www.thinono.org
visualities
> Martin Baer - Martin Chiketa - Bernd Fischer - Lee Hirsch - Ziba Mir-Hossein - Judy Kibinge - Cheick Omar Sissoko - Onyekachi Wambu - Sue Williamson
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an overview of the films seen at the festivals
> Martin Baer & Is-Haka Mkwawa
documentary maker
Making 'Soviet Implosion' at 'the costs of a used car', Martin Chiketa has proved Zimbabweans can make a documentary without donorsupport. After working as a diplomat at the Zimbabwean Embassy in Moscow between 1988 and 1992, Chiketa decided to make a documentary on the fall of the Soviet Union from an African perspective. Doing so, he interviewed a large number of people - including persons like Julius Nyerere (former president of Tanzania), Margaret Anstee (former U.N. Under Secretary General) and Herman Cohen (former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State), as well as a variety of African students and ambassadors in the former Soviet states, journalists and political leaders.
In 'Soviet Implosion part one: causes' Chiketa analysis the collapse of the Soviet system along the ideas of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, whose thoughts were an important source of inspiration for a variety of political movements in Southern Africa. 'How can you have socialism without freedom?', Nyerere wonders, 'I never accepted the idea that their Marxism was socialism, although that was what the Soviets wanted us to believe.'
In 'part two: implications for southern Africa' the director shifts his attention to the implications the end of the cold war had on the African continent. As the Soviet-support to the African 'Marxists' declined, the US stopped financing anticommunist movements in the region, which had tremendous effects on countries like Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. The shrinking fear for communists allowed De Klerck to invite blacks in parliament and hence helped the fall of the Apartheid. 'The pressures we faced during the Cold War stopped us from doing our own thinking', Nyerere concludes, 'I hope we can now start our own thinking - we must not accept the new religion of capitalism, it is simply wrong.'
Chiketa's next project will address interracial dating. Like 'Soviet Implosion', which originally derived from his personal snapshots, it started as something light and funny, but it is evolving into a rather serious issue. The documentary will probably be finished in 2003.
An interview with the director at the 5th Zanzibar International Filmfestival in july 2002, can be requested via klaartjejaspers@gmail.com. The interview can be edited in Dutch or English.
director
'From Dachau with love' - a title which says it all. A shizofrenic dance of the feelings the mere name Dachau raises. Fischer proves to have mastered the art of arranging his footage in a way that tends to confuse the viewer, as the audience becomes aware of its own stereotypes surrounding the name of the camp where some 31.000 inhabitants lost their lives.
But as dramatic and sad as the name strikes the visitors, the camps' survivors, a nun living at its premises or the rare concerned villager, as idyllic and cheerful it strikes the towns mayor, the tourist guide and the press-officer of the town's policeforce. To them, it is not the name of the camp, but of their hometown, a small Bavarian village 39.500 inhabitants big. Though the interviewer approaches the villagers as serious as the victims, their continious insistence Dachau is just another village looks increasingly desperate. Pretending to be the unbiased and innocent observer, Fischer displays his hometownmates making themselves look more and more ridiculous in their attempts to prove Dachau is the perfect location for a romantic honeymoon or a paradise for admirers of untouched forests.
Cartoons. The contrast between their Dachau and the Dachau imagined by the outside world is simply too big. What to think about the youngish mayor advertising himself using a drinkingsong 'women, palmtrees and beer - that's what we want 400 days a year', the hysterical tourguide going through the flowering garden of the castle stubbornly insisting the old towns medieval history is at least as interesting as the camp's or the local oppositionleader complaining the Dachau-villagers are in fact the victims of the camp, as its name haunts them whenever they leave town? What to think about all these traditional costumes or the policemen praising themselves as they stop for pheasants?
To the relief of the viewer fearing to become haughty, Fischer timely brings in some likable human Dachau creatures who do seem to have found of dealing with the traumatic connotations. There's the musician telling how he came to appreciate the camp's wall for bringing him in touch with the blues at the time the Americans used the barracks to keep their prisoners. There's Sister Elia, who takes pictures of the visiting survivors to replace their number with a human face. And there's the camp's neighbour - pleasantly unashamed of the naked beerbelly above his colorfull bathing trunks - hospitably pointing out what happened where and when before victoriously explaining how they got hold of the piece of land dividing their gardens from the monumental premises.
With love from Dachau
(Germany, 2003) - a film that makes you laugh, sneer and mourn at
the same time.
