Africa Is a Country

The 19th New York African Film Festival: ‘Playing Warriors’

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The 19th New York African Film Festival: ‘Playing Warriors’

By
Elliot Ross

It’s not hard to see why Rumbi Katedza’s first feature has been described as a Zimbabwean ‘Sex and the City’. Four high-flying twenty-something women spend a good chunk of the movie hanging out in trendy Harare bars talking sex, dating, and marriage. There’s kissing, laughing, gossiping and some great outfits. Luckily, unlike the HBO series, there’s no annoying voiceover offering throwaway insights every five scenes. Katedza’s heroine Nyarai (Kudzai Sevenzo) is no Carrie Bradshaw. She’s cleverer, sharper, and when it comes to the crunch she is strong enough not to need the affirmation of men to feel good about herself. “Men use tradition when it suits them,” she tells her marriage-obsessed mother.

‘Playing Warriors’ is about young urbanites grappling with a traditional way of life that they can neither understand nor escape, a culture they belong to yet feel more and more distant from. Nyarai has hilarious, Flintstones-esque, daydreams of pre-colonial village life, and protests, “All they want to hear is that we’re barefoot, pregnant and married!”

Eight years in the making, Katedza (who is also behind the site ZimbabweFilm.com) has written a warm and witty film. There are tears as well as giggles, but you’re never too far away from a snogging couple falling off a bed or a jaw-dropping demonstration of male vanity to lighten things up. If there’s a sequel or a series to follow this then the folks at Shuga had better watch out: they’ve got competition, and it’s funny.

[vimeo 30721581 w=500 h=357]

‘Playing Warriors’ plays on Sunday, April 15, at 4pm at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.

* Africa is a Country will review films from the 19th New York African Film Festival (April 11-17) over the next few days.  Also come to the two panels on “Cinema and Propaganda” which we are co-presenting with the Festival on Saturday, April 14, at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan.

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.