The filmmakers' work shows the face of a modern and cosmopolitan Africa and challenges longstanding clichés about the continent.

Project highlights directing talent in seven African nations.

Languages: Multiples languages (Wolof, Kiswahili, Arabic, Nouchi,...) with subtitles
Run Time : 1hr45min

The African Metropolis Short Film Project is an initiative of the Goethe-Institut South Africa and South African executive producer Steven Markovitz, with support from Guaranty Trust Bank and the Hubert Bals Fund of International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The short films are set in Lagos (Director: Folasakin Iwajomo), Abidjan (Philippe Lacôte), Dakar (Marie KA), Johannesburg (Vincent Moloi), Cairo (Ahmed Ghoneimy) and Nairobi (Jim Chuchu).


THE SIX SHORT FILMS

Homecoming
Directed by Jim Chuchu
Running Time: 10:30 min
Language: English / Kiswahili; Subtitles: English
Fantasy, science fiction and infatuation fuse as an obsessed neighbour invents ever-stranger scenarios for wooing the girl of his dreams. Nothing is quite what it seems as a nerdy voyeur turns fiction into truth and the mundane into the unexpected in his quest to get the proverbial girl next door. Earth is about to be pulverised by a
meteor - or is it? - and it is the ideal opportunity to finally make known his unspoken desires - and be a knight on the proverbial white steed. But a mysterious stranger stands in the way of his
happiness. Will he overcome mass extinction and his own timidity and get the girl? A fun, warm, light-hearted look at obsession and the desire to be seen.

Director - Jim Chuchu
Chuchu, based in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, is a creative all-rounder, photographer, director, musician, and video artist. Chuchu's former band, Just A Band, was part of an art collective, and for them he co-directed what became known as "Kenya's first viral internet meme" starring the irrepressible Makmende. His current projects include a new album and a photography book set in
post-apocalyptic Africa.

Producer - Wanuri Kahui
In 2008, Wanuri completed her first feature film From A Whisper based on the real life events surrounding the August 7, twin bombings of US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998. The film won awards at the Africa Movie Academy Awards including Best Director and Best Picture, the Golden Dhow award for Best East African Picture at Zanzibar International Film Festival and Best Film at Kalasha, Kenya Film and TV awards. Shortly after she completed a documentary about the life of Nobel peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai entitled For Our Land (2009) for M-Net ‘Great Africans' Series. She has completed a short Science Fiction Film Pumzi (2009) that was partially funded by Focus Features (part of NBC universal), Goethe Institut and Changa Moto Fund in Kenya. Pumzi won Best Short at Cannes Independent Film Festival, May 2010 and took Silver at Carthage
Film Festival Tunisia, October 2010.

Producer - Idil Ibrahim
A New York-based filmmaker, Idil has lived and worked extensively in East Africa. Recently, she directed the ‘Making Of' documentary for the feature film Fishing Without Nets, filmed in Kenya, and based on the short film with the same title that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Idil served as Associate Producer on the film Laredo, Texas, which was also an official selection of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. She had a producing role on the film Trece Años, which also selected for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, as well as the Aspen Shortsfest, GenArt, Los Angeles International and Ashland Independent Film Festivals. Trece Años was also featured at Pangaea Day, a global multimedia event simultaneously aired and broadcast in locations around the globe such as Kigali, Cairo, London, Rio de Janeiro and New York with the mission and purpose to decrease divisions and create change and global unity through the power of film. Idil was selected to participate in the Tribeca All Access program at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival

Berea
Directed by Vincent Moloi
Running Time: 15:00 min
Language: English; Subtitles: English
Alone in his high-rise apartment, Aaron Zukerman's Berea is long-gone, but the old man has one last link to the here and now - a weekly visit from a beautiful stranger. Long after his friends and family have moved on, Jewish pensioner Aaron Zukerman remains in his inner-city apartment, his world getting ever smaller and smaller, as the city closes in on his memories and happiness. His focus is on a
weekly assignation with a kindly prostitute, for which he prepares days in advance. But when her unexpected replacement arrives one Friday, an initially angry response sparks a chain of events that ultimately changes the way the old man sees his world. A gentle, poetic ode to the power of reinvention.

