In my third year of working through my Cinemap project I’ve reached a point where I’ve made a pretty sizable dent in the number of African countries I’ve seen a movie from to the point where I only really have two regions left I need to see a movie from. I’ve decided to tackle what is potentially the more challenging of the two regions first and save some of the bigger countries for last. As such, for this installment I’ll be looking at a handful of countries mostly clustered around the southeast area of Africa. I’ll be looking at the four remaining island nations of the continents including the tiny nations of Seychelles, Comoros, and Mauritius and the not so tiny island nation of Madagascar. Finally I’ll also be looking at the two tiny independent enclave nations that exist largely within the borders of South Africa, Eswatini and Lesotho. I expected it to be pretty tough to find movies in most of these places, and I am basically going to have to cheat in the case of two of them, but I was surprised to find that in the case of many of them there actually were some reasonably big budget options though it would occasionally mean looking at stories from white colonizers that aren’t always as representative as I’d like.
Eswatini: Wah-Wah (2005)
Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is the second smallest country on the African mainland behind only the tiny river sized country of Gambia, which runs through Senegal. It’s one of the two tiny Enclaves within South Africa, the one on the East side which also touches Mozambique. That area was an ancient kingdom separate from the ones that would make up South Africa and this kingdom managed to maintain its borders and integrity against some pretty stiff odds and remains an absolute monarchy to this day. It did not, however, escape colonialism entirely and did fall under British control despite retaining its king. Like all colonialism this almost certainly wasn’t pretty but it was a distinct country from its larger neighbor and European rule there seems to have been a more traditional colonial set-up (faults and all) of the kind experienced in places like Kenya or Tanzania rather than the extreme forced segregation seen in Apartheid South Africa. Like a lot of African countries Eswatini would gain independence in the late 1960s, but before then they still had a lot of British led institutions run by people like Henrik Esterhuysen, the head of education for the British government administration and a man not likely to be remembered by history if not for his son Richard Grant Esterhuysen who would one day re-structure his name to Richard E. Grant and become an actor successful enough to one day write and direct a fictionalized account of his youth in the “Swaziland Protectorate” which is the movie I’m looking at today.
With the 60s setting I had assumed Wah-Wah was named after the George Harrison song, but that doesn’t show up and instead it seems to be named after a “blah blah blah” esque onomonopia that a character makes. The movie follows a clear teenage Richard E. Grant stand-in played by a young Nicholas Hoult as he comes of age in a rather dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father played by Gabriel Byrne who bounces between an ex-wife and a second wife played by Emily Watson and Miranda Richardson and the film also features work by Julie Walters so it certainly has a stacked cast to say the least. However, I wouldn’t say most of these people are really doing their best work and while Nicholas Hoult would go on to do some appealing work later I’m not sure he was up to snuff here and to be frank he’s a dude with really weird and distracting eyebrows that he had not yet learned to keep under control when he made this. The film itself is a bit odd in that it has this fascinating setting and political backdrop but doesn’t really do a lot with it; there are a few interesting pictures of life in 1960s Swaziland but nothing in the story here really feels like it would be fundamentally different if this family just lived in the UK and I’m not sure the particular brand of dysfunction that afflicts the family is otherwise that much of a hook for a movie and I’ll also say that it’s depiction of race relations in the colony seem awfully rosy. Still there’s some interest in seeing the Byrne character who actually does look quite a bit like Grant here and through the movie you can’t help but wonder if the actor has been channeling his father all these years as he plays various drunken scoundrels. At the end of the day, this just doesn’t feel too different from a myriad of other memoir type movies with their mix of nostalgia and sadness and doesn’t stand out to much but there’s interest to be found here and there.
