Berlin’s Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art has unveiled its latest programme. This month, films from African filmmakers Abderrahmane Sissako, Kenneth Gyang, and Jean-Marie Teno will be screened by the German establishment.
The films
Sissako’s 2006 film, Bamako, will be screened at the Arsenal 1, a cinema run by the institute. Bamako is set in a courtyard in the titular Mali capital. In the courtyard, citizens confront such bodies as the World Bank, the IMF, and African governments over the controversial structural adjustment policies encouraged by the west.
Starring Aïssa Maïga, Hélène Diarra, and Tiécoura Traoré, the film received the inaugural Film Award of the Council of Europe (FACE) at the Istanbul International Film Festival in April 2007. It claimed the coveted Best French-Language Film/Meilleur Film Francophone award at the Prix Lumière and earned the Audience Award at the 2006 Paris Cinema festival.
Also screening at the Arsenal Cinema 1 is Gyang’s 2013 film, Confusion Na Wa. The film covers 24 hours in the lives of an assortment of characters. Starring Ali Nuhu, Tunde Aladese, and Ramsey Nouah, Confusion Na Wa won the Best Screenplay award, Best Film, and Best Nigerian Film at the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA).
A discussion featuring Nuhu and Aladese will follow the screening. Film scholar Vinzenz Hediger will moderate the session. The Goethe University Frankfurt and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) are supporters of the event.
Also in Arsenal’s lineup for the month is Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno’s 2005 documentary, Le Malentendu Colonial. Christian evangelism and its legacy in Africa come under scrutiny in the film.
Sissako and Teno’s films are presented under the aegis of the Harun Farocki Institut’s research project, Terms and Conditions: The Legal Form of Images. The project is “dedicated to the legal matrix of artistic practice and cultural production”.
For more details of the Arsenal’s October programming, see here.
