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.
Portraits
Current Installment
Portraits presents three films that consider what African portraiture entails and how, by documenting a person, we might view society with greater depth. In the selected films, the protagonists are defined and changed by the circumstances they encounter and the community they are beholden to through history and relational connections. To see a life and community through portraiture is to open a line of intimate inquiry that values relationality and deep connection to the people and communities on screen.
What does it mean to attempt to know a person or people through cinema? These films complicate cinema’s most important investment: how we look. These portraits act as a way to understand contemporary Africa by revealing how people shape people and, in turn, how people shape systems, making them more legible through individual stories.
Millisithando uses the filmmaker’s life as a context to dive into the “independent” Transkei of apartheid South Africa, offering us a new reading of this history. One Woman One Bra follows a woman whose life is directly changed by the camera as an apparatus of colonial documentation and ethnography, while Hanami explores the interconnectedness of familial and social life through the portrait of an individual, an ambition all three films share; this investment in the portrait as a mode of further investigation.
— Kika Memeh and Ogheneofegor Obuwoma
One Woman One Bra
Kenyan filmmaker Vincho Nchogu impresses with her humorous account of one woman's fight to keep her ancestral land. Winner: Best First Feature, London Film Festival
Milisuthando
Milisithando uses the filmmaker's life as a context to dive into the "independent" Transkei of apartheid South Africa, offering us a new reading of this history.
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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
After finding her uncle's dead body on the roadside by a brothel, Shula grapples with her Zambian family's sanctification of a monstrous man. This darkly comedic absurdist drama was a prize winner at Cannes for director Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch).
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Our Lady of the Nile
Veronica and Virginia are inseparable friends at an elite Catholic boarding school, Our Lady of the Nile, but what binds them together is the very thing that separates them forever. We are in Rwanda, 1973, and tribal tensions are simmering ominously.
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Mambar Pierrette
The third and final film of the spring session of African Cinema Now is the first dramatic feature from Cameroonian non-fiction filmmaker Rosine Mbakam (Chez Jolie Coiffure), an imaginative portrait of a seamstress.
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Stories of Our Lives
Stories of Our Lives (62 mins) documents personal stories of lovers, fighters and rebels and the community histories that characterize the queer experience in Kenya. This is preceded by the touching and resonant 38-minute Nigerian love story, Ìfé.
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Walking with Shadows
In Lagos, Nigeria, Ebele Njoko has been running all his life. A search for acceptance and love from his family, has led him to recreate himself as Adrian Njoko, respected father, husband and brother. Suddenly, Adrian's past and secrets catch up with him.
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While You Weren't Looking
The changing landscape of South African politics and lifestyles is portrayed through a trio of artfully counter-pointed relationships.
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Nollywood: Filmbusiness African Style
If you've wondered how one of the world's highest-producing film industries sustains itself, this documentary breaks down the inner workings of Nigeria's most lucrative creative economy, the second largest film industry in the world according to UNESCO.
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La Belle at the Movies + Apostles of Cinema
Cecilia Zoppelletto's lyrical documentary examines the fate of cinephilia in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo's capital city, currently without a single operating cinema. + Apostles of Cinema (Tanzania, 17 min)
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The Eyes of Ghana
In his debut feature doc Ben Proudfoot unearths the story — and the images — of Chris Hesse, personal cameraman to Ghana's revolutionary leader, Kwame Nkrumah, who was deposed in a coup in 1966. This is a fascinating history reclaimed from the archives.
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A Tribe Called Love
Set in a Somali neighbourhood in Toronto, Mohamed Ahmed's film follows teenagers Farah and Halima as they fall in love despite warnings to stay apart because they're from different tribes
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My Father's Shadow
Akojo Film Collective is proud to present My Father's Shadow, launching African Cinema Now into a new year of vibrant programming at the VIFF Centre. The BAFTA-nominated film follows two boys on an adventure with their father through the streets of Lagos.
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