GFF Reviews

Category: Africa in Motion

  • The Mayor’s Race

    The Mayor’s Race follows Labour politician Marvin Rees’s journey to becoming elected mayor of Bristol. This made him only the third Black British mayor in the UK, and the first to be directly elected by voters.

    It’s hard to talk about this film without getting into a whole conversation about politics, and I mean what politics is, not just parties and votes. That’s not really the purpose of a film review, so I’ll try to keep it brief and relevant. The first impression Rees gives is one of profound naivety. His optimism, hope, and genuine belief that more representatives from marginalised communities will translate into power being use for the benefit of those communities, is almost not credible. It’s like, have you seen THE WORLD before? You can’t possibly think, as a grown man who’s paying attention, that this is how this works. It made me think of Mamadou Ngela from This Is Congo, where you’re like, do you know what game you’re playing?

    Secondly, you watch how much work and emotional labour goes into running one of these campaigns and you just think, imagine if this much energy went into directly solving the problems, instead of going through the roundabout route of party politics. Think of how much time and effort goes into each political campaign, not just the winner’s, and not just from the candidate, but from the volunteers, staff, journalists, activists, and voters themselves. Then think about what might be achieved if that effort went on direct work solving community problems, instead of a competition in which the majority of it will be wasted as only one candidate can win, and even then their job will be to seek permission for the problem to be solved.

    Finally, it does seem to dawn on Rees as the movie goes on, that there are widespread systemic issues, that are not solved by changing the face on the front of the machine. The film shows rallies by the EDL, who are the convenient and accepted face of racism in British consciousness, as if they and only they are racist, and the rest of us needn’t worry about racism beyond their monopoly. But then it also shows the police protecting the EDL rally, but attacking the anti-racism counter-protestors. Is that going to change under a Black mayor? Our survey says no.

    But. BUT. I don’t think it can be underestimated what it means to have public figures who represent unrepresented or underrepresented communities. Why do we expect one black, working-class politician to change the world, and scrutinise him according to that standard, but are completely indifferent to an upper-class, white political hegemony that is entirely self-serving, and maintains a status quo that is to the detriment of the vast majority of people? Party politics held in such low regard, that we just expect it not to work, and not to represent us, and only save our ire for someone selling an attempt at its elevation.

    Perhaps because the film follows Rees and his perspective, it does generally come away with a feeling of hope. Rees is kind of pleasantly surprised by how little is made of his race during the campaign, and how his political rivals don’t use it as part of their campaigns. This was not always the case in Britain, as I probably don’t need to tell anyone. It also doesn’t seem to be much of an issue with the electorate, with class seemingly more of a factor in their mind, and his background as a poor, working class kid from the rough area of the city resonating with a lot of voters.

    Which is not to say there isn’t pushback from racist groups, and racist abuse and threats sent by them. Unfortunately those fuckers are a constant cancer.

    What’s kinda more interesting is the city of Bristol, who is the second major character in this film. I feel like I really got to know the city through this film, its people, places, and history. In some ways, this story is about Rees as a part of the city’s history, rather than about him himself.

    The best parts of this film are with him and Paul Stephenson, a British civil rights leader from Bristol. Rees sees himself as part of the same lineage of change as Stephenson, and he looks upon him as an elder of experience and a bit of a mentor. Stephenson is so fascinating and impressive, he campaigned for civil rights in the UK, worked with Mohammed Ali setting up opportunities for kids from black, working class neighbourhoods, did work against apartheid, and set up an archive of Black British history. Made me wanna see a movie about his life too!

    That’s the thing about racism in Britain. Racism is described as an American thing. Americans had slavery, Americans had segregation. And because only Americans have racism, only Americans had civil rights campaigns. Any British child could tell you who Martin Luther King or Malcolm X were. But ask them to name a single British civil rights campaigner, and you will struggle. Because Britain attempts to erase its long history of racism, it equally erases its history of anti-racist activism. Watching this film, I’m seeing footage of Paul Stephenson’s achievements for the first time. Why is that?

    Anyway, this is already a screed. Really interesting film.

  • Dhalinyaro

    Dhalinyaro is a lovely, sweet, coming-of-age film about three girls in Djibouti City, in the lead up to them taking their final exams and going off to university. The film follows their ups and downs as they deal with exam pressure, household obligations, parents, boys, love and sex.

    Deka begins an on-again-off-again unconsummated affair with an older married man, and struggles to make a decision about where to go for university. Hibo knows she’s going to study abroad in Paris, as seems her destiny coming from a well-to-do family with a mansion and servants. Asma stresses about doing well in her exams, as she know how much her parents work and sacrifice for her, and how hard it is to support their family on their current income.

