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Winners of the Africa First Short Film program
ride the subway in New York City

The Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program was started this year to inspire young filmmakers by awarding five worthy individuals $10,000 dollars towards a short film.  On September 24, a quintet of directors were chosen out of hundreds of entrants: Edouard Bamporiki (from Rwanda), Jenna Bass (from South Africa), Jan-Hendrik Beetge (also from South Africa), Dyana Gaye (from Senegal), and Wanuri Kahiu (from Kenya). This November they were brought to New York to meet with Focus CEO James Schamus and others and to talk about their work. We sat down with the five.

Tell us about your project.

Wanuri Kahiu: My project Pumzi––which is Swahili for “breathe”––is a futuristic short set in Nairobi when the outside is extinct and has been outlawed. Everyone lives inside a building. And everything happens inside of this building, except one character, Asha, believes that a tree exists on the outside, and she does everything within her reach to break out of this inside world and go to the outside world to prove that this tree exists. I got the idea when people had to start paying for water. I imagined there would a time when we would start paying for air, and I could imagine that world to be a world without an outside.

Jenna Bass: My film, The Tunnel, is set in Zimbabwe just after independence, when there is a lot of optimism around the world. My film is set in a small rural village that is being terrorized by the Fifth Brigade, which had been set up by [President Robert] Mugabe to squash the dissidents. A little girl sees her father being taken away by the Fifth Brigade and then digging this trench (which he is about to be buried in). That is all she sees, but she elaborates on this and creates a fantasy in which he has dug a tunnel to the city. She keeps building on this fantasy. As the film progresses she realizes the truth, but in the end her fantasy of is what matters.

Jenna Bass (South Africa)

Edouard Bamporiki: Long Coat is set during Commemoration Day in Rwanda. Genocide happened in my country with Hutus killing Tutsis. Now we have had 14 years of reconciliation, but we still don’t have unity. Long Coat is about a young boy who goes to the Commemoration Day. An old friend talks about how she lost her father, and the young boy speaks up to say he knows what happened to him. Fourteen years ago he saw his father killing her father. He remembers that her father came to his father, wearing a long coat, and the young boy’s father says, “You don’t have life now,” and kills him. We want one day to have truth like this, for people to tell us what really happened.

Jan-Hendrik Beetge: The Abyss Boys is basically about two brothers who are abalone poachers trying to escape their lives. But trying to escape that world causes their own destruction. I came to the story rather by accident. I was writing another story when I looked over the ocean. And it was then that I started writing The Abyss Boys. The synopsis came within an hour and as I wrote it, the story just came out. It was a time when abalone poaching was a very relevant term, and I thought what if I put two children in that scenario and it sort of grew from there.

Dyana Gaye: My project N’Dar [Saint Louis Blues] is a musical about a taxi in which a meeting takes place between the driver and the passenger on a trip between Dakar and St. Louis in Senegal. On public transportation, you have to force a meeting with the people you are traveling with or you can go and have no contact with anyone else. In the taxi, however, you don’t look at others. I started to imagine this meeting with music, and so it becomes a meeting of sounds. That’s why I wanted it to be a musical.

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Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya)

Which part of your project is you? Which part your country? And what part Africa?

Wanuri Kahiu:  I think the way I think about my film is more than just Africa; it is a global perspective. The African part of the film is in the fact we are not living a life of reciprocity. We have complete disregard for our natural resources, because of greed or some other reason. The part that is about my own country is the greed and corruption that exists in the government. It is so sad. The part about myself is the character, Asha. The name Asha means life and I feel that it is my personal search for life and a sense of belonging that is in the film.

Jenna Bass: All of these things are so bound up in each other that I could not make the film that I want to make if I was from someplace else. That is what is so exciting about African film; it is a perspective that is formed by your country and by the other African countries. What crosses over to my film also is that Africa is a place of such inexplicable things. We look around to the history of Africa and it is a hard to imagine that they did all these things to each other. I don’t understand half of it. The rest of Africa is walking around wondering, “how did these things happen?” Wondering with awe at the strangeness of it. That awe is specific to my film.

Edouard Bamporiki: I call on all Rwandans and ask if the Hutus will accept their sin. The problem is not that I wronged you, but that I must accept the responsibility for doing so. If we are in Commemoration Day, you can see Tutsi men asking the Hutu, can you please admit that you wronged me? If you say you wronged me, you can ask for forgiveness. But they don’t accept they have sinned. The African part of this is how genocide ideologies still exist. I hope that my film can stop them. As for myself, the film can ask people to accept their sin and ask for forgiveness.

