I have just seen a short film called Moving Windmills and wanted to share it with you. It is an extremely inspirational story of a young Malawian William Kamkwmamba, who was forced to drop out of school for lack of money. But he did not discourage: when he saw a picture of a windmill in a textbook he decided to build one to power his family’s home. The film is now distributed online both via The Pangea Day Event, which has a big selection of other interesting films available too, and via William Kamkwamba’s Malawi Windmill Blog.

Moving Windmills at the Pangea Day Event web site
William Kamkwamba’s Malawi Windmill Blog

I would like to list here and comment on some films that have had a good (read: shaking) effect on me. I’m rather omnivorous with cinema but most of all I like realism and all forms of subversiveness and the should-I-cry-or-should-I-laugh kind of comedy that derives from a realistic setting. Documentaries and stories that hang on the edge between comedy and tragedy or fragmented and non-linear plots that leave the viewer slightly disturbed are all a go-go!

I first thought of making a top 10 list of my all time favorite films, but it would not do justice to any of the works - I cannot put them in any order of preference really. So I’ll just keep coming back to this post every now and then with an update and start today only with the one by Djibril Diop Mambety:

  La Petite vendeuse du soleil     

I just saw it on dvd again the other night, the story puts me on such a good mood! I think even every Dakarois pickpocket should see this film and be ashamed of themselves when they discover Sili, the small girl with polio, who decides to help her blind grandmother by selling newspapers in the streets of Dakar. Sili beats the street boys in selling, and she is not discouraged for one little moment despite some setbacks that come her way.

   Das Leben der Anderen by Florian Henckell von Donnersmarck

 This one too is a must! It’s shows what life is like in the former German Democratic Republic behind the iron wall and under the omnipresent surveillance of Stasi, the secret police. Hardly the first film to tell how communism affected the life of individuals, but this one has a very interesting angle - it shows how the system itself can threaten and destroy those who are running it. I felt a heavy weight on my chest throughout the film - very enjoyable indeed! 

  Mahamat Saleh Haroun: Daratt (Tchad, 2006)

This must have been the first Tchadian film I have ever seen, a great story on how a young boy is able to resist to some of the terribly burdening expectations that are put on on him by his family. Silent and beautiful suspens.  

Adam Sie: Oumy et moi (Senegal, 2006)

Such a sweet documentary on the relationship of the Sierra Leonais director and her Senegalese girlfriend who is albino. So fresh views on young love and prejudice surrounding their commitment to each other.

  Joseph Gaï Ramaka: Karmen Geï (Senegal, 2001)

An adaptation of Prosper Mérimées text and Bizet’s opera à la Sénégalaise, simply empowering! I love the fact that it is through an African adaptation that some viewers may be first introduced to this classic work! 

Justine Bitagoye: Mieux vaut mal vivre que mourir (Burundi, 2006)

If you saw Darwin’s Nightmare, you know the category. Apocalyptic scenes that raise awareness of the status quo of many African cities: people - even small children - live in a dumping area, in this case in the centre of the Burundi capital, and eat what the carbage van pours on them. 

If you ever need to choose whether to see Aki Kaurismaki’s latest film Lights in the Dusk or Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako, my vote goes definitely for the latter. As it happened, I saw these two yesterday and the day before and the contrast just strikes me: Both directors give voice to the underpriviledged of the society, be it Finnish or Malian/African but I left the cinema after Kaurismaki’s film as numb as his characters, who stare into the emptiness and utter their dull so-called dialogues. Where the hell is the flesh and blood of the story? Perhaps it’s not fair to compare two so different works, especially when I really like some of Kaurismaki’s previous films, but I cannot help thinking that this latest one is almost elitist, oxygen-lacking snobbery.

On the contrary I urge you to see Sissako’s latest, where globalisation is put on trial and Malians speak their minds. You’ll see testimonials by real persons such as Aminata Traoré -former Minister of Culture and Tourism - or Samba Diakité who chants his testimony, and plenty of others. They will not let you leave the cinema undisturbed.

Last night I saw the film adaptation of Alaa Al-Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building. It was a three-hour-spectacle of Egyptian drama of people living, loving, hating and plotting in this famous building in downtown Cairo in Suleiman Basha Street. For me part of the fun in the screening was to try to understand the Egyptian Arabic and it was also interesting to observe the reactions of the fellow viewers among whom there were many invitees from the Middle East, I gather. They sometimes laughed at issues, which were clearly culturally bound and which did not open up to me, linguistically or otherwise. Well, I would have made the story perhaps less ‘entertaining’ and with less caricaturized characters and depicted the social struggle and the clash of values in their lives with more rawness… I wonder how the book shows it. 

Cairo still remains a mystery to me… Maybe it’s time to pay visit to this megalomanic metropole and see what it’s all about. So far my experience of Egypt is reduced to the fictive world of Waltari’s Sinuhe The Egyptian, I devoured the novel when I was a teenager. 

When I was four or something, I had already heard about the pyramids and Egypt, and one day I decided to walk there! I took the direction to where I had earlier seen, from the bus window, these huge gravel heaps in pyramide shape. I had our German shepherd to keep me company. The fact that these heaps were perhaps 5 kms from my home made no difference, they were just as far or close from home as Africa might have been to a four-year-old…and this all happened of course before the era of mobile phones and it had taken quite a long time for someone in the family to trace me on my route and bring me back before I reached the pyramids. I was told later that a neighbour had spotted me somewhere on my itinerary but he could not make me turn around, because I was so single-mindedly “on my way to Egypt” and because our German shepherd was so protective of me.