London’s Film Africa Festival is a great opportunity to see the latest works from the continent, and this year’s line-up emphasizes stories with a focus on “return” of one manner or another. In this article, the writer profiles six must-see films at the festival, all of which were directed by women. Maryam Touzani’s sophomore feature film, The Blue Caftan is a radical reinterpretation of love and family, presented with tenderness. Using the traditional marriage of a middle-aged couple as a non-threatening starting point, Touzani pokes holes at the hypocrisies that define conservative societies. Cesária Évora, the late Cabo Verdian diva, whose larger-than-life voice took the pain and soul of her traditional morna music culture and made it a Grammy winning global phenomenon, gets the big screen treatment in this carefully curated study. Inspired loosely by the work of Ousmane Sembène, Jusu crafts Nanny as some kind of corrective to the tragedy of the heroine in Sembène’s revered classic, Black Girl (La Noire de…). Rumbi Katedza’s agile documentary unveils another side to stories of immigration, doing so with candour, wit, and a surprisingly generous dose of humour. Transactions explores the outsize role that remittances have come to play in African economies by zeroing in on one utterly relatable Zimbabwean family.
SOURCE: AFRICAN ARGUMENTS