In 2012, Focus World, an offshoot of Focus Features, released the second group of films produced with the support of Africa First, an initiative created to foster young filmmakers in the early stages of their cinematic careers. A yearly competition, Africa First is open to filmmakers “of African nationality and residence.” Five winners receive $10,000 each toward the preproduction, production, and postproduction costs of a short film as well as mentoring and a “summit” with the advisory board in New York City. The winners featured in Volume Two were selected in 2009 and the films, many of which have won prizes at film festivals in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America, were completed by 2011. Although Volume One was released on DVD, this new collection of films is available in North America only via the streaming video service Hulu, for free viewing with advertisements or, upon subscription to Hulu Plus, without ads. Like its predecessor, Volume Two attests to the vibrancy of African cinema today, with an entertaining and thought-provoking range of genres, film styles, and approaches to representing Africa on screen.
Rungano Nyoni’s Mwansa the Great tells the story of three children: Mwansa, who is eight years old; his older sister, Shula; and his younger sister, Tipa. They live in a small village outside of Lusaka, Zambia, with their mother; their father has recently died. All of the film’s characters speak exclusively in Bemba, except when they invoke the English nicknames given to the two older children by their father, “Mwansa the Great” and “Shula the Princess.” The film opens with Shula and Tipa playing dress-up and having a tea party, red lipstick smeared on their lips and cheeks. We next see Mwansa in the red cape and leopard headband he wears throughout the film, hunting a lion.
Using an innovative technique with echoes of Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Nyoni has two actors playing the role of Mwansa and two playing the role of Shula, one each as the young children they are and the other as the adults they imagine themselves to be in their games. Taking further advantage of film’s ability to confuse levels of reality, Nyoni shows us the objects they use in these games both from within and without; we see both what the children imagine and what actually exists. The lion being hunted by a seemingly grown-up Mwansa turns out to be a cat. A toy car suddenly becomes large enough for five children to ride in, with Mwansa at the steering wheel. Attempting to spear the “lion,” Mwansa breaks his sister’s doll, made by their late father out of what the children call “magic mud.” He promises to make her a new one, and they head off to the source of the mud, the mine where their father had worked. Turned back by guards, Mwansa sneaks in, only to be chased by dogs. He tries to use his cape to fly away, and amazingly for him and for us, he at last succeeds; we see for the first time the child and adult Mansas together, the elder holding the younger up in the air to help him escape.
Umkhungo (The Gift), directed by Matthew Jankes, is set in Hillbrow, a slum in urban Johannesburg. The film’s South African distributor, Mannequin Pictures, claims that the film “chronicles the rise of an African superhero,” and Umkhungo in this regard has an interesting kinship with Mwansa the Great. In both films a young male hero uses supernatural powers to triumph in a life-threatening situation. Nyoni shows Mwansa’s powers to be a figment of the boy’s imagination, and her triumphal ending belongs to the realm of the fantastic. Jankes’s film, however, is an innovative blend of gritty realism and science fiction in which the powers of his boy hero, Themba, are never questioned.
Umkhungo begins with Themba, bloody tears streaking his face, being hidden by his mother in a wardrobe. We later learn that from this wardrobe he will watch his father beat his mother to death. A petty criminal named Mthunzi sneaks into the building to see the crime scene before the police or the neighbors arrive. He takes Themba in, at first with plans to sell the child and later with the desire to protect him. During his first night in Mthunzi’s apartment, Themba awakes alone in the middle of the night, again bleeding from his eyes. A sudden wind blows the door shut, keeping Mthunzi out, and the radio turns itself on. In this moment, reminiscent of Poltergeist (1982) and more recent supernatural horror films, Themba rises from his mattress. A mysterious force leads him to pull up several floorboards, under which he finds a pocketwatch and some money hidden by Mthunzi.
Themba’s uncle, who believes the boy is cursed, is pursuing him in order to “put him back into a cage.” Yet the nature of Themba’s special powers remains mysterious throughout the film. Mthunzi takes him to an isangoma, or traditional healer and medium, who tells the boy not to be afraid since the world is speaking through him. Mthunzi confides in Themba that his pocketwatch belonged to his younger brother, who disappeared as a child. Themba’s visions lead Mthunzi to discover his brother’s fate and confess his feelings of guilt about what happened to him. The film concludes with Themba’s voice-over attesting to the burden that he and others like him must carry. If such a group of boy-superheroes did exist, they might be charged with the task of transforming the poverty and prejudice that has shaped Themba’s life.
