Kenyan filmmaker Hawa Essuman will showcase her latest film festival sensation Soul Boy, at the first ever-African woman film festival.
Hawa is one of the 23 female filmmakers who will make history at the first Women of the Sun Film Festival (WoS Film Festival) which will feature 25 films from 15 African countries with 15 of the filmmakers present at the screenings.
The seven-day festival to celebrate women filmmakers in Africa will be screened at The Bioscope, Johannesburg, South Africa from September 2 to 9 and is staged in conjunction with the Goethe Institute, the Gauteng Film Commission (GFC) and the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC).
The WoS organissers say the festival offers a unique opportunity to see great films and to meet the exceptional women behind them.
“The time is ripe to change the widely held belief that filmmaking is a male domain,” says Eve Rantseli, Director of Women of the Sun. “Women in film have much to say and are saying it with unique vision and flair. The launch of this annual women’s film festival will be the start of getting women filmmakers and their works part of the mainstream.”
Soul boy is directed by Hawa, written by Billy Kahora and produced by Marie Steinmann and Tom Tykwer.
It is a story about 14 year-old Abila who lives with his parents in Kibera, one of the largest slums in East Africa. One morning the teenager discovers his father ill and delirious. Someone has stolen his soul, mumbles the father as he sits huddled in a corner.
Abila is shocked and confused but wants to help his father and goes in search of a suitable cure. Supported by his friend Shiku who is the same age as him, he learns that his father has gambled his soul away in the company of a spiritual woman.
The teenager doesn’t want to believe it and sets about looking for the witch. When he finally discovers her in the darkest corner of the ghetto, she gives him seven challenging tasks to save his father’s lost soul. Abila embarks on an adventurous journey which leads him right through the microcosm of his home town
Guests include Jyoti Mistry (South Africa), Tagreed Elsanhouri (Sudan), Fanta Nacro (Burkino Faso), highly acclaimed Algerian director Djamila Sahraoui, Zimbabwe’s award winning novelist and film director, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the first Angolan woman to ever make a feature film, Maria Joao Ganga.
No comments:
Post a Comment