Akojo Film Collective presents African Cinema Now!, a series dedicated to contemporary African Cinema by and about Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. This collective began as an inquiry into the position of contemporary African cinema in the imaginations of Canadian filmgoers and the wider film festival circuit. African Cinema Now! serves as a gateway to creating necessary dialogue around contemporary African cinema that is often disregarded within mainstream Canadian film spaces.
The series invites audiences to watch and engage with African cinema through thematic installments that will take place year-round at the VIFF Centre.
We invite you to join us for our inaugural program, Dreaming of Elsewhere. As a starting point, we aim to draw from a wide range of experiences within the diaspora that represent a portion of African cinema today. Our goal is to expand our collective understanding and knowledge of the rich cinematic landscape created by Africans across the world.
The present moment requires us to engage with the world in new and liberating ways, and this program aims to introduce interesting points of departure in how we might think of cinema and its often colonial apparatus.
We look forward to the collective learning experience that will be African Cinema Now!
— Kika Memeh and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma
Dreaming of Elsewhere
Home is a fluid concept, alive in the soul and rooted where the body finds itself ready to occupy. Dreaming of Elsewhere is an invitation to consider how we might define home and the efforts required to build a life far from the refuge of familiarity. Following tumultuous journeys at sea and successful attempts at migration, these films capture the emotional, physical, and communal labour shouldered when turning daydreams of a new or different life into reality.
Esi Edugyan’s compelling work on belonging has been seminal in shaping how we think about belonging within the lives of Black Canadians. This program, named after her 2014 novel, investigates these ideas of belonging, the motivations behind the desire to create a home in faraway places, and the often-disruptive forces that complicate ideas of home and migration for Africans in the diaspora.
As Canada struggles with the place and understanding of immigrants, we are interested in how people have considered the often-difficult task of making a new place home and the sacrifice required to find belonging within the capitalist structures that motivate relocation. By contrasting the complex and exclusionary ways in which governments define home, these films acknowledge and challenge the static notion of home, complicating what we know as guests on these Indigenous Coast Salish lands, where notions of belonging are deeply unjust.
Akojo Film Collective consists of Kika Memeh and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, both curators and programmers based in Vancouver on the Coast Salish lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. They share an interest in contemporary African cinema and the numerous possibilities it holds as a way of understanding modern realities born from the African continent’s colonial past.
Chez Jolie Coiffure
Having immigrated to Belgium from Cameroon, Sabine manages Chez Jolie Coiffure. Her salon patrons, many of them undocumented immigrants, are not only be made to feel beautiful but can also escape the daily difficulties and harsh realities of their lives.
Atlantics
In Dakar, Ada loves Souleiman but has been promised to another man. One night, Souleiman and his co-workers leave the country by sea. Several days later, a fire ruins Ada's wedding and a mysterious fever starts to spread. It seems Souleiman has returned.
Dilli Dark
Michael Okeke left Nigeria six years ago to survive in the frequently disconnecting and overcrowded New Delhi, which he despises heartily. He dreams of true love and a better job but is pushed into only the 4 Cs: cell phone, cocaine, cash, and clients.
Tori and Lokita
Sharing a sibling-like bond, immigrants Lokita (17) and Tori (12) work as performers in a trattoria, dealing drugs on the side, while navigating an indifferent bureaucracy. When Lokita is held captive in a marijuana grow op, events spiral out of control.
The Pirogue
When offered the chance to lead one of the many Senegalese pirogues bound for Europe via the Canary Islands, Baye Laye reluctantly accepts the job, knowing full-well the many perils that lie ahead.
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Mother of George
Following their joyous wedding, complications arise for a Nigerian couple living in Brooklyn when they're unable to conceive a child - a problem that devastates their family, defies cultural expectations, and leads the wife to make a shocking decision.
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