DANBURY, CONN. — 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 from Feb. 7 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 WestConn, will present a different film each week. Day and evening screenings throughout the festival will be in the Student Center Theater on the university’s Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. All film showings will be free and the public is invited. Professor of Anthropology Dr. Rob Whittemore, who coordinates the annual festival, will lead an open discussion following each screening.

This year’s series will feature three movies released in 2004 by directors in South Africa, Angola and Namibia, as well as a 2005 release from the west central African nation of Niger. Economic exploitation, civil and regional warfare, racial discrimination and political repression are recurring themes in the four films, offering an evocative, frank and sometimes whimsical African perspective on the continent’s crises and challenges during the past century. Films scheduled for screening during this year’s festival include:

• Wednesday, Feb. 7, at noon and Thursday, Feb. 8, at 7 p.m.: “Arlit: Deuxieme Paris” (Arlit: The Second Paris) by Niger director Idrissou Mora Kpai (in French and indigenous languages, with subtitles). Presented in a documentary format, the film explores the economic and human devastation wrought by the collapse of the uranium mining boom in Arlit, once a thriving sub-Saharan town that now struggles to cope with the aftereffects of the ephemeral overseas investment that fueled that boom. Set against the sweeping panoramas of daily life at the edge of the Sahara Desert, Whittemore observed the film provides “testimonials of local witnesses left behind who describe the impact of overseas investments in a strategic commodity extracted at the expense of local safety, health and prospects for a better life.”
• Wednesday, Feb. 14, at noon and Thursday, Feb. 15, at 7 p.m.: “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. 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,” Whittemore said.
• Wednesday, Feb. 21, at noon and Thursday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m.: “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,” Gamboa seeks to “give us an Angolan story that speaks for countless regional wars whose end leaves local peoples with the burden of building a bearable future.”  

• Wednesday, Feb. 28, at noon and Thursday, March 1, at 7 p.m.: “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. 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.”

The African Film Festival is sponsored by the WestConn department of social sciences and supported by the WCSU Class of 1961 John Tufts Memorial Fund, the WCSU International Center, Office of Student Affairs, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs and Affirmative Action Programs.

For more information, call the WestConn Office of University Relations at (203) 837-8486.