Films From Niger And Southern Africa—

Annual WestConn African Film Series Is

 Exploring The Aftermath Of War, Exploitation

DANBURY — The socially devastating aftermaths of war, apartheid, colonial rule and economic exploitation provide the themes for four movies by contemporary African directors that will be featured through March 1 during Western Connecticut State University’s 11th Annual African Film Festival.

The festival, organized as part of Black History Month activities in February at the university, will present a different film each week. Day and evening screenings throughout the festival will be presented in the Student Center Theater, 181 White Street (Route 6). All film showings will be free and open to the public.

Dr Rob Whittemore, a professor of anthropology who coordinates the annual festival, will lead an open discussion following each screening.

Economic exploitation, civil and regional warfare, racial discrimination and political repression are recurring themes in the films, offering an evocative, frank and sometimes whimsical African perspective on the continent’s crises and challenges during the past century.

Screenings will be presented at noon on Wednesdays and at 7 pm on Thursdays. Films scheduled for screening during this year’s festival are as follows:

*Wednesday, February 14, and Thursday, February 15: Zulu Love Letter by South African director Ramadan Suleman (in English and Zulu, with subtitles).

Thirteen years after she became a victim of repression during the apartheid period, the film’s central character Thandeka is a journalist skeptical of prospects for racial reconciliation following the end of white minority rule, and profoundly bitter over apartheid’s legacy of broken lives and lost educational and professional opportunities.

Mr Suleman explores how Thandeka’s obsession with the past leaves her scarcely able to “attend to her mute daughter’s yearning to know her as more than a self-righteous crusader,” Dr Whittemore said.

*Wednesday, February 21, and Thursday, February 22: O Heroi (The Hero) by Angolan director Zeze Gamboa (in Portuguese, with subtitles).

The film recounts the story of a soldier who returns from the nation’s prolonged internal conflict to begin the painful transition to daily life, made more difficult by a physical handicap, unemployment and homelessness.

Through the varied personal encounters of the returning “hero,” the director seeks to give viewers an Angolan story that speaks for countless regional wars whose end leaves local peoples with the burden of building a bearable future.

*Wednesday, February 28, and Thursday, March 1: Le Malentendu Colonial (The Colonial Misunderstanding) by Namibian director Jean-Marie Teno (in English, French and German, with subtitles).

Teno’s film is set at the dawn of the 20th Century in Namibia, exploring the 1904 genocide of the indigenous Herero people during the period of German colonial rule. Dr Whittemore noted that the European colonial powers’ division of Africa in the three decades prior to World War I “set the stage for ‘modern’ European values to sweep aside indigenous beliefs and social systems. Teno’s whimsical commentary and interviews lead us to imagine an African Renaissance exposing the flaws in a blindly global economy.”

For more information, call the WestConn Office of University Relations at 837-8486.