5 New Films to Watch, N°21
5 new documentaries this week. Crop: Talking About Images is a film directed by Marouan Omara and Johanna Domke. The film, quoting its website, “reflects upon the impact of images in the Egyptian Revolution and puts it in relation to the image politics of Egypt’s leaders. Instead of showing footage from the revolution, the film is shot entirely in the power domain of images — Egypt’s oldest and most influential state newspaper Al Ahram.” From the top-level executive office down to the smallest worker, the documentary follows a photo journalist who missed the revolution due to a hospital stay. Here’s an excerpt:
Même pas Mal (No Harm Done) is a film by Nadia El Fani and Alina Isabel Pérez that follows up on El Fani’s ‘Securalism – Inch’Allah’. The tone in ‘No Harm Done’, according to first viewers, has become darker, the director’s attitude noticeably more radical. “This may be due in part to her personal history: her cancer, the operation, chemotherapy on the one hand, paralleled by the unprecedented radical Islamist hate campaign against her film in Tunisia, which culminated in death threats against the director published on the social networks.” French-Tunisian Nadia El Fani received the best documentary film award at Fespaco this year. The film hasn’t been screened in Tunisia yet. Nor can the filmmaker return home.
The documentary Creation in Exile: Five Filmmakers in Conversation follows Newton Aduaka, John Akomfrah, Haile Gerima, Dani Kouyaté and Jean Odoutan: five African filmmakers in the diaspora (Paris, Washington, London, Uppsala), their everyday lives echoing sequences of their films. A film by Daniela Ricci:
Returning the Remains (“A Khoe Story 2”) is poet, writer and filmmaker Weaam Williams and Nafia Kocks’ 50 minute documentary about the history of the “unspoken of genocide” on South Africa’s Khoe/Khoi people. “The most challenging documentary film we’ve ever made,” Williams describes it in a recent interview. Here’s a first clip:
On a lighter note, Geoff Yaw’s King Me explores the world of competitive checkers play as seen through the eyes of South African Lubabalo Kondlo. In 2007, Kondlo, with the help of some sympathetic Americans, traveled to the U.S. to compete in the U.S. National Championship of Checkers in Las Vegas, Nevada. A relative unknown in the legitimate checkers world, Kondlo crushed the competition and earned the right to challenge 20+ year reigning World Champ, Ron ‘Suki’ King:
