Category: Africa in Motion

The assassination of Marielle Franco mobilised an entire generation of Black women into Brazilian politics. From street demonstrations to the ballot box, Seeds: Black Women to the Front follows the journeys of women who stand in the 2018 election.

The murder of Marielle Franco sent a message loud and clear: “If you are a Black woman who fights for Black women, you will be killed”. The intention was to silence them, but instead it got the opposite reaction. Black women took to the streets to make their voices heard, and when election time came, there was a 93% increase in Black women volunteering to stand for political office.

Marielle’s death also brought home just how far Brazil was tipping into fascism under Bolsenaro. There was a need to present anti-fascist candidates across the board. If the rise of the far right went unchallenged, there soon might be no democracy left to defend.

Seeds is a great documentary for showing a wide diversity of women who stand, from different parties, from different backgrounds, trans women, religious women, working class and educated women, women from favelas. They stand on an anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-queerphobic platform.

Come ups and downs, come win or lose, there is no going back, they have the inspiration and the confidence, they understand their worth and importance of their voice. This is Marielle’s legacy.

The Colonel’s Stray Dogs refers the opponents of Gaddafi who went into exile, one of which was the filmmaker’s father. For 40 years Ashur Shamis’s life revolved around the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, but in the Libya that has emerged he still has no place, and no way to return home. In the aftermath of the accomplishment and destruction of his dream, his son sits him down to take an honest accounting of his life.

When Colonel Gaddafi took power in a military coup in 1969, Ashur was an idealistic young man. He was attracted to the pan-Arabic teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was an outspoken activist, and when it was clear that this would cost him his life, he fled to Britain.

Khalid, his son, was born in the leafy suburbs of London. He grew up like any other kid on his street and all he knew of Libya is that it is where his dad is from. In some ways there is a resentment there, that they have such a happy home life in London, but his father is constantly living in Libya, in his thoughts, in his work, in what he gives his time and energy to.

What has his father been doing all these years? As part of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, he mostly handled press interviews, denouncing the dictatorship, talking about human rights abuses. He’s smart, articulate and likeable. He did all he could to bring media attention to the crimes of Gaddafi.

But the NFSL wasn’t just a talking shop, and their tactics included violent resistance. They armed and trained paramilitary forces to try to overthrow Gaddafi. And here we get into the more questionable of his father’s actions. Because these groups were cobbled together from idealistic young men, armed with whatever they could find the money for, and trained in whatever country also had reason to hate Gaddafi and would allow them to play soldier in their backyard. They launch a number of attacks, with Ashur doing the drumbeat of propaganda from afar, and they are slaughtered. The media characterises them as suicide missions.

Khalid speaks to his mother in the kitchen while his father naps. “He was an arms dealer.” “He was not an arms dealer!” protests his mother, who seems to have stayed willfully ignorant of her husband’s activities, “Don’t be stupid!” He asks her, “Do you think he was a terrorist?” and she laughs at the question. There seems to have been a lack of critical examination of his actions during those times.

Gaddafi was such a monster of an enemy that any countermeasure seemed justified. But they sent those men to their deaths, in missions that impartial observers could clearly see had no chance of succeeding. Their judgement was clouded, by their underestimation of the stability of Gaddafi’s regime, by their distance from the reality on the ground, by their own desperation to succeed and go home. And perhaps their judgement was clouded for them, as Ashur eventually left the Front and gave up violent action when he felt they were all simply being used as pawns by the CIA.

As the years in exile grew into decades, Ashur’s hope came and went in ebbs and flows, and when he still tried to help it was again, mostly through speaking in the media. Satellite tv and the internet provided new opportunities for Libyans to get news from beyond state propaganda.

And then the Arab Spring came. Which no one saw coming. Least of all Ashur. And it was with absolute delight that he greeted the deposition and death of Gaddafi. He returned home to see his family and take up a role in the formation of a new government. And what happened?

He was irrelevant. He hadn’t been in the country for almost half a century. He knew no one on the ground. He didn’t understand the dynamics and nuances of power he was walking into. And the Libya he had envisioned it to be, it no longer was any more. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had believed that if they got rid of Gadaffi, the Libya of 1969 would return. That they would not simply depose him, but undo him.

