Forward Thinking: Africa in Motion 2014

Right back to its debut edition in 2006, the Africa in Motion film festival has struck a balance between old and new; between presenting landmark classics from the continent’s key auteurs and showcasing emerging talent from Casablanca to Durban. In its ninth year, the festival formalises this joint interest in past and present by taking its theme from the concept of Sankofa – an adinkra symbol usually depicted as a bird with its head turned backwards, moving forwards while recognising where it’s been. Under a banner of ‘looking back, reaching forward’, the resulting programme is notable for its temporal breadth – from colonial cinema of the silent era through to contemporary science-fiction.

The most prominent expressions of the ‘looking back’ side of things are two strands that recognise 20th anniversaries – one positive, one traumatic. The former celebrates two decades since South Africans of all races went to the polls in the first democratic general election; the latter, 20 years since the Rwandan genocide. In the first strand, the sufferings and legacies of apartheid are the explicit focus of several films on the schedule, including American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 documentary Come Back, Africa and Oliver Schmitz’s Mapantsula, banned on its release in 1987 but now considered a key example of anti-apartheid cinema. Alongside these historically significant texts are new documentaries that contemplate the period’s politics, including Prisoner 46764: The Untold Legacy of Andrew Mlangeni (about an ANC member arrested at Rivonia and imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Mandela) and Meg Rickard’s 1994: The Bloody Miracle, which interviews some of those who attempted to violently derail the country’s burgeoning democracy.

Elsewhere in the strand, and in keeping with the theme of moving forwards as well as looking back, there are films with more contemporary focal points – most notably Future Sound of Mzansi, in which DJ and rapper Spoek Mathambo provides a guide to the country’s vibrant electronic music scene, from kwaito to shangaan electro and beyond. Meanwhile, for those who prefer music movies with a more populist, triumph-of-the-underdog feel, Hear Me Move promises Johannesburg’s answer to Streetdance et al – after which you can try out your pantsula moves at the closing party in Edinburgh’s Summerhall.

The Rwanda strand is smaller but similarly multi-faceted. The '94 genocide itself is confronted and commemorated in Keepers of Memory, in which director Eric Kabera (who will attend the festival to lead a pre-film masterclass and post-film discussion) revisits massacre sites and gathers eyewitness accounts. Kabera also makes an appearance in Finding Hillywood (tagline: 'The power of film to heal') which profiles Rwanda’s growing film industry and the part it has played in the country’s ongoing recovery.

Elsewhere in the listings, AiM’s pan-African curation takes in both well-established national cinemas (including Nigeria’s 2013 African Academy Award winner Confusion Na Wa) and countries with less familiar filmmaking heritage (e.g. Botswana – represented by intriguing rockumentary March of the Gods: Botswana Metalheads). Indeed, the programme draws from all across the continent, from the Maghreb (including the UK premiere of Moroccan filmmaker Mohamed Amin Benamraoui’s Adios Carmen, set during the Spanish occupation) through Mali (Abderrahmane Sissako’s much-anticipated, Cannes-winning Timbuktu), Burkina Faso (which supplies opening film Soleils) and Ethiopia (Angelina Jolie exec-produced legal drama Difret).

AiM also considers Africa’s global diaspora: for instance, Jogo de Corpo (Body Games) follows capoeira mestre Cobra Mansa as he unpicks the Brazilian martial art’s African origins, while They Are We sees the Cuban descendants of a girl sold into slavery in the 1830s reunited with distant relatives in Sierra Leone. Finally, a different kind of outsider insight is offered by 1927 silent film Siliva the Zulu, one of the latest examples of the festival’s commitment to unearthing lost African classics. A combination of ethnography and romantic fantasy directed by Italian explorer and filmmaker Attilio Gatti, Siliva inevitably presents Africa through a colonial prism, but is nonetheless highly valued as a rare document of Zulu tribal customs and everyday life. So whether you nurture an existing passion for African movies or are looking to broaden your world cinema horizons, AiM’s cultural, ethnic and genre diversity offers plenty to discover.