Afrikan Heritage Month: My Eyes Will Send a Light to You: Africa Cinema Icon to Narrative Film Series 2

Join us via Zoom: https://bmcc-cuny.zoom.us/j/87415701511?pwd=bms0WWZlMjkybEt0SlZ5djVvVXBpUT09

Meeting ID: 874 1570 1511
Passcode: 201998

The following three films will be shown today:

LEGEND OF THE UNDERGROUND 2021 Director: Nneka Onuorah Nigeria 1hr: 26 Mins.

Exposing the punitive laws in Nigeria that have put an already beleaguered community at increased risk of extortion and violence, this documentary follows a group of a young non-conforming Nigerians who have created safe houses in Lagos and Harlem. The film toggles between the two cities as daily threats endanger the health and safety of a community united across continents.

Following Nneka Onuorah’s impactful feature documentary debut The Same Difference, she joins forces with co-director Giselle Bailey to uncover rampant discrimination in Nigeria and explores the lives of several charismatic non-conformist youth who must choose either to fight for freedom of expression there or flee to live ‘free’ in the USA. Through social media, celebrity and bold creativity, they spark a cultural revolution that challenges the ideals of gender, conformity and civil rights in Nigeria.

Executive produced by John Legend, Mike Jackson, and Ty Stiklorius, The Legend of the Underground is a timely and critical look at a vibrant and resilient community that continues to fight state-endorsed discrimination in Nigeria while celebrating who they are

ATLANTICS 2019   Director: Mati Diop Senegal 1hr: 40Mins.

In a popular suburb of Dakar, workers on the construction site of a futuristic tower, without pay for months, decide to leave the country by the ocean for a better future. Among them is Souleiman, the lover of Ada, promised to another.

The film is centered on a young woman, Ada, and her partner, Souleiman, struggling in the face of employment, class, migration, crime, family struggles, and ghosts. Working mostly with unknown actors, Diop focused in the film on issues such as the refugee crisis, remorse, loss, grief, class struggle, and taking responsibility (or not) for one’s actions. The Atlantic Ocean is used in many ways throughout the film, including as a symbol and as an engine for change, growth, life, and death.

In a suburb of Dakar that lies along the Atlantic coast, a futuristic-looking tower is about to be officially opened. The construction workers have not been paid for months. One night, the workers decide to leave the country by sea, in search of a brighter future in Spain. Among them is Souleiman, the lover of Ada. However, Ada is betrothed to another man – the wealthy Omar. Ada is deeply worried about Souleiman, as she waits for news of his fate in the run-up to her wedding. On her wedding day, Omar’s bed mysteriously catches fire in a suspected arson attack, and a young detective is assigned to investigate the case.

In the coming days, Ada falls under suspicion and is subjected to interrogations and a virginity test. Meanwhile, her friend Fanta and the young detective are both suffering from a mysterious illness. It slowly emerges that the spirits of the men lost at sea have returned and each night take possession of the bodies of other inhabitants of Dakar. Most of these spirits are focused on the tycoon whose withholding of their pay had forced them to go across the Atlantic. They demand their pay, threatening to burn the tower down otherwise. Once they receive their pay from the tycoon, the possessed force him to dig their graves so that their spirits may rest. But Souleiman wants only to be with Ada. Unfortunately, he has possessed the young detective, which initially scares Ada. But as she meets the other spirits, including one who possesses Fanta, she comes to understand them and spends a last night with the new Souleiman. While reviewing footage from the wedding, the detective sees that he, under the possession of Souleiman’s spirit, was the one who committed the arson. He closes the case.

SOLEIL O 1970 Director: Med Hondo French-Mauritania 1hr: 38 Mins.

It depicts, with sardonic fury, the adventures of an unnamed young African man (Robert Liensol) who arrives in Paris and, with naïve optimism, seeks his fortune among his colonizers. He considers himself at home in France, but soon discovers the extent of his exclusion from French society. Facing blatant discrimination in employment and housing, he and other African workers organize a union, to little effect; seeking help from African officials in Paris, he finds them utterly corrupt and unsympathetic. Making friends among France’s white population, he finds their empathy condescending and oblivious, and his sense of isolation and persecution raises his identity crisis to a frenzied pitch. Hondo offers a stylistic collage to reflect the protagonist’s extremes of experience, from docudrama and musical numbers to slapstick absurdity, from dream sequences and bourgeois melodrama to political analyses. Hondo’s passionate, wide-ranging voice-over commentary, addressing the hero in the second person,

blends confession and observation, aspiration and despair, societal and personal conflicts

Mauritanian director Med Hondo’s debut is a bitterly funny, stylistically explosive attack on Western capitalism and its legacy of colonialism. Laced with deadly irony and righteous anger, Soleil Ô follows a starry-eyed immigrant as he leaves West Africa for Paris in search of a job and cultural enrichment, but soon discovers a hostile society in which his very presence elicits fear and resentment.

Drawing on the freewheeling stylistic experimentation of the French New Wave, Hondo deploys a dizzying array of narrative and stylistic techniques—animation, docudrama, dream sequences, musical numbers, folklore, slapstick comedy, agitprop—to create a revolutionary landmark of political cinema and a shattering vision of awakening black consciousness.

“When I wrote my script I did not have an audience in mind. I was living in France and experiencing what being a minority felt like. I had to yell and free myself. Writing the script of Soleil Ô was an authentic act of rage and liberation.” (Med Hondo)

“Soleil Ô resembles a manifesto, scrappily shot across four years and suffused with a political indignation that, despite the film’s historical specificity, still feels urgent today.

See the complete list of films (pdf) in this series.

See a list of all Afrikan Heritage Month events. Attend 2 or more events for Co-Curricular Transcript credit.

For more information, contact Professor Horace Brockington at hbrockington@bmcc.cuny.edu.

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