The Colonel’s Stray Dogs is about the dislocation of exile experience, of the double-vision that occurs, and the questionable decisions that can be made when you live more for your dreams than for your reality. An absolutely fascinating film about the lives of people you would walk past on leafy suburban streets.

I really wanted to see this but missed it at the Take One Action film festival, so I was so glad to get another opportunity with Africa in Motion. It was well worth the watch.

In the city of Zinder in Niger, is the Kara Kara district, traditionally the home of lepers and pariahs, today it is an area known for its poverty and violence. Going beyond the headlines, this documentary follows the residents of Kara Kara, seeing their lives and their community from their perspective.

With sky-high youth unemployment, cut off from education, and no prospects, young men form gangs, or palais. There they hang out, shoot the shit with their friends and work out. And when I say work out, I mean work out. When everything costs money, working out is the only pastime that is free, and without a job to eat into your time, these guys are stacked. Like, lift a motorbike with your mates on it stacked.

This hypermasculinity compensates for any other societal measurement of success. But it is rare for toxicity not to accompany it, and the palais are no exception. Young men test themselves in street battles, and their bodies as scarred with the blades and makeshift weapons of hand-to-hand fighting. In turn, arrest and prison follows, and the cycle of oppression keeps on spinning.

After the arrest of three of his friends, Siniya Boy tries to find a better way, deciding to try and set up a security firm with the local lads. Given that they’re all young and built like tanks, it seems like a good idea. But when you are poor, every part of every step is difficult. Even sourcing the income for uniforms, clothes and boots, requires cash. So they take up work in a quarry, working by hand breaking rocks with a pick and sledgehammer. Honestly cannae watch, because you see him standing swinging that hammer, wearing flip-flops. Not a steel-toe boot among them, and you just tense up at every swing.

Bawa has already got out of the life. He states plainly that he just couldn’t live with the things he was did. He participated in the street violence, maiming others, and in gang rapes of local women. It is a life he wants to leave behind for good, although he says he is haunted by his memories. He now works as a taxi driver, providing for his family. He tries to do better for his community, and in some sort of amends, he tries to help the women of the red light district, encouraging trafficked children to return to their parents and working to get police attention to the murder of a sex worker.

But even Bawa is still part of the economy of the district that goes hand-in-hand with the gang life. Despite the fact Niger exports billions of dollars of oil every year, in Kara Kara in Zinder, there is a shortage of petrol. The price is too high for the residents, and it is regularly smuggled across the border from Nigeria and sold at half-price. Bawa fills his taxi on such stuff, at roadside stands run by palais members. Here we meet Ramasess.

Ramasess is a genderqueer smuggler who makes night runs to the border, dodging police patrols and customs agents. They have to support their mother and sisters. They describe themselves as hermaphrodite, but this seems less an indication of being intersex as it is an expression of trans non-binary identity. But this means they have the household cares from the female sphere as well as the responsibility accorded to the firstborn son. Ramasess says they wouldn’t be a smuggler if they had a better options. But the fact is it is steady paying work, and there is constant need for cheap petrol.

The thing Ramasess, Bawa, and Siniya Boy all have in common is the feeling that their reality is not acknowledged. That the cops and the border patrols, they all have no answer to the question, “What do you expect me to do?” Because the plans seems to be just starve. There is no employment paying a living wage for dignified work. In this district in this city in this country rich in oil, gold, and minerals, there seems to be no way open for folk to survive.

But this is not simply a bleak documentary on these bleak conditions. It is also an examination of the endless resourcefulness of a generation of young people finding a way to make a life, make a future for themselves. None of them are lying down, all of them are fighting. And as they turn themselves towards paths more beneficial to their community, that fight becomes a fiercer one for the future of Zinder.

An animated short telling the legend of Lwanda Magere, a warrior who was gifted with skin as strong as stone, and the strength of ten men. His achilles heel is his shadow, a secret he keeps hidden from everyone.

