THE AFRICA BAZAAR MAGAZINE
February 3, 2020
The Museum of Modern Art’s annual international documentary film festival, Doc Fortnight Festival, will kick-off its 19th season Wednesday, showcasing features and short films from around the world.
Among the filmmakers showcasing their cinema at this year’s Doc Fortnight festival are two Africans—Akosua Adoma Owusu, a Ghanaian-American and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Lesotho-born German director
The filmmakers join a list of other leading filmmakers, including Michael Almereyda, Terence Nance, Denic Cote, Sky Hopinka, Lucretia Martel, Ben Rivers, Lynne Sachs, Kazuhiro Soda, Rogers Ross Williams, and Maya Khoury.
Ms. Owusu’s films, a trilogy titled “Welcome to the Jungle” examines blackness and cultural appropriation in pop-culture as well as in the Western society. The trilogy delved into the intricate history of the Afro hair style and other unique black hair styles, as well as paid tributes to black hair stylists and their businesses.
Mr. Mosese’s film,“Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You” is an elegiac semi-autobiographical film that looks at the double-edged of voluntary human migration and expatriation as well as the rudimentary rage that both can produce. The film also examines the legacies of colonialism and Christianity in Africa.
The festival is organized by Joshua Siegel, curator; with Stergios Dinopoulos, Department of Film at the MoMA and Kathy Brew, Consulting curator.
Below are three other films we are looking forward to at the festival:
Narrated by Tilda Swinton, Jane Fonda, Debra Winger, Adjoa Andoh, Kerry Fox, Women Make Film: A New Road Movie through Cinema, 2018, Mark Counsin’s personal journey through more than 120 years of filmmaking by women is not only a magisterial attempt to begin rectifying the wrongs of most history writing, but also a whirlwind celebration of forgotten or under appreciated visionaries like Sarah Maldoror from Angola, Binka Zhelyazkova from Bulgaria, and Margaret Tait from Scotland, told through mesmerizing scenes from their movies.
Overseas, directed by Sung-a Yoon is a disturbing look at a training center for Filipino women who are leaving their own young children and elderly parents to become domestic maids and nannies abroad, principally in Asia and the Middle East. through role-playing exercises, the woman must confront the prospect of sexual assault, verbal abude and virtual enslavement n the homes where they will work
Umbilical– directed by Danski Tang (short film) explores how her mother’s abusive marriage shaped her won experiences as a child at a boarding school in China.