A film that makes you wonder where you stand.
filmmaker
Vusiyi Mini was a father. Vusiyi Mini was an artist. Vusiyi Mini was a hero. Vusiyi Mini composed the song which introduced the lyrics 'Pas op, Verwoerd', warning the big man behind the Apartheidsystem his days were counted, the blacks were coming to get him. The song encouraged the black majority to rise up against the white minority humiliating them.
Vusiyi Mini was hang in 1948. He approached his gallows singing.
Fifty years later Mini gets
his funeral. There's a priest at his grave, he's surrounded by
friends and family.
A white official blows the trumpet as the corps reaches its new
marble housing.
His daughter finally recognises her dad in the deceased the
people are mourning.
Vusiyi Mini is one of the leading artist in Lee Hirsch' documentary 'Amandla!', an homage to the creative inspirators off the anti-Apartheid struggle. Legends like Miriam Makeba ('click song') and Hugh Masekela ('Stimela', 'Free Nelson Mandela') and a variety of former exiles, political activists, musicians and a couple of white retired policemen are the ingredients of an explosion of sound and memories. To most a feel good film with contents, 'Amandla!' ('Power!') comes as a vibrant and inspiring experience.
Hirsch, an American by birth, calls himself an activist. 'Amandla!' celebrates not only its specific South-African context, it should serve as an example of the power of song. A instrument that could be usefull in many other struggles, like the current anti-globalistic movement.
His film is what it celebrates: a tool to support the moral of the combatants.
filmmaker
When the series producer asked her to participate in a competition to win an assignment to direct the filming of a Andia Kisiah story on the childsoldiers of Sierra Leone, Judy was in doubt. 'It was my first encounter with filmmaking outside advertising. I have never studied film, so it literally took them two invitations and the sending of a script for me to pitch! The producer clearly saw my potential better than I did!' She won.
As she realised she was being chosen rather then one of her more experienced colleagues, Judy started digging. 'I did a fair amount of research on the project and realized that despite the story being set in Sierra Leone, the stories of child soldiers across the world was very, very similar. In countries as diverse as Uganda, Lebanon, Angola, DRC, across South America, and others, their initiation was always brutal – often, they were made to perform terrible deeds like kill their own friends or relatives, drink their blood etc. This way, they were ruled by fear and guilt. They were almost often given drugs or alcohol to make them fearless, and a fearless child will do anything they are told to. Also similar was the anger and rejection they received from home, and their loss of childhood.'
This rejection became the central theme of 'The Aftermath', a film which focusses on the childsoldier returning to their former homesteads.
We see the young boy Camara coming home to find his father blaming him for his mothers death. His best friend Kaikai tries to kill him for murdering his younger who came to look for him after he had been abducted. Camara tries to explain, but his words can't beat the pain and fear in the ones he left behind. He wished he could be back in the bush, where at least he was appreciated.
Camara is left with one friend, a girl like himself: taken by the army, returned to prostitute herself to an old villager. She's saving money to start a tailorshop. She slowly manages to encourage him to start a new life, as history makes its brutal verdict.
Though the story is staged in Sierra Leone, Kibinge got it shot in Kenya and decided to use sheng, a kind of hip street Swahili. 'It's young, filled with slang', she explains, 'I really did not want to even begin try mimic Sierra Leonian accents. I figured that the child soldiers would invariably have some sort of a slang going in the ranks, wherever they were.'
Understanding the mind of a childsoldier, Kibinge now knew where to do her casting. 'I wanted to work with kids from the slums because I was not looking for innocent youth but for hardened youth'. She met Calypso Onditi and asked him to play Camara. 'He had never acted on screen before but he was a natural,' the director later writes, 'he was incredible – and went on to get a part in Lara Croft’s Tomb Raider 2!'
An interview with the director can be requested via klaartjejaspers@gmail.com. The interview can be edited in Dutch or English.
documentary maker & antropologist
In 'Runaway' Ziba Mir - Hossein and Kim Longinotto document the lives of a number of runaway girls in a shelter in Teheran, Iran. The camera follows the girls from the moment the arrive in the shelter till the moment they leave to return home or to find a life elsewhere. Talking freely about the situations that made them leave their families, the girls give the viewer an intimate understanding of their past and their aspirations for a future that they expect to be different.