As a worthy young warrior he uses his power to protect his people from warring raiders, and feed them from his successful hunts. But the old saying about power is true, and with age his pride grows to arrogance. Will Lwanda heed the advice of his ancestors? Or will he follow a path of hubris?

Great wee film.

The Art of Fallism documents the history of the student protest movements in South Africa which began in 2015, starting with #RhodesMustFall and ending with #TransCapture. It interviews artist-activists, giving their first-hand accounts of the events from their perspectives. Like any movement, there is as much challenge building solidarity within as destroying oppression without.

I think this film manages to cover a wide range of activists’ experiences. The myth of a Black monolith is destroyed as you see women talking about destroying the patriarchy, men from working class neighbourhoods challenging the middle-class environment of campus, trans people tackling the erasure of cissexism and transmisogyny. People are learning from each other as much as they are learning about how to take political action.

And you get these waves as successes embolden the call for yet more radical action. And repositioning as activists look at their praxis and say, “How could we do this better? Who are we excluding? Who are we not representing?” Because none of us are free until we are all free.

And the journey they are on is as much a decolonisation of the mind as the campus. In the structure of dehumanisation of human beings under racist colonialist imperialism, how did that form how we think about gender, queerness, sexuality, disability, the body, and class, as well as race? And within a fight against racism, people who have always been the oppressed begin to see intersectional privileges they hold in relation to others. And the work to do better, to destroy the processes of marginalisation, is how you build the solidarity necessary to achieve your goals.

In some ways this is a joyful film about hope. In some ways this is a brutal film about repression. But I feel this is also a coming of age film, a film about maturing into a more conscientious adult. That the movement was the real education.

It’s also a good film about how art is integral to the most important issues of our lives. From the ability to pay for education, survive state violence, and battle systematic oppression, art is what holds together people and ideas.

This started with a statue of Rhodes. Yes, he was a political statement about the dominant societal ideas of white supremacy, but it was also a work of art. And in that sculpture it managed to convey so much meaning, that is sparked a generation to revolt.

The art that is produced in the wake of its fall will be just as important a cultural legacy. And that is what this film examines – The Art of Fallism.

A Cemetery Of Doves is a short film with no dialogue, following a young gay man as he experiences love and rejection for the first time.

The film begins with the quote, “Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” It then tries to encompass all the emotion of love and loss without dialogue to mediate.

It begins with a young teenage boy and an adult man driving out to a remote location. The boy is in the back, looking nervous, shame-faced, and hesitant. The man’s expression is unreadable in the rear-view mirror. When they stop, the man gets out, unfolds a note from his pocket and reads. In obliquely poetic language, it declares love for a man. As the boy studies the man’s back for any reaction, the man sets his jaw and proceeds to tear the note up, and bury it in the ground.

They drive back in silence, and the rest of the film is the boy thinking back over their relationship and contemplating what comes next. The silence of the film echoes the lack of expression for queer love in their society. You get the feeling the boy doesn’t even have a label like gay through which to understand his feelings. That this is something so unspoken, all he knows is he felt this attachment with such intensity, and knew it must be kept secret for fear of dangerous consequences. His grief, his fear, all are borne in secret, in silence, in isolation.

What I found enigmatic was the man. He must have cared for the boy, because he clearly understood the import of his love letter, and he does not round on him and castigate him with disgust. He clearly knows how dangerous this revelation is, and buries the letter. So despite the rejection, it can be viewed as an act of affection and protection.

Perhaps he was straight. Perhaps he was also gay and the feelings were simply not reciprocated. And perhaps worst of all, the love letter made him realise just how serious the boy’s feelings for him were, and he realised what danger that put him in. Because the violence he would meet with were he discovered to be gay would no doubt increase in ferocity if he was considered to be ‘corrupting’ youths. We are unable to know for sure, because all remains unspoken, because to even acknowledge it carries danger.

A beautiful, mournful, and meditative film.

Absolutely excellent. Outstanding short film.

A dorlis is like an incubus, a evil spirit which enters homes at night and commits sexual attacks upon the inhabitants. Dorlis the film is like a kitchen sink drama, but also a horror movie. Which for women is often the same thing, as the place we are least safe is sometimes our own homes.

