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Festival 2023

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Oct 27 -
Dec 31 2023

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Imagine destroying and remaking 'Out of Africa'

1985
In 1985 the Ethiopian famine, which claimed hundreds and thousands of lives, was the first time that international journalists broadcast live TV images of an African humanitarian disaster. The pictures of malnourished children still haunt the Northern imaginary of Africa today. 

1985 was also the year of the Hollywood production ‘Out of Africa’. A love story between two Europeans set in colonial Kenya, it represented Africa as a space of excitement, and adventure, for Europeans. Africa as backdrop in which Africans played a marginal role. The film won 7 Academy Awards.

These two narratives fundamentally shaped the way the North imagined Africa over the last 30 years. It is an image of a suffering continent in which Europeans have adventures and Africans have no agency. This period is finally ending. 

1992
In 1992 Kenneth Nnebue, a Lagos electronic merchant, shoots a film and puts it onto blank videocassettes. Living in Bondage, the story of a man struggling to make it in Lagos, is a huge success, selling over 500,000 copies. This is credited as the birth of Nollywood.

The following year Helen Ukpabio produces and stars in End of the Wicked which features many scenes pitting evangelical Christian beliefs against traditional African religion. This theme emerges as a major element in many Nollywood films. End of the Wicked sells hundreds of thousands of copies.

Today, Nollywood is both a multi-million dollar industry and the dominant media presence on the African continent. 

THE IMAGINARY PAST
These two very different media images, of Hollywood and Nollywood, exist independently of one another. But what would have happened if they had connected? What if, like ancient fables, they had fused with one another?

We imagine a past in which these images cross-fertilised and mutated into something very different. We imagine a director, Emeka, an outsider in the Nollywood scene, who tries to find a copy of ‘Out of Africa’ to see what all the fuss is about. 

But in our imaginary past, most of the copies of ‘Out of Africa’ have been destroyed. All Emeka can find is one minute of footage preserved as still images. But, before he can watch it, it is destroyed, shredded before his eyes by the international regulatory body, The Anti Cliche Police (ACP). 

Emeka, and his production company of geniuses and misfits, The Navant Guard (TNG) spend weeks re-assembling the film. Miraculously the audio track has remained intact. They watch it. The watch it again. They slow it down. They watch it again. They slow it down. They watch it again. 

Emeka and The Navant Guard decide to remake ‘Out of Africa’.

- Sam Hopkins and Sophia Bauer

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