Jan-Hendrik Beetge
(South Africa)

Jan-Hendrik Beetge:  For me, it’s almost more of a circular thing than it is a hierarchal one.  Let me start with the personal aspect. In the story the younger brother freezes to death, but not because of his brother’s neglect, but because of a misunderstanding. My best friend died when I was 18 on a trip that he’d asked me to go with him. But I said, “No.” For years I’ve wondered if I could have stopped him from dying. I have never had a brother, which is the one thing that I wanted the most in my life. And so my story is birthed out of that feeling of non-guilt guilt. And trying to find the redemption in something that you don’t really feel responsible for. As a South African, and more specifically as a white Afrikaner South African, I feel one thing that’s very common in our culture is trying to apologize for an era that wasn’t our fault. And as Africans, we are trying not to be seen as the Dark Continent. I think we have as much to say, if not more to say, as the rest of the world. And I think that is the circular thing––I look at Africa, I look at South Africa, and I look at the corruption that goes on, and it all comes around. In my story, the police are as guilty of poaching in South Africa as the poachers. But you have to do what you can. My father always says, “Change what you can and leave the rest.”

Dyana Gaye:  As for the African, the actual crossing of the taxi is not only a means of transportation, but also a means to cross the continent. It reveals different aspects of the daily life. What is about me is the music, and on how music brings people together. The musical genre is a very personal that weaves together a kind of relationship between the image and the sound, and coming out of your being to allow this meeting.  And by doing this through music, some things that you wouldn’t allow yourself to do with your body, you can do it in a musical. This project allows all my different interests to co-exist, because I am a musician, as well as a dancer and a filmmaker. So it is through the musical that all my different interests get to meet. 

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Dyana Gaye (Senegal)

What influences you as African filmmakers?

Dyana Gaye: Cinema interests me in its global-ness.  It is not necessarily a particular genre or specific filmmaker. I can talk about David Cronenberg and David Lynch who make films I really like, but those are not the kind of films that I would do. And I am not sure if their films actually inspire me. There isn’t necessarily a connection between what one likes and how it translates into what one does. Djibril Diop Mambéty is someone who inspires me, but it’s difficult to work in the shadow of monsters like that. It is not necessarily the people I admire who inspire me, as the things I am reading and watching at the time. There is a French critic that talks about influence of bedside books, but there are also bedside films.

Jan-Hendrik Beetge:  The birth of my inspiration comes from still photography. I am in awe of the power of a single photographic image, especially photo journalistic images that are able to manipulate such emotions. I remember this image of a man and woman on the beach, and the woman is looking out over the sea, but it is only when you read the caption and learn that their baby has been taken up by the ocean, that the photo hits you. You don’t have to know anything more. I try to describe my style as cine-photographic. What influences me the most is what I am looking at. I want to make films that are not just poetry, but visual poetry.

Edouard Bamporiki: I don’t know if I want cinema to inspire me, as I would like to inspire cinema.

Jenna Bass:  I think that if I answer that question my head might explode, especially being here where I am surrounded by the work of some of the filmmakers I respect the most. There are filmmakers out there whose work I am sure has inspired me, filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Lars von Trier. What they have all in common is that they have a singular vision that they won’t compromise. I heard a lecture by Mike Leigh once where he said, “Don’t compromise, don’t ever compromise.”

Edouard Bamporiki (Rwanda)

Wanuri Kahiu: I have been influenced by many filmmakers. I’ve been overwhelmed by Sembène Ousmane’s sense of African-ness. But I don’t consider myself a filmmaker, but rather a storyteller––and I choose a visual medium with which to tell my stories. I can’t not speak about what inspires me without speaking about the writers who inspire me––the magic of Ben Okri and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I feel connected to them by the emotions they have managed to create.

What is it like being here in New York altogether?

Jenna Bass: Most of the countries that we come from don’t really have a film industry and yet here we are––brought here by a level of complete passion and stubbornness.

Jan-Hendrik Beetge:  It has been years and years of struggle to just get to a point where people believe in your voice. It feels like we have connected with each other too. As James Schamus said earlier, it is through the process of working together that we will get the chance to make something. It is the expression “Ubuntu” which means through the many, one can and through the one, many can. 

Wanuri Kahiu:  There is another word––“culture.” In Kenya, culture has been defined in these traditional ways, by the Maasai who jump, by the traditional dance, by people saying “go see the animals”– all that is supposedly is culture. I feel that we are beginning to carve out our own culture; we are getting to define culture by what it means to us personally, by our own experiences.