Africa
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Leah Warshawski on Connecting the Rwandan Film Industry
Last Friday the African news site AllAfrica.com published a lengthy story on the growth and maturation of the Rwandan film industry since the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Coming from a place of inter-tribal distrust and decimated infrastructure, filmmakers, like others in the country, got to work rebuilding their country, their pride, and their national image. In the immediate aftermath of the genocide many films understandably dealt with it as subject matter (think Italian neorealism springing up in the wake of the Allied tanks), but in the ensuing 20 years filmmakers have created a space to tell other stories and redefine […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 19, 2014 -
Shooting in Africa with A Most Wanted Man Producer Andrea Calderwood
I recently met Andrea Calderwood at the Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival where she was in town to support Half of a Yellow Sun, helmed by Nigerian director Biyi Bandele. Originally from Scotland, the London-based Calderwood has long been a formidable presence in the U.K. film world, a BAFTA-award winner for Kevin MacDonald’s The Last King of Scotland, who even made Scottish news herself last year when The Herald named her to its list of the top 50 most influential women in the country. This year she’s busy as always. Our Kind of Traitor, an adaptation of the John le […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 28, 2014 -
Director Marius Van Neikerk on My Heart of Darkness
The journey of an international documentary to the United States is an uncertain one. Make its subject a lesser-known foreign war and the post-traumatic effects thereof, and you’ve got what an American agent calls a “hard sell.” My Heart of Darkness, a brooding foray into four veterans’ pasts, has been traveling the international festival circuit since premiering at IDFA in 2010. The years between then and now, where it’s having its U.S. premiere at L.A.’s Pan African Film Festival (PAFF), has been marked by all manner of revelations and misunderstandings—appropriate for a film about the reconciliation of four former enemies […]
by Daniel James Scott on Feb 11, 2012 -
ANNE BUFORD’S “ELEVATE”
Screening Times: Sunday March 13th, 4:30pm (Vimeo Theater), Tuesday march 15th, 10:00pm (Alamo Lamar C), Thursday March 17th, 6:00pm (Rollins Theatre) Half a decade in the making, Anne Buford’s Elevate chronicles how a group of gifted West African basketball players respond as they are feverishly recruited by American schools on the promise of their skills on the hardwood, and how coping with the adjustment to American life may be the toughest thing of all. Filmmaker: How did you first hear of the West African basketball players whose stories Elevate chronicles? Buford: In the Fall of 2004, RC Buford, who besides […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 15, 2011 -
“Starting With an Idea is Fake. It’s a Dead Form”: Claire Denis on White Material
Plenty of associations come to mind when one thinks of a Claire Denis film; the French auteur’s work is intelligent, nuanced, and frankly, often slow. Denis approaches her films like a sculptor, beginning with the giant block of matter that is a life (or lives) and whittling the irrelevant away until she finds a character’s essence. So it comes as something a surprise that the final act of Denis’ latest, White Material, plays out as something of a suspense thriller; Denis has worked in genre filmmaking before (notably Trouble Every Day), but typically inverts and eschews genre convention. However, while […]
by Zachary Wigon on Nov 17, 2010
