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Geek Vibes Nation
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Vibes Nation
The 32nd New York African Film Festival Shorts Program - Films By And About African Women
The 32nd New York African Film Festival has always been known for selecting and screening contemporary classic films from Africa and the diaspora. The 32nd Edition with this year's theme, 'Fluid Horizons: A Shifting Lens on a Hopeful World,' honors the resilience of African youth and their ancestors, and that is evident through the selected titles in the closing night shorts program by and/or about African women. The films vary from touching emotional tales to visual, kaleidoscopic feasts for the eyes. As the Geek Vibes Nation remote festival coverage faithful soldier, I decided to share a brief overview of this year's titles. The festival has been traveling all over New York, will run at BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music) during the DanceAfrica festival through Thursday, May 29, and concludes with a free screening at St. Nicholas Park on Saturday, May 31. Temple Road (13 minutes) There's nothing more intimate than feminine rituals in this culturally specific short. Directors Anil Padia and Michael Mwangi Maina create a sepia-colored world of spiritual and ritualistic preparation of a woman, blending Kenyan and Indian cultures in a dazzling, golden-hued mix. Scenes after scenes of women dressing the protagonist, Akidor, in finely embroidered fabric, washing her hair, braiding it, and indulging in detailed habitual cleansing, scrubbing, bathing, and rubbing by the elder women in her family, and brought into her rites-of-passage journey into womanhood. Padia's costume design and creative direction find inspiration in his fashion design roots. The result is a feast for the eyes and a sensual visual experience like no other. We Will Be Who We Are (16 minutes) From Kenya to Sierra Leone, another director brings a stunning visual piece about two best friends who decide to marry in an attempt to free one another from societal restrictions. Aya and Boi ceremoniously celebrate life, friendship, individuality, and freedom, all against the backdrop of stunning cinematography and breathtaking landscapes. As Aya indulges in the latest fashion trends and Boi performs the Muslim prayer, the distance between them becomes more apparent. In another scene, where they both wear wigs and beautiful dresses, it's clear how similar they truly are. Director Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda perfectly uses inspiration from director Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, and creates a stunning commentary on repressed individuality in conservative societies. Iron Fist (15 minutes) In another Kenyan gem, the pressures of motherhood and responsibility take their toll on Wangari, a hardworking Nairobian woman. She finds relief and catharsis at a local boxing gym, where the hardships of her conditions and the demands of daily physical work clash with seeking bodily exertion and avoiding creepy, stalkerish predators. Kagure N. Kabue paints a beautiful story of resilience, feminine empowerment, and celebrating working women all over the world, all told through simple cinematic language and an enjoyable narrative that prioritizes the liberation and independence of women above all. Le Grand Calao (27 minutes) There are films that feel like a breath of fresh air on a hot summer day. Le Grand Calao is essentially this film, where a group of women decides to take a break from the burdens of their hectic lives to spend time at the Grand Calao's public pool. Conversations flow in this stunning short as director Zoé Cauwet captures the intimacy and coziness of feminine moments. The film is simply shot and executed, highlighting how, in these modest settings, those women can still find their happiness and their release from the daily life burdens. In one scene, one of the women dips into the swimming pool for the first time, and Cauwet beautifully emphasizes this genuine moment of feminine liberation and experimentation for this unassuming woman from a small town. Sira (24 minutes) Mariame N'diaye's film takes place in France, but the Malian traditions are the ones at play here. A mother-daughter bond in a foreign country makes them create the cultural oasis they are both craving, a place far away from a rather hostile environment, at least for the mother, evident in subtle moments, coyly sneaking themselves into the short narrative. The film takes a heartbreaking turn when it shows the Malaian couple struggling with the reality of their situation as immigrants, and the rules imposed on them by the French society, including understanding the language and being fluent in it. It's a bittersweet short about how the effect of language and cultural barriers on the bond between a mother and a daughter. God's Wife (15 minutes) A powerful Nigerian short about the suffocating traditions imposed on women in a patriarchal society. The film begins with the Igbo tradition of cutting a widow's hair. Through a close-up, director Dika Ofoma presents a young woman's face, washed in grief and morbid anticipation of what is coming next. His bold cinematic language creates the perfect vehicle for showcasing the young woman's suffering in a society, weighed down by tradition, that keeps rejecting her existence and individuality, forcing her to make difficult choices. The film is a disturbing anatomy of a woman exploited due to the harsh circumstances of her poverty and her lack of resources, a tough but necessary watch.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
From Mozambique: Masks, Jump Rope and Risqué Moves