Director - Vincent Moloi
Moloi, primarily a documentary filmmaker, but has directed different drama series for TV. He studied Media Studies before cutting his teeth at Soweto Community TV initiative. For the SABC he has made
ground-breaking documentaries including A Pair of Boots and Bicycle, profiling black South African soldiers in WWII; Nightsweepers, an earnest examination of women sweeping the streets of Johannesburg at night; I am A Rebel about a South African author and Robben Island anti-apartheid prisoner turned anti-capitalist activist. With his African Metropolis inclusion Berea, he revisits themes of diminished power he first explored in Men of Gold, his 2007 documentary reflecting the contradictions of being poor, white, previously privileged and now disempowered in a post-apartheid world.

Producer - Makgano Mamabolo
Makgano Mamabolo matriculated as a Drama student at the National School of the Arts and then went onto acquiring her Bachelor of Live Performance from AFDA in 2001. She has since been working as a professional actress for the past five years, having covered a spectrum of genres from presenting, to soapie, to sitcom, to drama, to film, as well as performing Miss Kwa Kwa, her one woman show for theatres country wide during all this time. She is not just an actress however, but moves comfortably from in front of the camera, to behind the scenes. Apart from having directed and produced television magazine show inserts for DSTV, she has for the past three years also been a Conceptualist for programmes such as Home Affairs, Mazinyo dot Q… spanning from drama to comedy, but more so a Writer, for programmes such as Fela's TV and Nomzamo. She is now moving into the next progressive step in her career as a Creative Producer, with her first programme being SOCIETY, under Puo Pha Productions - a production company she is co-partner of.

Producer - Lodi Matsetela
WRITER - PRODUCER - DIRECTOR - PARTNER AT PUO PHA PRODUCTIONS. Drama school matriculant, Advertising graduate, currently working towards her Masters in film at Howard University in
Washington DC. Having worked mostly in television, she along with her production company are delving into the development of feature films.

To Repel Ghosts
Directed by Philippe Lacôte
Running Time: 20:00 min
Language: Nouchi / French; Subtitles: English
During a visit to Abidjan, French artist Jean-Michel Baquiat comes face to face with demons, ghosts, doubt - and his own death On 12 August 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat passed away. Nevertheless, his memory remains very much alive. This film pays homage to him by telling the unknown story of his trip to the Ivory Coast. Basquiat arrived in Abidjan at a time when he was exhausted. Haunted by his ghosts. All his hope lay in this first encounter with Africa…

Director - Philippe Lacôte
Lacôte started his professional career as a radio reporter in 1989 with a series of podcasts on the fall of the Berlin wall. Short fiction films followed; The Messenger and Affaire Libinski were shown in
several international festivals. Alongside these he developed documentary work including Cairo Hours, and the acclaimed Chronicles of War in the Ivory Coast. He is currently shooting his first
feature film, Run, coproduced by Arte, which is the junction of his fiction and documentary approaches. Lacôte was part of the Cannes Film Festival's Cinefondation programme.

Producer - Claire Gadéa
Claire started her career at JBA Production with producer Jacques Bidou. As a production assistant, she worked on about ten feature films including One Evening After the War by Rithy Panh (Un Certain Regard, Cannes 1998), The Mutants by Teresa Villaverde (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Cannes 1998), April Captains by Maria de Medeiros (Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2000) and Lumumba by Raoul Peck
(Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Cannes 2000). In 2007, she joined Steamboat Films as a production manager. She is responsible for the ‘collection design' for the Franco-German TV channel Arte, in coproduction with the Centre Georges Pompidou (18 documentaries produced to date). In 2008, at Lobster Films, she created the VoD website Europa Film Treasures, with the support of the Media
Programme of the European Union and in partnership with 30 European film archives. Since 2008, Claire Gadéa has been working at Banshee Films as a producer. She is currently producing Run, Philippe Lacôte's first feature-length film, in partnership with Wassakara Productions, Diam Production, Arte France CInéma, Canal + Afrique, Onac-Ci, CNC, OIF, Bac Films.

The Other Woman (L'autre Femme)
Directed by Marie KA
Running Time: 12:15 min
Language: French; Subtitles: English
A housewife in her fifties discovers her true self when she has to accept her husband's second wife into her home From Senegal comes a brave, controversial film set in the secret world of multiple spouse households. KA's film homes in on one story as Madeleine and her husband's new, young second wife develop a relationship far
beyond conventional norms. The intimacy has the potential to blow apart a stable domestic situation, but it also has the potential to rewrite the story of both women's lives. A bold and exquisitely tender film, beautifully acted and sensitively filmed against the backdrop of colourful, beguiling Dakar.