**1/2 out of Five
Mauritius: The Cathedral (2006)
Mauritius is one of a handful of small islands located a bit east of South Africa, and specifically it’s also east of Madagascar and also east of the French overseas department Réunion and also encompasses another island even further to the east called Rodrigues. The island was actually uninhabited upon discovery and was initially settled by the Dutch and then later taken over by France and finally ceded to the UK after the Napoleonic Wars. That’s quite a mixed colonial history but the mix of cultures there is much more complex than that; slaves were brought to the island early and their descendants remain a huge part of the population but an even bigger percent of their population seems to be built on Indian workers who were brought in by the British after slavery’s abolition, a phenomenon I’ve come to learn happened in more and more places than I would have thought over the course of this project but which seems to be even more extreme in Mauritius, which is actually one of only two countries besides India to have a Hindu majority (the other being Nepal). So you’ve got a very cosmopolitan and diverse island and one that actually has a relatively large economy as tiny African islands go. In fact its success has been called the “the Mauritian Miracle” and appears to be a pretty sustainable trend based on a diverse collection of industries but it has not necessarily manifested as a thriving film industry although they do have some films under their belt including the subject of today’s entry.
The Cathedral is one of those movies that on some level exists as much to showcase the city at its center as it does to tell its own story. In this case that city is Port-Louis, the capital of Mauritius, and perhaps the place most emblematic of the country’s cosmopolitan diversity. The movie follows a woman named Lina as she goes around the city over the course of a day akin to something like Cleo from 5 to 7 but without the hook of a cancer diagnosis hanging over it. The title refers to a device the film introduces of having a basically omniscient voice-over narration by the St. Louis Cathedral in the city’s center, an idea that I think was meant to mirror a concept from Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” but this idea feels a bit half baked, only really coming up at the beginning and end of a film that doesn’t actually seem to have that much to do with the building. The film is largely episodic, which isn’t inherently a bad thing but… the episodes aren’t that interesting. Ingrid Blackburn has some screen presence as Lina but the character ultimately doesn’t prove that complex and neither do most of the people she encounters. Perhaps the most interesting thing that happens to her is an encounter with a photographer working on a project that involves photographing people’s feet, which the film seems oddly unskeptical about, but that story doesn’t go much of anywhere either. I tend to avoid calling movies “pretentious” as that’s a word that gets rather widely abused but I think that kind of applies here; it’s a movie that thinks it can generate art out of the mundane but kind of doesn’t put in the work to do so and if not for the glimpses of an underphotographed location we get it’s pretty dull.
** out of Five
Madagascar: Red Island (2023)
Madagascar is almost certainly the largest and most famous country I’ll be looking at while watching films from Africa’s southeast islands and enclaves; it’s that big island located to the east of Mozambique which is of course it was the namesake of a bunch of popular animated movies about talking animals. The country is generally pretty well known for its plants and animals, particularly its ring-tailed lemurs, but outsiders tend to know a lot less about its people. Like a lot of African countries Madagascar has a fairly fraught recent history centered around colonialism. During the late 19th Century the island was taken as a colonial possession by France and was a pretty big part of their empire but it was hardly a smooth process and there was a pretty lengthy history of resistance to this rule on the island. That, along with some post-colonial instability has left the island without a lot of money and infrastructure but it’s uniqueness and its size and population has allowed it to be the home of at least some filmmaking and Letterboxd shows about a hundred movies of various kinds that the island can claim, though I did end up taking the easy way out and going with one of the films that’s a bit more about the island’s colonizers than about its natives.
Red Island is set in the early 1970s when Madagascar had ostensibly already declared independence from France but had done so by adopting a plan of gradual de-colonization which would still involve being ruled by a bunch of French magistrates and they were also home to French military bases. The film is set around one of those bases and follows a young “army brat” whose father is an officer stationed there. This kid would appear to be a stand in for a younger version of the film’s writer/director Robin Campillo, who made this shortly after triumphing with his AIDS era drama BPM (Beats Per Minute) and whose African childhood was not something I was familiar with. Campillo also notably wrote the film The Class, which like BPM was most notable for these long possibly improvised dialogue scenes and that’s not really what this movie is like… possibly to its detriment. This feels more like a pretty standard “memoir” movie; you get various anecdotes about what life on this base would have been like from a child’s eye view while also giving hints that the kid would grow up to be a creative (and possibly queer) adult. In the case of this film those hints come from these sequences where the kid reads comic books and imagines himself as the comic’s (female) protagonist. I don’t think those sequences ultimately build into anything too meaningful and to some extent I kind of feel that way about the movie as a whole, but some of the episodes are fairly interesting and it’s crafted well enough and keeps your interest generally, but ultimately it’s a bit too “all over the place” to cohere into something bigger.