Daouda Coulibaly’s Tinye So (The House of Truth) starts with an intertitle that exhorts the spectator to “Heed things, rather than beings” (citing Birago Diop’s 1948 poem “Souffles”). The film is divided into sections, each preceded by a Bambara ideogram and message, such as “Hear the water’s voice.” The story begins with a young boy named Ibou whose mother sends him to buy charcoal at the market. When Ibou asks for charbon, the elder vendor encourages him to use the word in “our beautiful language” instead. The two commence a witty discussion about the respective worth of the Bambara and French languages and, eventually, the fate of African immigrants in France. Ibou asserts that French will be useful to him since he won’t stay “here” forever, and the merchant replies that if he ever gets to go “over there” he will only need to know one word, balai, or broom. Ibou, angry at this prediction that he could be nothing but a street-sweeper in France, gets his revenge by asking how to say “Internet” in Bambara. Coulibaly breaks the narrative here and at several other moments to cut to a song whose lyrics and accompanying images reinforce the themes of the film: in this case, that many Malians prefer a “shimmering foreign tongue” to their own tales and legends.
Coulibaly later introduces the character of Ayoub, a man who is both wise and mad and who complains that people no longer listen to their elders. His story, an allegory of the French colonization of West Africa, is told as a marionette show. Ayoub’s mother was mistreated by a white man, and he was born after the white man was chased out of the country. But postcolonial Africa is no paradise; a man who has listened to the story of Ayoub’s life laughs and suggests going to check out the girls at a local bar. When he stands up his stack of flyers is blown away by the wind, and we learn that he is “the candidate of change.”
The central character in Stephen Abbott’s Dirty Laundry never speaks and is given the name of Roger only in the film’s screenplay. A white man in a Che Guevara shirt enters a deserted laundromat in the middle of the night, takes off his clothes, puts on a white bathrobe, and puts his clothes into a washing machine. Our protagonist reads a book and waits for his laundry while various shady characters come and go. A man wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts walks in, fighting with his girlfriend or wife via cellphone in a mixture of English and Zulu. After receiving a call from another woman, he takes some of Roger’s laundry soap, starts the washer, and leaves. An angry man enters and yells at Roger for taking his parking spot. A mysterious man passes along a laundry detergent box with a cassette tape hidden inside and says he expects his money tomorrow. A young couple come in twice, hoping to buy condoms from a machine on the wall but too embarrassed to do so while Roger is there. The appearance of another white man in a white bathrobe, who is looking for the cassette tape in the detergent box, complicates things further. A pointed and amusing portrait of heterogeneous elements of contemporary South African society who cross paths in the most banal of locations, Dirty Laundry can be read against the only overtly political moment in the film, the shot of a sign on the laundromat wall that reads “Don’t forget to separate whites and coloureds.”
If Dirty Laundry is the most entertaining of this collection of films, Matt Bishanga’s A Good Catholic Girl is the weakest. Amina, a young Muslim woman, plans to convert to Catholicism and marry Brian, the young carpenter with whom she is in love. Her father, Hadji Mustafa, has betrothed her to the family’s butcher, a Muslim, whom we see trying to convince Mustafa that he should better control the women in his family. Whereas Amina’s more devout sister argues that Amina should respect and listen to her father, their mother believes that the girls should be allowed to choose their husbands based on love and not religion. Mustafa is ultimately persuaded by his wife to let his daughter follow her heart, but upon hearing this news the butcher rapes, strangles, and kills Amina, after which the police allow Brian to shoot him dead. Amina is clutching a teddy bear for the duration of this rather overwrought concluding scene, which includes long scenes of weeping accompanied by dramatic music. Bishanga takes on the complex conflicts between Muslims and Christians in Uganda as well as the tradition of arranged marriage, but the film’s screenplay and acting do not hold up to the grave importance of its subject matter.
