The Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination (EBCCI)

The University of the West Indies ? Cave Hill Campus

in collaboration with

U.S. Embassy ? Bridgetown

present

Black History Month – February 2008

Film Screenings at the EBCCI Cinemateque

These film screenings will be held during the month of February and a new schedule will be announced each week. Please check below for the dates and times for the films for this week, as well as a brief synopsis of each film?

ADMISSION is FREE!!!!!

Thursday, February 7

7:00pm Quartier Mozart – Jean-Pierre Bekolo (80 mins)

Followed by a Discussion with Professor Gladstone Yearwood

One of the most delightfully unexpected African films in decades, Quartier Mozart was awarded the Prix Afrique en Creation at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival and has enchanted film festival audiences from New York to New Delhi. Told over a 48-hour period in a working class neighborhood in Yaounde, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film is the story of the not-very-sentimental education of a young schoolgirl known as Queen of the ‘Hood. Maman Thekla, the local sorceress, helps her enter the body of a young man, My Guy, so she can discover for herself the real “sexual politics” of the quarter. Meanwhile, Maman Thekla herself assumes the shape of Panka, a familiar comic figure in Cameroonian folklore who can cause a man’s penis to disappear with a simple handshake.

Saturday, February 9

3:00pm Le Franc – Djibril Diop Mambety (45 mins/English subtitles)

This is a whimsical but sardonic parable about the plight of everyday Africans buffeted by the changing winds of the international monetary system. The hero, Marigo, is an African Charlie Chaplin, whose dream of being a musician helps him survive in a world of bureaucratic red-tape, urban decay and economic chaos.

5:00pm La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil/The Little Girl who sold the Sun – Djibril Diop Mambety (1999) (45 mins/English subtitles)

This is a simple tale of a crippled, yet resilient little girl fighting for her economic independence against an unjust marketplace as a metaphor for Africa?s struggle to survive in an increasingly globalized economy. She refuses to accept the role the world has assigned to her; as a result, her self-reliant vision has the effect of transforming the reality around her.

7:00pm Touki Bouki – Djibril Diop Mambety (1973) (85 mins/English subtitles)

Alienated from their society in Senegal, young lovers Mory and Anta fantasize about freedom far from the dusty streets of their hometown of Dakar. They long to escape, and in their fevered imaginations, their dream city of Paris, doesn?t seem that far away. So the couple embark on an exhilarating adventure as they try to hustle money for their passage to a new life. Although both of them head off to their destination, only one of them will stay on to face the truth of realising a dream.

8:30pm Lumumba – Raoul Peck (115 Mins)

The true story of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Haitian-born and later Congo-raised writer and director Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the mail clerk and beer salesman with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising belief in the capacity of his homeland to build a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgium overlords. Lumumba emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba’s own administration; a true story of political intrigue and murder where political entities, captains of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony.