (that’s a big category, but we’ll move on). In December last year it had a limited release, including here in New York City. I missed the screenings. In most cases films like “Kinyarwanda” would vanish and months later pop up on Netflix with little marketing where, unless someone in the know tells you, you’ll know never see it. Or the filmmakers will do their own guerrilla marketing. But that won’t be needed now as digital rights to “Kinyarwanda” have been snapped up by Snagfilms, which has an online library of more than 3000 films. That means you can order it or see it via Snagfilms’ partners “… Comcast Xfinity, FiOS, DIRECTV, iTunes, Amazon and VUDU.”
Via Shadow and Act.
Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition
You won’t see or hear a more exciting song by a South African rapper this year than Kanyi’s ‘Ingoma’. Produced by Mananz, with Teboho Semela (sister of Ben Sharpa) on violin. From Gugulethu, Cape Town:
‘Nigeria’s own Donald Trump’
MTV Base, the music channel’s African subsidiary carried on satellite TV, have been making these upbeat video features, where a group of upwardly mobile young Africans–most based on the continent–interview leading businesspeople, entertainers and a few public representatives (I spotted Julius Malema and Paul Kagame in the series promo). At the same time the interviewers are also profiled. The videos come in at 20 minutes or so and are sponsored by cell phone company, MTN.
A few are online. The first is an interview with Nigerian business tycoon, Aliko Dangote, who has a reputed net worth of US$13.8 billion and is the 51st richest man in the world. The presenter hypes Dangote as “Nigeria’s own Donald Trump” which is odd since Trump is hardly a successful businessman.
Typecasting Binyavanga Wainaina
By Caitlin Chandler
How do you write about a place that occupies a mythic place in the imagination of outsiders? And how do you write about national and personal identity when identity does not obey the neat idea of nation states and borders?
American novelist William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional Southern community, wrapping his stories in a fragmented language, trying to protect the towns and people he described from being recognizable and known. To write about the American South, which in Faulkner’s time and our own comes wrapped up for non-residents in a set of tropes, produced in Faulker an anxiety of representation he could only remedy through producing an imaginary geography.
Binyavanga Wainaina instead delivers a memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, rooted firmly in the real landscapes of his home.
Slo-mo better than No-mo
Not personally in love with the song, and I get this feeling all the way through that I want to hear the music the dancers are actually moving to, but this is great slow motion footage of “street” dancers in Rwanda and Burundi.
July 1, Burundi, Rwanda and Somalia
The Rwandan Glass Ceiling
The second instalment of Dan Moshenberg’s weekly posts (his first here) on that place where gender, Africa and media collide.–Sean Jacobs
By Dan Moshenberg
Let’s talk about Rwandan women.
Last Friday, June 24, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and her son Arsene Ntahobali, were found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including multiple rapes of Tutsi women and girls. The two were tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, located in Arusha, Tanzania. The ICTR is a United Nations tribunal. Nyiramasuhuko was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was family affairs and women’s development minister in the administration of President Juvenal Habyarimana. By all accounts, Nyiramasuhuko, a Hutu, organized and led massacres, torture and mass rapes of Tutsi women and girls in the border town of Butare.
Nyiramasuhuko is the first woman to be found guilty of genocide by an international tribunal, and the Western news media had a field day: “Rwandan ex-minister becomes first woman convicted of genocide”: “Rwandan woman, a former govt minister, is first female convicted of genocide; son also guilty”. The BBC was particularly enchanted by the killer’s gender: “Rwanda genocide: Verdict due for female former minister”; “Profile: Female Rwandan killer Pauline Nyiramasuhu”. That’s one helluva glass ceiling.
When does being a Rwandan woman matter? When that woman is a killer, a rapist, a torturer, a `monster’. Not when she is an organizer and a healer.
Newt Gingrich goes to Africa
News that New Gingrich and his third wife, Callista, are going on vacation from his campaign to become the next US president in 2o12, reminded us of the time Newt and Callista went to Africa.
In the video, above, Newt talks about how when he was a boy, he wanted to work with the natural world. I had those same dreams. Mine were fueled by watching Richard Attenborough’s “Life on Earth.” But my hopes for the future didn’t include putting the animals into zoos.
Maybe that’s where Newt Gingrich and I went our separate ways.
Gingrich emotes (as much as he’s capable) here about his youthful dreams of becoming a vertebrate paleontologist, or a zoo director. (He’s visited over 95 zoos in the world.)
Perhaps part of a campaign to look less animal and more human, Gingrich and his current wife went on a whirlwind Smithsonian-National Geographic-San Diego Zoo joint trip to Africa that took them from Luxor, Egypt, to Rwanda (where he supposedly “hiked” in the Ruwenzori), the Serengeti (in time to see the annual great migration), Zambia (where his wife, Calista, walked out of the hotel room to shoo away a monkey in order to photograph a giraffe), Mali, “a very poor country,” and finally, Marrakech, which “surprised” them in its comparableness to “Italy” (and therefore a place he would recommend to anyone).
Throughout the interview, Newt can’t help doing the zoo-director-educational-bit: in Madagascar, they “spent time with the lemurs, which are “very early pre-monkeys” that didn’t evolve from their ‘primitive’ state because the island was isolated from the mainland.
In Cape Town, he saw actual people when he went to mass: there, the “Ho-sa community” sang Amazing Grace “in Ho-sa” (we think he means Xhosa). It reminded him of being in Beijing, where they heard the same hymn sung in Chinese. These two experiences culminated in profound thoughts about the “diversity” in the world – though to us, it seems more of an indication of the power that neo-Evangelical Christianity has to flatten diversity.
And finally, it comes out: he and Calista are “fortunate” to be working with “Citizens United” (watch out, the webpage opens to a creepy montage of shooting, explosions, and other war sounds). Citizen’s United landing page states that it “seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty with security,” and seems to misuse French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville’s admiring-yet-wry critique of “American Exceptionalism.” In Newt and Calista’s hands, de Tocqueville’s analysis is wholly laudatory: America, as a ”new republic,” is a place where one’s social standing has no bearing on one’s potential, but a place where “liberty, equality, individualism, and laissez-faire economics defined the ‘American Creed,’” in which the American people rise “to great challenges — sometimes out of necessity but often out of the determination to create a better future.”
Values that couldn’t be more “African.”