The film follows Nora, as she, her mother and sister go to look after her grandfather after a stroke. The first scene is so good at laying out the family dynamic. Nora is having her hair brushed by her mother Laure. Her mother is rough, braiding tightly, yanking on the hair with the brush and her fingers. As Nora’s head is pulled back and forth, she remains silent and stoic, clearly used to the rough treatment, and knowing any complaint will make no difference. Her attention instead is focused on her younger sister Melissa, who is still a little girl, and is watching in fear, knowing she will be next under her mother’s hairbrush. When Melissa’s turn comes, and she shrinks from her mother’s hairbrush, her mum says, “Are you a big girl or not?” Nora then volunteers to finish brushing Melissa’s hair to let her mum get on, and starts to do her sister’s hair gently.

In one simple scene, all the characters and their relationships to one another are established. It’s so identifiable, and domestic, an everyday repetitious chore so familiar it could be overlooked as mechanical, but which the filmmaker imbues with deep and fundamental messages about empathy, bonding, shaming, and silence. It’s clear Nora has internalised the message from her mother – no one gives a fuck how you feel, just be obedient. But she is protective and nurturing of her younger sister.

When the sisters are taken to see their grandfather, from the instant you see Nora’s reaction to him, you know something’s off. He’s been at her.

Laure’s brother is also there with his family, as they get the grandfather situated back at home. The stroke has left him unable to speak or walk unaided. At dinner, Nora’s uncle toasts her grandfather, speaking of him in the warmest and most well-respected terms, of his hard work and sacrifice to his family, of their gratitude for his devotion, while Nora stares at her grandfather in silence. He then announces that Laure will be staying to look after him.

Of course she is. Not that she volunteered. Or even agreed. But you know, both of them have jobs, both of them have children, so of course it makes the most sense if his daughter looks after him, and his son fucks off. Laure even points out that she’s a single parent, while if he stayed, he would be able to share the workload with his wife. He slaps her down, and shames her for shirking her duties.

Laure’s an interesting character. Because on one level you just despise her. She gives no fucks about how her kids feel. She is completely blind to the trauma Nora is experiencing being under the same roof as her grandfather. She frequently dumps her responsibility as a parent onto Nora, leaving her to look after her sister, or her grandfather, or both. And it’s Nora’s denial about her own needs, her sacrifices, that are keeping the family going, functioning. Her watchful eye over her sister, and determination to shield her from harm, makes it feel like she is the parent, not Laure.

And yet from the interaction you see between Laure and her brother, her obvious struggle to balance her financial responsibility to work with her domestic responsibility to care, you see that she is on her own, overwhelmed, and juggling so many demands on her energy. Would she actually be a better mother if she wasn’t exhausted, broke, and constantly worried? And it’s clear that if she asks for help, or expresses need for support, she is shamed, put on a guilt trip, and silenced. Something she is passing down onto her own daughters. She is dealing with the impacts of patriarchy just as Nora is.

Melissa is told by one of her cousins that their grandfather must have got a fright to have caused his stroke. Perhaps he saw a demon or devil up in the trees by the house. Maybe a dorlis.

Unable to speak about her experiences, or explain to Melissa why she is so protective of her in their grandfather’s house, Nora adopts the story of the dorlis. She uses it to convey her sense of dread, horror and fear.

Honestly I could go on for ages about how densely packed and rich this 25 minute film is. Excellent actors give intense performances, and the director captures nuance and emotion skillfully. Really excellent short.

Yerusalem is, as billed, the incredible story of the Ethiopian Jewry. Known to the Ethiopians as ‘Falasha’, a term meaning foreigner, which is now considered derogatory. At one point their struggles are summed up quite succinctly by an activist, “The Falasha problem is really two problems. They are Jewish among the Blacks, and then they are Black among the Jewish whites.”

