In celebration of Black History Month, the fourth annual African Film Festival of Ottawa (AFFO) was held for the first time at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
From Feb. 9-16, Ottawans could watch a variety of films made in countries across the continent, from Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco, and Senegal.
Also a first for the festival was moving the festival from October to February.
To open the festival, Aboubakar Sanogo, festival curator and Carleton professor, said this move was an effort to capitalize upon the increased discourse around Black representation during Black History Month.
While this was the goal of the date move, Sanogo added that pan-African values should be promoted every month of the year.
The festival’s prime goals are to be a platform to show contemporary African film and illuminate and celebrate pan-African culture and broaden the cinematic palettes of Canadians meaningfully.
African cinema is completely unlike the Hollywood filmmaking most Canadians are used to.
The films are slower-paced—less focused on individuals and containing significantly more messaging and theme than their North American counterparts.
African cinema has a long history of being not only entertainment, but also celebrations of culture and critiques of racism, colonialism, and corruption.
From the early films of Ousmane Sembane and Med Hondo to more contemporary filmmakers such as the Guilde of African Film Makers, activism has always been at the front of African filmmaking—and the films of the AFFO were no exception.
Zambian film I Am Not a Witch was the third film of the festival. The film is a poignant critique of cultural misunderstandings and institutionalized exploitation.
Written and directed by Rungano Nyoni and inspired by real-life stories of witchcraft accusations against women in the country, the film premiered at Cannes in May 2017 before receiving a UK release in October of that year.
I Am Not a Witch follows a nine-year-old girl, Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), who is accused of witchcraft shortly after appearing one day in a village. Shula does not accept or refute these accusations and is subsequently forced into hard labour by the local authorities.
The film is Nyoni’s full-length directorial debut, but it feels unexpectedly polished. While the screenplay feels disjointed at times, Nyoni’s writing is generally quite clever and, for Shula, hits an especially good and refined note.
Young characters, especially young lead characters, are often difficult to write, owing largely to the rarity of quality child actors. While Mulubwa turns in a captivating performance, it is also a safe performance, restrained somewhat by the careful writing of the director.
In her debut role, Mulubwa is given the bulk of the screen time. She handles it quite well for an actress her age, acting with a sense of poise and genuineness. Helping things along is the gorgeous cinematography by David Gallego, which makes the film watchable even in its weaker (or stranger) moments.
I Am Not a Witch is very much a character-driven film. Its scenes don’t always seem to flow together nicely, but each person in them progresses naturally throughout the film. Shula has an understandable character arc, even if her surroundings sometimes befuddled me. Of course, this could be because of a cultural or a customary disconnect between the Zambian director and myself, a white Canadian viewer.
Indeed, everything in I Am Not a Witch feels intentional, even if it didn’t always resonate with me. An early scene depicts Shula in an appointment with a witch doctor, and the film employs a rather bizarre stop-motion editing technique that I found somewhat jarring and unexpected.
However, it felt like the director and the editing team were trying to do something new and imaginative with the scene—it felt deliberate, not random.
I Am Not a Witch ultimately feels like a film with a lot to say and a few new filmmaking ideas to offer. Those at the AFFO screening shared some similar sentiments about the film’s originality and its visuals.
“I’m not saying I totally understand it,” attendee Ray Battams said. “It’s like Shakespeare—I can’t figure it all out, so quite often what I do with Shakespeare is I read the play just for its language and not worry that I have to sort it all out. I will come to these [movies] and sometimes it will be music—sometimes, it will be the use of light. Today, it was that I was amazed just by how good [Mulubwa] was.”
For other viewers, the film provided a valuable level of insight into the culture of an unfamiliar country and people.
“[African film] is from the perspectives of people that have a different way of telling stories,” said Merryl Ndema, an attendee at the screening and a former volunteer at the International Pan-African Film Festival in Cannes.
“They’re finally getting an opportunity to break out of their circles to introduce it to everybody else,” he added.
“We live in a world where, sometimes we don’t know what’s going on in other places . . . I think it is very important to show these things,” said Yami Msosa, an attendee who went the AFFO with Ndema.
“It’s an opportunity to see things from a different perspective,” said Ndema. “It’s not through the same lens that we’re used to seeing movies.”
Photo by Tim Austen
