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.
Community Partner
Akojo Film Collective
Kika Memeh and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, Curators
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.
The Witch at the Edge of the Screen
Current Installment
Akojo Film Collective presents The Witch at the Edge of the Screen in conjunction with the release of the African cinema anthology book Speaking in Tongues: Visual Language in African Cinema(s), edited by Kikachi Memeh with contributions by Ogheneofegor Obuwoma and Chrystel Oloukoï.
The Witch at the Edge of the Screen takes its name from Obuwoma’s contributed essay, which examines womanhood as framed as parahuman, a nonbeing enacted both within society and on-screen.
“Women are by nature witches,” is the declaration by the son of a town’s Chief, in an interview by Yaba Badoe in the making of her 2009 film Witches of Gambaga. Cementing the idea of womanhood as an inherent malady manifested through “a cantankerous nature, bearing grudges and manifestations of male pride in a woman… all signs that a woman may be a witch,” something to be tackled.
But what happens when these women answer back cinematically, through the daring possibilities of films like I am Not a Witch and Bloodettes, which identify this practice of disenfranchising women and address it by reflecting these absurdities through satire that tackles the weaponization of culture towards a violent lived reality for women? Through this, they chart a woman-led visual language that better reflects African women’s lives now.
— Kika Memeh and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma
The Bloodettes
In this early Afro-futurist shlocker from Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo (made in 2005 and set in 2025), two sex workers try to dispose of the body of a high profile politician who's died on the job (theirs, not his).
I Am Not a Witch
Rungano Nyoni's acclaimed debut feature is a visually striking satire about a 9-year-old orphan accused of witchcraft in contemporary Zambia. Screening in the latest African Cinema Now! series, The Witch at the Edge of the Screen.