In the Mozambican dance Nssope, two people swing a long rope as other dancers take turns skipping it. This looks something like the African American game double Dutch, except that in Nssope there is one rope rather than two and the tempo starts very slow. The speed soon doubles, though, and then it triples. The dancers also have some tricks up their sleeves — like jumping the rope while lying down. This year, the Song & Dance Company of Mozambique headlines the DanceAfrica festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (May 23-26), and for festival regulars, much of what the company is bringing is likely to resemble that rope jumping: familiar but from a different angle. 'Most of the companies that we've brought in over the years have been from West Africa,' said Abdel Salaam, the festival's artistic director. 'I'm trying to move around a bit, so that audiences here can understand the diversity of the continent.' Companies from Mozambique — in southeast Africa with a coastline on the Indian Ocean — seldom appear in the United States. Although the Song & Dance Company participated in DanceAfrica Chicago in 2004 and performed in New Jersey in 1998, this is its debut at the Brooklyn festival. Another reason Salaam chose to highlight Mozambique is that 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the country's independence from Portuguese rule. The Song & Dance Company was formed only a few years after independence, and in 1983 it became an official government-funded institution. 'Our goal is to be the house of Mozambican culture, and its ambassador,' said Lindo Cuna, the company's producer and manager. The troupe gathers dancers from all the country's provinces, he said, and its repertoire includes dances from all its regions. Maria José Gonçalves, a choreographer and dancer, likened the group to a mirror of Mozambique: 'We tell everyone what is going on in the country or in the world,' said Gonçalves, who has been with the company since 1992. One example of this kind of civic education came at the end of the civil war (1977 to 1992), when the company toured a work called 'Ode to Peace.' 'Outside of the city, people didn't have television,' Gonçalves said, 'so we explained to them that now we have peace.' Another work helped to educate about the dangers of AIDS. Over the years, the company has also brought in more contemporary elements. In 2002, it collaborated with the contemporary American troupe Urban Bush Women on 'Shadow's Child,' a dance fable. (At one point in it, a Mozambican girl is mocked by Florida girls for how she jumps rope.) For Gonçalves, who performed as a guest of Urban Bush Women in 'Shadow's Child' at the Lincoln Center Festival that year, the experience was eye-opening. 'Every performance was different,' she said, 'and at first I wondered, 'Why is this changing every day?,' but now I do that, too.' All the selections on the company's DanceAfrica program, though, are traditional. Salaam said that in the past he tried to invite two guest companies to each festival, one traditional and one contemporary. Mozambique has a contemporary dance scene, led by the choreographer Panaíba Gabriel Canda, but Salaam said he could afford only one company this year. Since Song & Dance is the national troupe, he said, it promised the fewest difficulties with visas, which have grown harder to arrange on the American side. 'Last year, when we brought dancers from Cameroon, we were denied 17 visas,' he said, 'so we wanted to avoid that problem if we could.' Two dances on the program — Mapiko and the dance of the Nyau — have made it onto the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list compiled by UNESCO. They involve secret societies and initiation rites, trance states and masks intended to frighten. Some of the initiated Nyau dancers, who taught the company part of the ritual, 'have to sleep in a cemetery for a week to prepare,' Cuna said. 'Some dance on a rope because they cannot touch the floor. But they didn't tell us the whole story because it's a secret.' What the company performs are theatrical versions of these dances, with replica masks and drums. In a UNESCO video, a villager describes Mapiko as 'what appears when we hit the anthill.' In the company's version, a male dancer, wearing a creepy oversized head, interacts with one female dancer after another — this one getting in his face, that one advancing on him with her backside. The other dances on the troupe's DanceAfrica program lean even further in the direction of entertainment, as opposed to ritual. In Xigubo, a warrior dance from southern Mozambique, men wield spears and shields. In lines and dueling pairs, they kick and stomp as women ululate on the sidelines and drums boom. 'For most dances, the name of the dance is the name of the drum,' Cuna said. 'And each has an identifying rhythm.' The jump rope dance comes at the tail end of Tufu, during which the company's women, wearing brightly colored sarongs called capulanas, sing and dance on their knees, tilting and pulsing their shoulders seductively. Cuna pointed out that Tufu bears traces of the Arab traders who preceded the Portuguese and that it was originally performed by men. To Gonçalves, it is about 'showing how beautiful we are.' Ngalanga, the finale, is what Gonçalves called 'a happy dance.' To the sound of drums and the timbila, a Mozambican xylophone made of wooden keys and calabash resonators, men and women enter from opposite sides, then intersperse. They twist their legs. They flap their arms. They shake it off. In male-female pairs, they do what you might call the bump, their thrusting pelvises colliding in time with a drum hit. It's a cheeky courtship move similar to the Afro-Brazilian umbigada ('belly bump') and the Afro-Cuban 'vacunao' ('injection'), both of which have origins in the Kongo culture of central Africa. The Mozambican dancers do the move cheerfully, in several positions. As Charmaine Warren, DanceAfrica's producer, playfully put it, 'It gets a little nasty.'
