WORLD PREMIERE

With the presence of the directors LAURENT BENHAMOU and LUCY DURÁN.

World-renowned, award-winning Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko takes us on a unique journey to follow the trail of his instrument, the kora, a West African 21-string harp whose origins are shrouded in legend. The journey begins at Ballaké’s home in Bamako, capital of Mali where he was born and raised. We hear his talented group of young kora students play sublime music on his rooftop. His cousin demonstrates the complex craft of making a kora, and takes Ballaké for the first time to visit the majestic rocky hills where the great Mali empire began. Travelling further westwards to Senegal and Gambia, where his family on both sides are from, Ballaké traverses by canoe the beautiful Casamance river to drop in on a family of kora players who keep alive the old traditional style of the instrument. Inspired, Ballaké plays the kora late into the night, to the sounds of crickets and night birds, remembering his own heritage in that part of the world. Narrated by celebrated Malian rapper Oxmo Puccino, this film takes us to the heart of the kora tradition, and to the mystique and legend around it.

LAURENT BENHAMOU

French of North African origin, has always been guided by his love of music. Before becoming a film director, he worked on radio, programmed at a concert hall in Paris and spent six years on the influential magazine Mondomix supervising video production. In 2012 he directed Croisées Métisses, his first 52-minute documentary for French TV. Ahinamá was filmed in Cuba in 2017, and received the SACEM prize for best music documentary. In 2022 he co-directed with Lucy Durán Ballaké Sissoko, kora tales, filmed in Mali, Senegal and Gambia, for TV5 Monde.

LUCY DURÁN

(Professor of Music at SOAS, University of London), of Spanish heritage, specializes in the music of Mali and Cuba. She was presenter of BBC Radio 3’s World Routes for its duration, 2000-2013. She has produced 26 albums, with three Grammy nominations. Her films include Tegere Tulon: handclapping songs of Mali (2019), nominated in 2021 for Best Short Documentary, at Cannes International Pan-African Film festival. In 2022 Durán curated the film cycle for Festival Imaterial in Evora, Portugal, and was awarded the Festival prize for her work. She is co-director of the film Ballaké Sissoko, kora tales, which receives its world premiere in Evora at the Imaterial festival in 2023.

SARA CF GOUVEIA
Film selected by Laboratório Associado IN2PAST

Atanasio Nyusi is a powerful storyteller and legendary Mapiko dancer. He takes us on a surreal journey that interweaves Mozambique’s colonial past and present. With music, dance, and using the body as an archive of a collective knowledge, this documentary shows us the horrors of war through the beauty of dance and poetry.

SARA GOUVEIA

Award winning filmmaker living in South Africa. Her films have strong visual aesthetics and explore the line between fiction and reality. Sara’s first feature length documentary “The Sound of Masks” had its World Premiere at IDFA 2018 and was described in Africa is a Country as “a visual meditation on the nature of memory in postcolonial societies”. The film was selected for the Marrakech International Film Festival 2018, Hot Docs 2019, New York African Film Festival 2019, the Durban International Film Festival and DocLisboa 2019, amongst others and received several awards. Sara has worked as a writer, director, cinematographer, editor and has created a number of music videos.

ALEXANDRINE BOUDREAULT-FOURNIER, DJ JIGÜE

As a result of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), many French settlers travelled to Eastern Cuba with African enslaved people to escape the revolt. The Tumba Francesa Societies, which were known as a brotherhood and a mutual aid network, emerged from these waves of slave migrations. Eventually, they became integral constituents of Cuban culture. La Tumba Mambi (recently awarded Best Music Documentary by the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK) is a docu-fiction film based on the Tumba Francesa, La Caridad de Oriente, which is located in the city of Santiago de Cuba. Through the Society’s youngest member, Flavio, who is collecting information about the Tumba Francesa for a school project, we meet his grand-mother Andrea and mother Queli, two charismatic knowledge keepers of their rich cultural traditions. The original film soundtrack composed and produced by Cuban based DJ Jigüe, in collaboration with Tumba Francesa members, is a rhythmic and striking reminder that the present is grounded in a history of struggles for freedom.

ALEXANDRINE BOUDREAULT-FOURNIER

Alexandrine is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She conducts research on electronic music, media infrastructure, and digital data consumption and circulation in Cuba since 2000. She wrote the book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2019), and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anthropologica. She directed the film Golden Scars (2010) and co-directed the films Guardians of the Night (2018), Fabrik Funk (2015), and The Eagle (2015).

DJ JIGÜE

is currently one of the most well-known DJs within the electronic scene in Cuba, developing his own aesthetic called Tropical Afrofuturism. He combines ancestral rhythms with the live presence of Afro-Cuban drums, Afro-futuristic and electronic waves. DJ Jigüe is the creator behind Guámpara Music, the first independent urban music label in Cuba.

