Netlfix is rooted in Africa, and it’s promising to never leave. It comes bearing the gift of big budgets to throw around at anything and everything that would encourage more African subscribers. It also promises to uphold our culture and values to tell our stories in the way we want to, and to show us just how committed they are to all this, they partnered with UNESCO for a short film competition across Africa, asking filmmakers to reimagine folktales from their culture. After over 2000 submissions, the best six were chosen to headline its African Folktales Reimagined collection, now streaming on Netflix.
Having sat down and watched the films, below is my ranking of the six short films.
1. Katera of the Punishment Island, Uganda
The story kicks off with a storied montage of animated figurines walking over a map as a soothing voice recounts a Ugandan tale that this short film aims to reimagine. We learn of a ritual where women who bear children out of wedlock are chained to a heavy metal, dragged into an island and are abandoned there as a punishment for their transgressions. Katera of the Punishment tells the story of one of these women, Katera (Tracy Kababiito), left in the island to meet her end, and who after being rescued by a fisherman (Michael Wawuyo Jr), plans her revenge on the people who put her there.
The story is a rather straight-forward narrative with similarities to the countless female-led revenge action thrillers that have excited movie lovers since the invention of cinema, but director and writer Loukman Ali adds his own flare by diving into all the classics of the past to weave a rather intriguing and satisfactory African western. It’s the first African Western I’ve had the pleasure to witness. From the wardrobe, the orange hues, the stances, the indifferent smirks, and a beautiful score serenading the final scenes, what starts as a curious insight into a rather unfamiliar side of Uganda that we know of, ends on a deserted makeshift town in a secluded grassland plain with our protagonists sharing fire with their target to story beats identical to a Clint Eastwood flick.
I have absolutely no quibbles with this short film. All the faults I could nitpick were the result of squeezing what feels like a fully fledged feature film into a 27-minute run time. Like dialogue that sometimes floats through scenes and some characters not being given their due depth, but for what it is and what it’s able to achieve in such a short span of time, this was the perfect way to kick off this collection.
2. Anyango and the Ogre, Kenya
When the narrator begins describing the tale of this short story, I instantly recognised it. It’s a story many Kenyans have heard in their childhood, told to us by mothers and grandmothers under sooty roofs or in the comfort of our childhood homes, and if that’s the feeling the makers of this show were intending, it’s safe to say Anyango and the Ogre tugs at the Kenyan in me immediately.
The original folktale that the film is based is about a woman who, in need of a husband, finds a handsome man to take her and her children in. Over time, she realises he’s fattening up the children to feast on them and hides them in the woods. Left behind as their mother goes to hunt, the three children, like the little pigs in the tale, encounter evil knocking on their doors, trying to get them to open up.
Voline Ogutu, the writer and director of Anyango and the Ogre, adds her own spin to the narrative, retelling it in a rather inventive way that grounds the sentiments of the folklore in modernity. Even more so, she takes introduces some form of sci-fi, merging cultural undertones with a futuristic umbrella to tell a story that is unfortunately, all too relevant: that of domestic abuse.
With women divided into sections depending on their age and marital status, the film is quick to spell out the stakes for husbandless women deemed unworthy by society. So when it throws the audience into the abuse and torture our heroine (played by Sarah Hassan) endures to protect her children from their abusive father, we fully understand the dilemma she’s trapped in.
In its short duration, Anyango and the Ogre delves into a lot of themes, from class divides to societal alienation of those seen as unworthy to the value of folktales as a form of escapism to women, even the most broken ones, finding happiness in community – inspired by Kenya’s Umoja village in Samburu, a women-only sanctuary of homeless survivors of violence. It achieves a blend of different styles without tripping over itself, and there is enough realism in its acting and dialogue for the audience to buy into it.
3. Enmity Djinn, Mauritania
I have never had the chance to see the streets or the people of Mauritania except for a brief scene at the beginning of the Hollywood film The Mauritanian. It’s sad that we have such concrete notions of American and European ways of life and very little of our own. Anyway, I digress.
Mohammed Echkouna brings forth his vision of a horror-inspired narrative of a djinn, a menacing shadowy being who finds himself in an unfamiliar city, confronted by a familiar foe three generations after he was last summoned. The majority of the film is shrouded in silence, as the black silk figure watches and whispers into the ears of characters powerless to his suggestions. This silence leaves a lot of space for assumptions and confusion, but Enmity Djinn is more than happy to flow at its own pace, slowly inviting its presence into the lives of our protagonist and her family.
