A programme of films on and from Africa, designed to raise questions about the nature and variety of documentary film (including more experimental artists’ videos and animation) and the controversial roles assigned to and adopted by both the filmmaker and his/her subjects.
A captivating film about Mali’s ancient culture, and its position in society today. Filmed with a Malian crew, cut to the beat of Malian popular music, the film offers an insightful, alluring mosaic of Malian perspectives on their culture. The internationally known singer, Salif Keita, opens and closes the film with musical and spoken statements of its themes.
An examination of the historic mud architecture and the individuals in Djenne who sustain it. Blending genres, this film incudes documentary, scripted narrative, and commentary by the players and others.
In the summer of 2003, the lengthy power struggle between the rebel movement Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and government leader Charles Taylor (indicted by the United Nations for crimes against humanity) reaches its climax with the imminent capture of the Liberian capital Monrovia… Co-Directors Stack and Brabazon film on both sides of the conflict. Stack is in Monrovia, where he interviews Taylor, follows inhabitants (including a teacher and the archbishop) and films in the hospital and the sports stadium with thirty thousand refugees, while more and more bullets whiz past his ears. Brabazon is with the rebels, mainly boys, on their way to Monrovia. With occasionally shocking images, he captures the seizure of Monrovia, the fighting and pillaging, from up-close.
In an award-winning film, Siopis combines spliced sequences of home movies from her mother shot in the 1950s and 1960s in South Africa with sound and visual text, to tell an elemental story of displacement and migration. Whilst the story is of Siopis’ maternal grandmother’s literal and emotional journeys between Greece and South Africa in the early part of the 20th century, the film has wider resonance as an allegory of globalisation and exile.
Law and Freedom explores controversial court cases which abolished the death penalty, decriminalised sex between men, established the rights to housing, health and just administrative action. Narrated and directed by Zackie Achmat, Law and Freedom brings to light the people who made possible these cases which have dramatically affected the lives of all South Africans. It’s a Nice Country! also explores the case of the Treatment Action Campaign for the use of antiretrovirals to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV. In this personal reading of the ‘Nevirpine case’, Zackie Achmat pays tribute to TAC members who through their work of education and community mobilisation used the Constitution to achieve access to life-saving treatment – ensuring that we have, as one member comments, ‘A nice country!’.
This short drawn film explores (neo)colonialism as a form of cannibal consumption. The setting is the dinner table and after-dinner board-game. The diners and the players are the busts of Leopold 11 and the ‘pioneers’ who colonised the Congo and who are still commemorated in the Royal Museum of Central Africa at Tervuren in Belgium.
A Royal Hunger has a dual purpose, to question the manner in which Europeans appropriate images of Africans to market products that have no (direct) relation to Africa, and to challenge the narratives of philanthropy and altruism of the Royal Museum of Central Africa.
The north Katanga was one of the richest regions in the Democratic Republic of Congo before the war. During the five years of war people were starving and suffering of malnutrition. The film is a personal journey into an area which is potentially very rich, but suffering from a completely inhuman disease – malnutrition.