By our count, there are 9 African films showing in Park City, Utah this year — as in films by African directors or dealing with African themes. That's a big crop for the Sundance Film Festival (see Africa's A Country on previous years' slim pickings). There's only one narrative feature by an African director in the competition, but it looks like all three of the documentaries depart from the 'Westerner-makes-film-about-Africans-and-draws-on-stale-and-tired-tropes' model. The shorts category boasts promising newcomers: Frances Bodomo's Boneshaker is the story of a Ghanaian-American family looking for traces of home in Louisiana, whileFyzal Boulifa's The Curse deftly sidesteps the Orientalist imagery associated with the Maghreb. Click through for our reviews of the 5 shorts, and check out our previews in the following pages.
1. Mother of George | dir. Andrew Dosunmu (U.S. Dramatic)
Nigerian-born filmmaker Andrew Dosunmu is cranking them out. He was at Sundance in 2011 with his first feature Restless City and his latest (also photographed by the inimitable cinematographer Bradford Young)was developed as part of the 2005 Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs. Mother of George is the story of Adenike (Danai Gurira), who has come to the U.S. to join her fiancee Ayodele (Iaach De Bankolé), a restaurant-owner in Brooklyn. Charting her shift from hopeful arrivant into a woman determined to hold on to the traditions and values of home by any means necessary, the film adds to a growing body of émigre stories by artists negotiating life in the U.S. (the plot summary reads like an E.C. Osondu story). Listen to Dosunmu's thoughts on the film here click the link in the title for more details.
2. The Stuart Hall Project | dir. John Akomfrah (World Documentary)
John Akomfrah's The Stuart Hall Project began life as The Unfinished Conversation, a split screen installation (commissioned by the good people at Autograph ABP) which premiered to rave reviews back in 2012. This more cinema-friendly work, weaves archival footage of colonial Jamaica and Britain with social history, philosophy, classical and jazz music to explore the life, work, and ideas of Jamaican-born British intellectual Stuart Hall. The resonances between Hall and Akomfrah's decades of work make this a much-anticipated pairing. If Hall’s work has been to show how we might respond to Gramsci’s exhortation ‘Turn your face violently towards things as they exist now", then Akomfrah (one of the founders of Britain's Black Audio Film Collective) has carried that conversation into film, finding new ways to speak about the past and present, without slipping into nostalgia (check out Handsworth Songs). Like all of Akomfrah and Hall's work, The Stuart HallProjectpromises to shake up settled notions - of identity, nationality and blackness. Here's a recently released teaser, and interviews with Hall and Akomfrah.
3. Al Midan (The Square) | Jehane Noujaim (World Documentary)
Al Midan or The Square is Jehane Noujaim's document of the events that preceded and followed January 11th, and is named for Tahrir Square, focal point of the Egyptian Revolution. From the looks of the trailer, the film captures the euphoria of the uprising, traces the events following Hosni Mubarak's abdication and the ongoing struggle to reshape Egyptian governance and society. Al Midan probes Egypt's fraught relationship with its for-profit (and sometime U.S. funded) military, noting along the way that 'people with power do not give it up easily'. Screening in the midst of struggles over the constitution, news that Mubarak will be retried, and with ministers charged with embezzling public funds serving their sentences 'in absentia', this will hopefully offer insights into a complex and continually changing situation. For more information, visit the film’s website and Facebook page
4. God Loves Uganda | Roger Ross Williams (U.S. Documentary)
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