Africa in focus
Will feature award-winning films from across Africa this month. Meet a trailblazing activist and singer and other influential women.
FROM movies about young democracies to documentaries about women’s football, this month’s AfriDocs programme features a collection of films that have taken top honours at festivals around in the world, including The Tribeca Film Festival, Film Festival Vues d’En Face, France, and the Dutch Film Awards. The weekly series airs on DStv Channel 190 and GoTV on Thursdays at 7.55pm, with repeats on Sundays.
On August 13, Camilla Nielsson’s The Democrats is set in a politically unstable Zimbabwe, where a new constitution is being put together by the ruling party of strongman Robert Mugabe and a divided opposition. Various political, local and personal interests are bogging the process down. The film was named best documentary feature at Tribeca 2015.
Also featuring will be Lotte Manicom’s The Cessation, which was awarded the title of Best South African Documentary Short Film at the Jozi Film Festival this year. This short documentary follows three members of the Angolan diaspora in Cape Town and maps the impact of the Angolan Cessation, which was announced by the South African government in 2013 and effectively ends the Angolan diaspora’s refugee status in South Africa from 2015.
Tune in on August 20 for Hélène Harder’s Ladies Turn. In 2009, in Senegal, where “football is king”, a women’s football street tournament is organised for the first time by the association Ladies’ Turn. Despite the passionate commitment of Seyni, the former captain of the women’s national team, and of the women and men that fight at her side, the game is far from won.
Defying taboos and prejudices, the women play on the fields for a growing audience. Will they be allowed to go all the way and play the game they love? Ladies Turn was voted Best Documentary Film at the Festival Vues d’En Face in 2013.
Then, also from Senegal, Maria Luisa Gambale, Gloria Bremer and Steven Lawrence’s Sarabah tells the story of Sister Fa, a trailblazing Senegalese singer and activist on the rise. The first successful female rapper in Dakar’s fiercely competitive hip hop scene, Sister Fa fights to stop the practice of female genital cutting. The film garnered the jury prize at the Festival du Film Humanitaire in Paris in 2013.
On August 27 discover the blend of cultures, sounds and rhthms that make up Papa Wemba’s music, which transcends borders and nationalities. The singer, who spends half his time in Paris and half in Kinshasa, is also a symbolic figure for the young people of Zaire.
Also screening that night is Pascal Signolet’s Angelique Kidjo: The Amazon. It is a sensual, impressionist portrait of Angélique Kidjo, known as “the African Piaf”, and follows her on her first return to Benin in 13 years.
Judy Kibinge’s 12-minute Kenyan short film, Coming of Age, takes us through the development of Kenyan democracy through the eyes of a young girl. It deals with the quirky optimism that came with independence from colonialism, then the dark days as an adolescent under dictatorship, and now the new promise of multi-party democracy.
For the full schedule, see www.afridocs.net, follow @Afri_Docs on Twitter