KAREN BOSWALL DE GIVANDÁS

film will be shown with Portuguese subtitles

Drawing on a rich body of research conducted by young Mozambican musicians and filmmakers, in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker Karen Boswall de Givandás, “Dance My Daughter” offers a female perspective on Mozambique’s slow progress towards the recognition of the human rights of women and girls across the country. Here, where the voices of women and girls often go unheard, with no shared language, song and dance act as vehicles of protest and provocation, lamentation, and celebration. Through song, dance and stories they share the secrets of their relationship with the land, their husbands, their family and their community. In Niassa, in the north of the country, women share their songs of ritual, negotiation, farming and motherhood and reflect on the precarity of living off the land and the challenges of bringing daughters into an ever-changing world. In the capital, Maputo, a feminized version of xigubu, a male warrior dance, is performed by young women in response to increasing levels of gender-based violence. Nearly fifty years after Mozambique gained Independence from Portugal, the next generation of Mozambican researchers and filmmakers draw on the nation’s strong legacy of revolutionary song, dance and cinema to ensure more women’s stories are told through their own voices.

KAREN BOSWALL DE GIVANDÁS

Filmmaker, ethnomusicologist and visual anthropologist currently at the University of Sussex and London South Bank University, and a professional musician who lived and worked for many years in Mozambique. Her award-winning films and radio documentaries explore the spiritual, cultural and environmental worlds of individuals and communities through their music and dance practices. She conducted her doctoral research in collaborative music research and film production in Mozambique with a focus on women’s representation. She continues to use collaborative and decolonial audio-visual methodologies to support those working on improving their access to basic human rights in Mozambique, especially women and girls.

ZUZANA SOLAKIEWICZ

This slow-paced, beautifully-filmed documentary explores the relationship between women, song and land in Poland. It is the songs and their lyrics, commenting with humour and poignancy on life, love, land, and female agency, that provide a narrative structure to the film: raw, authentic, and devoid of modern interventions. The gifted traditional vocalist and ethnographer Ewa Grochowsva is the protagonist, joined by inter-generational groups of women, as they go about their daily tasks in the fields and at home, whether kneading dough, preparing for a wedding, or making jokes about boyfriends. Ewa’s enchanting voice conveys her love of “the cool soil on her feet”; she tells us that “my sisters went to school and I went to the fields”. Through folk songs, these women express their connection with nature as well as every-day, often difficult, life experiences. They reminisce about the potato harvest, examine how working the land has affected their hands. We hear the sounds of wind blowing in the fields, of the wild birds, of machines harvesting grain - soundscapes that attest to an older way of life in rural Poland. The Soil gives a rare platform to rural Polish women to express through music their lives and aspirations and the need for magical thinking. The camera closely examines the protagonists with tenderness, while depicting nature from a distance, as something beautiful, but impossible to tame.

ZUZANNA SOLAKIEWICZ

Polish writer and director Zuzanna Solakiewicz graduated in Humanities, University of Warsaw. Between 2005 and 2009 she studied film directing at the Sam Spiegel Film & TV School in Jerusalem. She completed an internship at the Lodz Film School. Her shorts and documentaries are successfully presented at many international film festivals. Her feature length creative documentary “15 corners of the world” won Festival del film Locarno 2014 – Critic’s Week Award and was shown worldwide on festivals and released in cinemas, VOD platforms and on Polish TV.

with the presence of the director CELIA LOWENSTEIN

Screened on Channel 4 (UK) in 1993 to critical acclaim, this remarkable documentary features Dakar’s superstar native son, Youssou N’Dour with unique footage. Shot on location and narrated by N’Dour, the film explores the enchanting sounds of N’Dour’s home town, Dakar, capital of Senegal where he still lives, whose influences have shaped his music. The film features his virtuoso band the Super Etoile – some of whom have passed away since the film was made - along with the blistering drums and dances of sabar parties, the plaintive religious songs of the Baye Faal, and N’Dour with The Super Etoile performing live at the epicentre of his music, the now defunct Soumbedioune night club. A moving visit to the slave island of Gorée leads to an unprecedented powerful musical encounter between N’Dour and the late virtuoso kora player, Soriba Kouyaté. We also see N’Dour deconstructing the complex mbalax rhythms of his music in his own recording studio, Xippi [meaning, Eyes Open] and his band members take a stroll through the Medina where N’Dour grew up. The depiction of this musician and his city merge to form a beautifully powerful portrait of a modern-day griot, one of the most famous musicians and public figures in Africa.

CELIA LOWENSTEIN

(USA and France) is a director/producer/writer whose more than 50 films are a hybrid of styles which include narrative fiction, musicals, documentary and films in verse. With a personal interest in music, science, art, poetry and the discourse of ideas, her films have been screened in cinemas, film festivals and shown on the BBC, Channel 4 (UK), Channel 5 (UK), ARTE/ZDF (Germany and France), PBS, Animal Planet, NOVA, National Geographic, HBO, Discovery and Biography channels. In 2019 she was awarded the Best Documentary at the International Women’s Film Festival for her film on the story of the Jewish people through the architecture of the synagogue. She lives between Paris and Santa Fe, New Mexico.