    The other main character in the film is the city of Djibouti itself. In some ways, this is not just a film about growing up and saying goodbye to your friends. It’s about growing up in the city, and saying goodbye to it too. Deka loves her home, she feeds all the weans on the street, takes tea to her neighbour across the way and listens to his stories. She loves this city, its beach and its streets, and that comes across in the film. I just loved the way the city was shot, you can almost feel the heat, the air, the smell. When girls go swimming in the crystal clear sea, you can understand how you would never want to leave.

    Just a lovely little slice of life.

  • In Search

    An incredibly moving and intimate documentary about women who have survived FGM.

    It is a film that allows women to speak about their experiences in their totality. The audience is not given the faces of black women flashed up in some statistics piece reporting on their perpetual victimhood. They are whole people, with whole lives, joys and challenges outside what was done to them. But all them want to speak out about their experience, to stop it happening to other girls, to break the taboo for other survivors, and just have their trauma acknowledged.

    That is what is so pervasive and damaging across all their experiences – silence. The physical act of violence was bad enough, but there is a silence that is expected of survivors, that they never speak to other women, or warn other girls of the pain, the complications, the real mortal danger it puts you in. Never speak about the effect it has on periods, on sex, on childbirth. Like is so often the case, violence against women must not only be borne, but borne in silence, without complaint.

    But as grim as the subject is, this film is a film of hope. And not in an abstract way, like the notion of hope. But real tangible progress that is being made, both in illegalising the practice, in normalising resistance to it among women, about breaking the taboo of talking about it, and in the advancements in reconstruction surgery which is literally giving women back what was taken from them. This film is both a product of, part of, and proponent of that change.

    The hero of this piece is Mami, the documentary filmmaker herself, who makes the incredibly brave and intimate decision to include herself and her own experience at the centre of the narrative. This was not a decision she made lightly, as she said in the Q&A afterwards. The film was intended to be her interviewing other women about their experiences, and over the course of the interviews, their conversations brought up and touched on so many things she was dealing with. And she thought, “How can I ask these women to come here and talk about such intimate things, when I am not willing to talk about these things myself?”

    So the film also becomes a memoir of recovery, as she goes back home to Kenya to talk to her mother about her circumcision, a topic which has never been discussed between them in 20 years.

    And just a word about her mother – I bloody love her mother. Her mother adores her. Her mother would do anything for her. Her mother exudes love for her. She is not the image many cast the mothers of FGM survivors (in that way all blame for patriarchal violence somehow has to turned back into a woman’s fault), the idea of some unfeeling, unloving, brutally strict mother who we all look at askance asking, “How could you?!” She was a woman who loved her daughter fiercely, who came up against the limits of what she could protect her from.

    Her mother has given her daughter the best of everything she could, has sent her to school, university, to study abroad in Germany. She is immensely proud of her, and has her graduation photo on the wall of her home, displayed in pride of place. Their relationship is one of such evidenced love, that is becomes unthinkable that they have never spoken about something so important in both their lives for 20 years. And in showing the impossibility of such a conversation even in the loving heart of their relationship, the power of the taboo is communicated to the audience in a very real way. These experiences around FGM may never have been yours as a viewer, but watching Mami struggle to speak to her mother, you feel the words being choked in your own throat, you understand how unsayable it all seems.

    And for me, their mother-daughter relationship is the heart of the film. As the filmmaker travels the world, talking to different women about their experiences, as she speaks to doctors about advancements in reconstruction surgery – always waiting in the background is the conversation she is leaving undone with her mother.

    One of my fears with a film on FGM is an anxiety about how graphic any descriptions of the actual physical procedure might get. Because the film is of FGM survivors telling their own stories, they are in control of how much they divulge, and because it is made by an FGM survivor, no attempt is made to dwell upon lurid detail instead of survivor empowerment. When survivors describe their experience, much of the focus is not on the physicality of it, but of the sense of betrayal, the anger, the trauma, of being held down and not allowed to escape when they realised exactly what was happening to them, of the silence afterwards holding them down and feeling inescapable.

    But every now and then, someone will say a word that you don’t want to hear, like remembering the sound of scissors, and your blood will run cold. Because all the survivors describe their stories so matter-of fact, and because there is story heaped upon story, you begin to think you have become acclimatised. And then halfway through the film, Mami sits down with the German lassie who is helping her make the film, and she shows Mami her pussy. “Oh!” Mami exclaims, “It’s like a rose! You have so many petals!” and then in a voice that breaks your heart, she says, “Mine doesn’t have any petals”. And I burst into tears.

    It’s hard in a film to balance relaying what a terrible loss and violation this was and continues to be for so many women, with empowering survivors with a narrative where they are not defined or encompassed by the violence done to them, but this film does so, communicating experiences you may not have had yourself effectively and powerfully, in a way that shows women speaking up is always a revolutionary act, and showing when it happens on mass, it can bring down centuries-old violent and sexist tradition, it can free and save girls from a future of similar violence. A deeply moving film.