With a character in focus who neither speaks nor bounces actions back and forth with other characters, the film tries to find a compelling hook outside the usual narrative tools, and for the most part it achieves it through narration of the myth of the djinn, cementing the expectations for the audience through the silence of scenes where the djinn is at work. The cinematography carries the rest of the weight, showing beautiful sand dunes, the Islamic architecture of Mauritanian streets, and the spacious interiors of their houses.
At the heart of Enmity Djinn is a matriarchal figure tied to the djinn, who feels the handiwork of the evil within the chaos and arguments in her family and chooses to act on their behalf. She knows his presence, alluded to having even touched him in her childhood, and she breaks through the same prayerful routines that have carried her all her life. There is a simple story underneath it all—a story that takes its time coming out, a story that is easy to miss in the midst of the silence and ambiguity, but a good enough story none the less.
4. Halima’s Choice, Nigeria
This Nigerian short film, written and directed by Korede Azeez, tries to ask questions about the concepts of conjured heaven and artificial intelligence, all against the backdrop of the roles of women in a community. Unlike the drama-fuelled, animated faces and pompous set locations that have come to define Nollywood over the decades, Halima’s Choice shines a light on a timid, solemn, green, and religious community that has made the choice to renounce the future.
The few left, convinced that uploading one’s consciousness into a virtual reality is sacrilegious, band together into the dogmas and rituals that have defined civilisation over the course of history. Every member of a society has to play their role, despite their feelings and preferences. Our heroine, Halima (Habiba Ummi Mohammed), goes about her daughterly duties with the weight of marriage to a very older man looming over her. She stumbles on a stranger who offers her a glimpse of heaven and the many freedoms it offers, and as the title suggests, Halima has to make a choice.
As a social commentary, Halima’s Choice moves smoothly between futuristic themes that are more and more prevalent in our day-to-day lives as we brace for the emergence of artificial intelligence and the more traditional and religious themes that we are yet to grow out of. As a narrative however, it falls shorts as it really never grounds the characters enough to care enough for their choices or lack thereof. There’s nothing distinct outside the archetypes of the characters, and the film comes and goes without leaving any sense of justified presence.
5. Katope, Tanzania
By the end of Katope, I was trying my hardest to grasp something from the film, anything. But I couldn’t. There are films that simply elude you, and it’s nothing personal. A film like Persona by Ingmar Bergman still confuses the hell out of me, but I have made peace with it over time. However, I consider Persona a favourite film of mine because, despite its ambiguity in its narrative and cinematography, it does leave a lasting impression on every person who watches it. Katope simply fails at that.
From what I gathered from my first watch, Katope is the story of a girl born to a barren woman who, even at her young age, understands her uniqueness. As she grows, her community suffers from a severe drought and falls back on their cultural roots to try and find a solution to their problem, a problem they tie to Katope’s birth.
Co-written and directed by Walt Mzengi Corey, the film is the shortest of the six, and, despite that, has long dream sequences and tribal montage that create this overdrawn sensation of repression that is never released in the end. Katope doesn’t answer any questions because it never asks any. It sets itself up as a beautiful and abstract insight into the cultural ecosystem of a Tanzanian community, but does very little as a narrative piece. There is always space for films like this, films that require multiple watches to slowly unwrap layers of symbolism and hidden crypticism, but I get the feeling there isn’t much underneath Katope, or at least, this 13 minute version of it. Perhaps I’ll change my mind on later watches.
6. MaMlambo, South Africa
The last of the short films takes us down to South Africa, where we are met by the mystical river being, MaMlambo, who watches over the sacred waters that stream discarded bodies. She’s old and weary, exhausted but not disheartened by her tasks. There she comes across a suicidal girl who might as well be another dead body, and she nurses her to health before passing on to her the privilege and seclusion that are her existence.
MaMlambo, like most of the other short films in this collection, is light on dialogue and plot actions, choosing to create atmospheres rather than delve into building the characters. There are hints of the girls’ traumatic pasts, but we are told in what I consider the laziest way, through newspaper cuttings in the middle of nowhere. We learn very little of what exactly they’ve signed up for, other than burying bodies, as the river being speaks in proverbial nuggets and the girl barely questions anything.
As the final film, this particular story sums up a lot of the faults of African Folktales Reimagined, with a lot of hollow characters decorated with African attire and body paint, living and expressing these African folktales but barely delving deeper to turn them into the modern stories they were intended to be. It’s like making a story of the hare and tortoise racing without the arrogance of the hare or the resilience of the tortoise. Most of the characters are forgettable placeholders for themes and quotes that barely resonate with the people speaking them. But we made them, so I guess we can’t blame the foreigners on this one.