Director and producer - Marie KA
Senegalese-Martinican filmmaker and screenwriter Marie KA is the driving force behind Dakar-based production company Picture Box, makers of educational and fictional films for the regional West African market. KA studied film at the Sorbonne and at Loyola Marymount University in California before returning home to concentrate on African stories. She has won various awards for her writing and directing, notably at Fespaco and at the Francophone Film Festival of Angoulême. Picture Box is currently developing its first feature film and a television series for children.

The Line-Up
Directed by Folasakin Iwajomo
Running Time: 13:00 min
Language: English/Pidgin English/Yoruba; Subtitles: English
How far would you go to pay for a child's life-saving operation? Ten men in a taxi, strangers to each other, head to an unusual line up, where they must strip and subject themselves to blindfolds and inspection by a mysterious woman and her charge. Only seven
go home that night, big money in their pockets. But what of the other three? The ritual is replayed again and again, and the attrition continues. For one man the rumours of how much ‘the chosen'
make spurs him on - he is desperate for the money to pay for a child's operation. But what price being chosen? Iwajomo's spooky, disturbing film confronts the perils of the poverty trap and the abuse of the desperate, in an allegory for the exploited.

Director - Folasakin Iwajomo
Iwajomo teaches video editing at his alma mater, the International Film and Broadcast Academy, in Lagos. His first short film, Blood On My Hands won the best short film award at the Goethe Institut
Lagos short film night, and the same film was nominated at the
Durban International Film Festival in 2010. His second short, Not
Today, won best screenplay at the In-Short Film Festival in 2011. He
also won the MTV Shuga one minute short film competition on
HIV/AIDS with his film Point Blank.

Producer - Victor Okhai
Victor Okhai is a producer, scriptwriter, director and film consultant. One of the founders of the Directors' Guild of Nigeria, he was a scriptwriter with the New Village Headmaster, the New Masquerade and Second Chance all on NTA's Network service. He was also Assistant Director/Assistant Producer for Zanani, a 16mm feature for UNESCO/NFC and Assistant Director, Doctors' Quarters a medical series on MNET. He has produced and directed several home movies and television series and was series producer for the BBC World Service Trust's radio drama STORY STORY. He has been filming features for the BBC world service news and the series "African Dreams" and has line produced for most of the major global television networks including CNN. Okhai has sat on several film contest and festival juries and acts as a consultant to various local and international organizations including UNICEF, Goethe Institut, Human Rights Watch, the government of the Republic of Cameroon on Cinema etc. and is Kodak's reseller in charge of Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon.

The Cave
Directed by Ahmed Ghoneimy
Running Time: 19:00 min
Language: Arabic; Subtitles: English
Adham, a young lad from Alexandria travels to Cairo to pursue his musical career and rebound with his old friend, Amr, a member of his former band who has since attempted to settle his life.

Director - Ahmed Ghoneimy
Ghoneimy, who studied directing through FAMU in Prague, is an Alexandrian native, where he majored in Expressive Arts and studied filmmaking at the city's Jesuit Culture Centre. Stints as a cameraman and assistant director were followed by his own critically-acclaimed work being made - his second short fiction film, Bahari won the Hamburg short film award at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, and had its European premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Producer - Tamer El Said
Egyptian filmmaker and producer Tamer El Said was born in 1972 in Cairo; he studied filmmaking and journalism and went on to make many documentaries and short films that received several international and local awards. In 2007, Tamer El Said founded Zero Production to produce independent films. He is currently setting up Cimatheque - Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, to support independent and alternative cinema in Egypt. He is also finishing his first feature length film, In the Last Days of the City due for release in the coming winter.


2013 | 38th TIFF, Toronto
* Selection - Contemporary World Cinema
* International Premiere
* Screening: Thursday September 5 / Jackman Hall / 6:00 PM
* Screening: Saturday September 7 / Jackman Hall / 9:00 AM
http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/festival/2013/homecomingafricanmet

2013 | 34th DIFF, Durban
* Selection - Section: Short Fiction
* World Premiere
* Screening, followed by Q&A: 20 JULY - 17:00 - MUSGRAVE B
* Screening, followed by Q&A: 21 JULY - 16:00 - BLUE Waters Hotel
* Sundowner: 21 JULY - 18:00 - Tsogo Sun Elangeni Hotel, Pooldeck
* Screening, followed by Q&A: 23 JULY - 16:00 - Ohlange School Hall, Inanda
Panel discussion: 21 July - 09H00 - South Deck Room, 11th floor, Blue Waters Hotel
www.durbanfilmfest.co.za/2013/feature-films/african-metropolis