Foyer at Humboldt Forum
10.11. – 13.11., 10am – 8pm
Free of Charge
AFRIKAMERA 2022: Urban Africa, Urban Movies – Migration & Diaspora is part of a four-year festival focus on contemporary urban cinema from Africa.
Flight and migration are among the dominant themes of the present. European perspectives dominate the political and artistic discourse, while African perspectives are largely ignored.
The question of “cultural identity”, the debate about the relationship between the “own” and the “foreign” is no longer dealt with only from the perspective of immigrants. It is being rebalanced, as it were, by those returning to the African continent from the diaspora or from the perspective of filmmakers living in both the global South and the global North. Many productions focus not only on migratory movements from Europe to Africa and back, but also on intra-African migratory movements.
Accompanying the AFRIKAMERA programme, four 360° productions will be presented that deal with themes of migration & diaspora in very different artistic ways.
Curation: Florian Wachinger
LE LAC
By Nyasha Kadandara
Kenya 2019, Documentary, OV, ca. 9 min
Located in the border region between Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad, Lake Chad is one of the world’s largest inland water bodies and also one of the most endangered biotopes on the African continent. On the one hand, the water level of the lake is constantly sinking due to climate change, on the other hand, the region is shaken by political unrest and the terror of the Islamist group, Boko Haram, 2.7 million people are fleeing around Lake Chad and live as internally displaced persons in UNHCR camps.
The 360° production LE LAC by Nigerian filmmaker Nyasha Kadandara provides insights into the everyday life of Mahamat, a once prosperous cattle farmer who had to leave his home for fear of the terror of Boko Haram, and Nassuri, an internally displaced person turned fisherman who lives with his family in one of the refugee camps. With disturbingly beautiful images, LE LAC sharpens our view of the vulnerability of people and nature.
NYASHA KADANDARA is an award-winning Pan-African director and filmmaker. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School. Her first film, Through the Fire, about a drug addict facing the demons of his past, won the Audience Choice Award at the Atlanta Docufest in 2015. Her short documentary Queens & Knights, about a queer and inclusive rugby team, won first prize at the 2016 NBC Sports Film Competition Cptr’d and premiered at South by SouthWest. In 2019, she wrote, filmed and produced Sex and the Sugar Daddy, a comprehensive multimedia reportage about transnational sexual relationships in Kenya, which was a finalist in the Popular Feature and Digital Media categories at the One World Media Awards. Her latest production, the investigative documentary Imported for my Body about cross-continental sex trafficking was shortlisted for the 2020 Amnesty Media Awards and selected for the Human Rights Watch Festival in Kenya. She is currently developing her first independent documentary, Matabeleland, and a narrative feature Come Sunrise, We Shall Rule.
AFROROUTES
by Sélim Harbi
Germany 2021, / Three 360°- Videos, each approx. 15.Min.
Production: INVR.SPACE GmbH
Executive Producer: Sönke Kirchhof
Postproduction Supervisor: Jessica Zippel
Prototype Tunisia: Med Arbi Soualhia
World Premiere
From Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) to Gujarat (India) to Tangier (Morocco): Afroroutes moves in the footsteps of the three great slavery routes – the trans-Saharan, the trans-Atlantic and the trans-Pacific – asking questions about Afrodiasporic identity: what happened to the millions of displaced African men and women? Where do their descendants live today? Have their original cultures and languages disappeared? How did their heritage contribute to the building of their new countries?
The project uses three different music and sound based rituals and ceremonies to make these questions tangible as lived cultural memories, as testimonies of cultural resilience and altered and transcendental heritage in 360° videos: In ceremonies of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion from Bahia, the centre of Black culture in Brazil and a central axis for the development of Afro-Brazilian identity; in Dhamal- rituals of the African Sidi community practiced in the Gujarat region of northern India; and in rituals of the Gnawa, an ethnic minority in Morocco, with reference to sub-Saharan myths, colour codes and healing practices.
SELIM HARBI (*1982 in Tunis) is a multimedia author, director and producer. He studied audiovisual media at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and worked, among other things, as an assistant director for THE ENEMY, gained journalistic VR experience in West Africa and regularly gave workshops in media and storytelling. He was also a World Press Photo multimedia fellow focusing on current issues in the African diaspora. Harbi develops and produces mixed media concepts. He lives and works in Berlin.
AZIMUTH
by Nirma Madhoo
South Africa/ Australia 2019, experimental film, OV, 9 min
Azimuth is a 360° experimental film that presents contemporary fashion in a 3D digital asset inspired by exposed concrete breakwater architecture at Durban Harbour, the architecture of the brutalist building complexes of the Durban University of Technology and the Ponte Tower in Hillbrow (Johannesburg). Azimuth celebrates concrete as an omnipresent material in three elemental states: liquid, solid and ethereal. Carried by a spherical Ambisonics sorround sound score, the fashion presentations simultaneously question and subvert stereotypical notions and attributions of African identities as the “ethnic other”.
NIRMA MADHOO is a fashion filmmaker and researcher based in Durban and Melbourne. She began her career as a fashion designer and then turned to contemporary fashion filmmaking. Her work juxtaposes videographic work with CGI, 3D printing, virtual reality and augmented reality techniques. Madhoo’s work is presented internationally at short film festivals, fashion film festivals and digital art festivals.
FERENJ – A GRAPHIC MEMOIR
by Ainslee Robson
United States/ Ethiopia 2020, 360°- Video, Languages: English, Amharic, Subtitles: English, 9 min.
German premiere
The immersive graphic memoir by American-Ethiopian director Ainslee Robson, is a visual dialogue between memory, reality and the sphere of the digital.
Based on reconstructed autobiographical memories and accompanied by Ethiopian tezeta music, Robson creates an Afrosensual dreamscape that leads in fragmented form from the Ethiopian restaurant Empress Taytu in Cleveland, Ohio, to the director’s childhood home and the streets of Addis Ababa. Punctuated by a speculative conversation between the narrator and former Ethiopian Empress Taytu, FERENJI questions the meaning of home and identity from the experiential perspective of Ethiopian-American diaspora.