This is an Israeli documentary, so it is very much from the perspective of looking from the inside of Israel out. And it very much comes to the subject with a viewpoint that all Jews should be united in Israel, and a condemnation of the racism that frequently was the barrier to keeping them out. As an outsider, a non-religious Scot, watching this documentary, this whole thing seems problematic front-to-back. The discrimination the Ethiopian Jews face trying to establish they are in fact Jews, that they are Jewish enough, and that their cultural Judaism is valid when being judged by the European descendant Jewry established in Israel, may seem to the filmmaker as an issue of unjust discrimination within Israeli society towards Black Jews, but to me sees like part and parcel of the wholesale problem of establishing a state based on racial and religious privilege. To me, having to authenticate your race, and have it challenged to the degree of its authenticity, according to a standard set by others, is going to be a fundamental problem when you base nationality upon race.

This is a fascinating documentary, and you don’t need to put a massive pin in your issues with the subject to enjoy the film. There is room to have your own reflections, while still being moved by the plight of the people involved.

I was not familiar with just how long a process it was to patriate the Ethiopian Jews. The pace of the documentary feels quite fast, and when it started, I thought, “Well, we’re going along at a fair clip here”, not realising just how much story there was to fit in.

The story starts as far back as 1950, when Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion refused to bring the Ethiopian Jews to Israel. But by the time the 1970s roll around, there was increased activism among the Jewish diaspora, including the Ethiopian Jewish diaspora. Campaigns against antisemitism run alongside attempts to evacuate victims and political prisoners to the safety of Israel.

But Ethiopia has its own reasons for not wanting to see the Jews go. First, under Haile Selassie, a well-respected leader, he nonetheless had to hold together a nation of dozens of ethnicities and languages. He wasn’t too keen on the example it would set if ethnic groups claimed their racial identity as their nationality rather than Ethiopian.

Then secondly under the Soviet-backed dictatorship of Mengistu, there wasn’t any wish to co-operate with the American ally of Israel. Added to that, the country under Mengistu’s tyranny was in abject chaos, with civil war, famine and genocide.

It became clear in Israel, that either the Ethiopian Jews were evacuated to Israel now, or very soon there would be none left to save. Evocative of the plight of the European Jewry in war-torn, Nazi-destroyed Europe, Mossad began a series of undercover missions to ferry the Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

The story of the their journey is extraordinary. One of suffering, endurance, resourcefulness, and hope. A really fascinating piece of history.

A New Country traces the history of South Africa from the fall of apartheid to present day as it relates to the promise of a Rainbow Nation. When watching Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom, was the promise of that day, of real freedom and a new equality for all in South Africa, was that promise kept? And a quarter of a century later, has South Africa been transformed, and if so, how?

The film interviews various activists, some from the generation who felt they were seeing their hopes realised in 1994 and the founding of democracy, and some from the generation who have come after, known as the ‘Born Frees’. And spoiler – they don’t think South Africa became a haven of racial equality as promised.

Why that came to be is an interesting story, and built intrinsically on the compromises made in the early days of constitution building, and de-apartheidisation. Firstly is just the fundamental myth that we are all sold, that they believed political liberation would lead to economic liberation. Same pal, same. After all if the vote is distributed amongst every person, surely that means power is distributed equally among us all, and wealth can’t fail to follow. Except in reality, that’s not how it works. For reference see [the world]. And because of this, economic reform was not specifically targeted as it should have been.

When it came to the economy, the initial impetus for redistribution fell second to the basic need of getting the economy back on its feet. After years of sanctions abroad as well as strikes and labour actions at home, the economy needed to be kickstarted back to life. This was, yes, for the obvious reasons to deliver the prosperity this bloodless revolution was meant to be about, but also, a necessary signifier of prestige, that a country could be run successfully under Black leadership. However, as the Reconstruction and Development Programme, set up to look into the transfer of economic assets back from the white elite, transitioned into the Growth, Employment and Restribution strategy, it became clear that transfer was simply going to be from one group of white capitalists to a new group of Black capitalists, without the wealth going down the hierarchy at all. The GEAR strategy seemed implemented purely to reassure investors and ensure capital had a comfortable and unchallenged status quo.

In some ways, it feels bad to blame new, idealistic statesmen in South Africa for not being able to make real change in the face of global capitalism. Jesus, all of us all around the world are David to that Goliath, and finding a winning strategy is the question of our era. Yet, it cannot be denied, that if you are asking why the dream of South Africa failed, the answer in large part is because it was sold.