'Women are silenced by the idea of shame, they are ashamed to talk about private matters openly', says Ziba Mir-Hossein, just after receiving the Silver Dhow - the first award 'Runaway' got in an Islamic country. 'I think: if it is shameful, why do men do it? The girls in "Runway" are heroes and they know it, thats why they wanted to be filmed. The shame is on those that made them runaway.'
'Runaway' is the second film of what is expected to become a trilogy. In part 1: 'Divorce Iranian Style' Ziba Mir- Hossein uses her scientific experience with Islamic family law to portray the lives of Iranian women in family courts, trying to get divorced or keep the custody over their children. Like the first two sequels, part three will deal with womens issues in contemporary Iran.
An interview with the director at the 5th Zanzibar International Filmfestival in july 2002, can be requested via klaartjejaspers@gmail.com. The interview can be edited in Dutch or English.
director
Cheick Omar Sissoko (1946) is a director from Mali. His works include 'Genesis', 'Guimba' and 'Nyamanton'. Sissoko was born in Segou, but studied filmmaking at the Ecole Nationale Louis Lumière in Paris. When he returned to Mali, he started working as a filmmaker at the Centre National de Production Cinématographique (CNPC) and created, with other young Malians, a collective production company: Kora Films.
Sissoko 's films, like many Malian movies, usualy reflect on everyday practices in a society that tries to find a balance between modern life, as strived for by the government, and traditional life, as at present in the villages where most Malians come from. In this fashion, Sissoko has made a dramatic film about the circumcision of young women, including rebelling women who refuse to get circumsiced and refuse to become the wife of the eldest brother of her deceived husbands.
In 'Guimba' Sissoko tells a griot-like story about a king, who's powers come to fall as he tries to fulfil the sexual lusts of his son, a remarkably unattractive dwarf. The film ridicules those in power, showing their misbehaviours and weaknesses. Sissoko has proved himself a dangerous political opponent, playing a role in the removal of former president Traore, who led a military dictatorial regime for 27 years. Since the director expected the current regime, though a multiparty democracy under President Konare, to react nervously on such a film, Sissoko chose the form of the fairytale.
documentary producer
Eleven years old, Onyekachi Wambu moved from the Nigerian village where he grew up to the United Kingdom. Here he met people who would speak about Africa as 'the dark heart' and about Africans as if they were barbarians. This was not the Africa he knew, the Africa of respect and affection.
In an attempt to display his Africa, and to understand cruel histories like the genocide in Rwanda, Wambu made the documentary 'Hopes on the Horizon' - rewarded with the Golden Dhow as best documentary film at the 5th Zanzibar International Filmfestival 2002. It consists of six pieces, telling the stories of pro-democracy movements in Benin, Nigeria, Morrocco, Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa. The emphasis of the documentaries lies on the '90s, a time in which various attempts towards democracy and reconciliation reached a national level.
When making his
documentaries, Wambu uses the skills he evolved growing up in an
Igbo-village that did not have a chief. 'When information was
needed, say, over a land dispute, people would talk to key
figures, but you would not just accept what they said. You had to
compare their answers to those of the village elders and your own
family, since different families could have different agendas.
Using these different sources of information, you construct the
truth. This is still the way I work when making a documentary.'
Currently, Wambu is planning his return to Nigeria. To introduce his children with the self-evident sense of honesty and respect he did not find in Europe, and to be able to give to the continent as he received from it. 'My grandmother had little but built a house and produced educated children. Today, African intellectuals have not paid back the debt to the scarifices my grandmother's generation made to their advancement.' The braindrain needs to be redirected, starting with Wambu himself.
An interview with the director at the 5th Zanzibar International Filmfestival in july 2002, can be requested via klaartjejaspers@gmail.com. The interview can be edited in Dutch or English.
mixed techniques
Sue Williamson is a South African artist. Starting her career as a journalist, political issues are reflected in her works of art, such as 'Messages from the moat' and 'For thirty years next to his heart', the first dealing with issues such as colonialism and labelling people, here: slaves, into numbers. Sue used the files of hundreds of slaves, engraving their details on glass bottles, sending them into the water. In 'for thirty years next to his heart' she presents a passbook, which she borrowed from Mr. Ngesi, who had kept taking his pass along wherever he went after it he was not obliged by law anymore. His passbook tells the story of his life, as reflected in the jobs he had and hence the places where he was allowed to be.
Besides her work as an artist, Sue Williamson has started a digital magazine on South African contemporary art: ArtThrob.co.za.
An interview with the artist can be requested via klaartjejaspers@gmail.com. The interview can be edited in Dutch or English.