During the introductory remarks for Max and Mona, filmmaker Teddy Mattera indicated that the inspiration for the film came from two parallel thoughts: a romanticization of death stemming from the traditional belief that the souls of the recently deceased are not able to cross over to the spiritual realm unless their passing has been properly […]
Tag: New York African Film Festival
Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, 2005
Khalo Matabane expounds on the cross-cultural interrogations of post-apartheid society in his previous film, Story of a Beautiful Country with Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, a thoughtful, insightful, and articulate melding of fiction and documentary on the changing landscape of new South African society as a result of continental (and international) immigration, refugeeism, and exile. […]
Story of a Beautiful Country, 2004
During the post-screening Q&A of Story of a Beautiful Country, filmmaker Khalo Matabane stated that his inspiration for his self-described road movie indirectly came from the daily television broadcasts of the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings, observing that many of the witnesses to the struggle – the human testimonies that not only chronicled national history under […]
My Lost House, 2001
Shot from the austere interiors of a disused housing project that has been scheduled for demolition on the outskirts of Paris, Kamal El Mahouti, returns to the “home”of his youth in My Lost House where, in 1970, at the age of six, his family had immigrated from Morocco to France and lived at the housing […]
NYAFF Short Films: Fanta Régina Nacro
Un Certain Matin, 1991 A farmer named Tiga’s seemingly uneventful trip to the woods sets the stage for an unexpected collision between truth and fiction, reality and celluloid, that is illustrated to wry, comic effect in Fanta Régina Nacro’s first feature, Un Certain Matin. Setting out one morning from his native village on the Mossi […]
The Prodigal Son, 2009
Like Katrina Browne’s earnest and impassioned essay film, Traces of the Trade, South African filmmaker Kurt Orderson’s The Prodigal Son is less a journey to find ancestral roots – albeit from the other side of the slave trade – than an invitation for an open dialogue on race and reconciliation. Having lived his youth in […]