And finally, the national narrative of South Africa about itself was never fully reconciled. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted immunity to those culpable under apartheid in exchange for full and frank disclosure of their crimes, was a noble goal which never really produced the results it set out for.

I mean, I understand why they chose to follow this path instead of going down the Nuremberg route. As someone who supports human rights, the execution of Nazi war criminals never sits right with me, even though no one ever deserved their deaths more. And it’s not as if Nuremberg resulted in a harmonious and cohesive Germany that fully faced up to its past either. So I understand why they would be willing to take a chance on an alternative, even one as abhorrent as that which gave immunity to murderers and torturers.

But it was too steeped in the Christian notion of forgiveness, which I am not a big fan of. I’m not religious but I have Christians in my family, so it is a concept I am familiar with, but it has never felt right to me. I’m all for victims and survivors being able to one day let go of their anger, on their own terms, for their own benefit. But I have found that the Christian notion of forgiveness inflicts a double-burden on those harmed, first to carry the pain of their injury, and then also to carry the duty of forgiveness of the abuser. It denies accountability, and obscures the reality that something done can never be undone. And I see that in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where victims were harmed, then denied justice for the harm, then were only given partial disclosure and insincere apology, and then were denied redress a second time, this time under a government that supposedly represented their interest.

It’s not surprising that a lot of the protests taking place in South Africa today focus a more honest retelling of the past. From the removal of statues venerating monsters to decolonising the curriculum to counter centuries of erasure by its beneficiaries. And finally to recognise that the promise of 94 was itself a piece of propaganda, one which worked for the existing power structure as well as the incoming inheritors. A Rainbow Nation is a bright, colourful symbol of hope which obscures the tempest which brought it about.

So here we are, a quarter century on, and South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. Within its borders, you can see extraordinary wealth and extreme poverty. It has never reconciled its history, the nation’s collective consciousness has a schizophrenic idea of itself. The pre-apartheid cycles of protest and repression have begun again, and this time without the optimism that was exploited in the 90s for demilitantisation. Where now for South Africa?

Downstream to Kinshasa is a documentary following the attempts of the victims of the 6 Days War to get the compensation allocated to them by taking their case to Parliament in Kinshasa.

The 6 Days War occurred in 2000, when the fighting between Rwanda and Uganda spilled across the border onto Democratic Republic of Congo soil. Ordinary people living in Kisangani were suddenly caught up in a war that had nothing to do with them. They were going about their everyday lives when gunfire opened, bombs dropped, and a full-on war began in their streets. Over 1000 people died, and 3000 people were wounded.

For this, the International Criminal Court found Uganda guilty of war crimes, and ordered them to pay the DRC compensation, a million of which was to go directly to victims. 20 years on the victims have seen hide nor hair of this money.

The film follows the survivors as they travel from Kisangani to Kinshasa to have their stories heard and acknowledged by the country’s rulers. And if you don’t understand what a feat that is, you don’t understand what it means to travel on crutches with two prosthetics 1000 miles, for days in wind and rain.

The boat journey was, for me, particularly tense. I’m not the biggest fan of the water, and the boat didn’t have raised sides, so anytime anyone went near the edge, my stomach just dropped.

For the group, this undertaking puts a strain on tempers, finances, and energy, but possibly the most finite resource is hope. The whole journey is a struggle to keep their spirits up, and believe that this government of corrupt bastards will part with money for them. 20 years of dashed hopes and justice denied weigh heavily on them, particularly the group chairman, Lemalema. As if being a casualty of war is not enough, and the everyday struggle their disabilities and society’s ableism poses, on top of this they must deal with being robbed by the very people whose job it is to act for their benefit.

Downstream to Kinshasa is about the very best and very worst in humanity. The shamelessness of the bastards in Parliament who dare to walk right past them, in their well-pressed suits, while they hoard the money from people with worn-out prosthetic legs, and battered crutches. And on the other hand, the kindness, support and strength the survivors share with each other, doing for each other, helping one another, buoying one another’s spirits, and giving one another the hope to carry on. Very moving film.