**1/2 out of Five
Comoros: The Grand Marriage (2013)
There are four small-ish islands in the northern part of the channel between Madagascar and Mozambique. One of them is the French Overseas Department Mayotte and the other three (Ngazidja, Ndzuwani, and Mwali) make up the collective independent nation of Comoros. The country differs from some of the other African islands I’ve been looking at recently in that it had significant early influence from Arab traders and as such became a heavily Islamic country prior to French colonization and it’s even a member of the Arab League, the organizations southernmost nation. The country is actually pretty densely populated despite only consisting of three islands but it’s still not really big enough to have much of a film industry. Letterboxd shows only seven feature length films from the country, which is more than I’ve encountered from some countries but I did not have an easy time obtaining any of them either through legitimate or not so legitimate means. Ultimately I kind of had to pick one that fits the letter of the requirements for this project but maybe not the spirit of it.
The Grand Marriage is a 47 minute documentary produced by the Al Jazeera news network, likely originally for television, but which is readily available with English subtitles on the Al Jazeera English Youtube channel. It’s not something I’d normally be inclined to log (or watch) but it will have to do. The film is an overview of the Comorian tradition of the “Grand Marriage,” which is a second marriage ceremony that people would throw ten or twenty years after having had a smaller “normal” marriage ceremony and having conducted one of these elaborate celebrations is considered to be a “must” for anyone of any social status to go through. The film follows a government official’s grand marriage ceremony to his two wives though you ultimately only get the most cursory of glances at the participants themselves and probably hear even more from other people involved in the ceremony. The film is pretty focused on the place these “grand marriages” play in social status on the island but it doesn’t go too deep into what that really means or questions how this kind of class hierarchy plays out. What’s more I’m ultimately I’m not so sure how unique this tradition even is. Holding a second more elaborate ceremony like this is maybe unique and there’s something to be said about the fact that these ceremonies are a reflection of the groom’s success rather than the support of their parents, but this is far from the only culture that throws elaborate wedding ceremonies as a show of status and the footage of the ceremony itself is certainly big but I wouldn’t say I was bowled over by the decadence on display. So, pretty straightforward televisual doc that I can’t say has anything terribly interesting to say, but its aims are pretty modest and it hits them professionally enough I guess.
**1/2 out of Five
Seychelles: Threads (2026)
My project to see and review one movie from every country in the world finally hit a significant snag once I got to Seychelles. Seychelles, which is a series of islands in the Indian ocean off the East coast of Africa and north of Madagascar and Comoros, is a very small but in some ways very stable and wealthy country for its size. It is not, however, any kind of center for filmmaking at all. In fact if you click on Seychelles on the Letterboxd map (no easy task because it’s so small that you need to zoom all the way in and know where to look in order to even find it on the map) you find only two feature length films attributed to the country. One is a movie called El Clan which as far as I can tell is a Spanish movie set in Spain whose connection to Seychelles is unclear to me and regardless the movie is completely unavailable to me through any means legal or otherwise. The other is a movie called Bolot Feray, which is posted on Youtube in three parts but the film is in Seychellois French Creole and the version online does not have any subtitle translation at all, so even if I watched that I would be in no position to “review” it in any legitimate way or give it a star rating or anything like that. So, for the purpose of watching something I can actually analyze I’ve instead opted to watch a 35 minute short film, but it’s something that comes with its own set of challenges as it’s not a professional production and is maybe not something that was ever really meant to be “judged” by some dude on the internet.
Threads is a movie that appears to have been made by teenagers and a title card making a fair use statement for some of the music in the film asserts that it was made as part of a school project. It’s also a very recent movie, meaning that the teenagers in question are still teenagers today and there are only a few reviews of the movie on Letterboxd, most of them seemingly written by friends of the filmmakers, so there’s a not insubstantial chance that the young people who made this will actually read this review. As such I want to be as constructive and understanding about the circumstances of how this was made as possible. I should start by pointing out that for an amateur project this is quite well filmed by director Shanthanu Gnanasekar; shots are framed with some clear thought and the film uses the colorful backdrops and natural light of this tropical nation quite well. In terms of its actual content things get a little shakier. The “threads” of the title are plot threads and the film touts itself as a “hyper link” movie that involves several stories being told at once, which is perhaps a bit too ambitious an idea for its own good. Thirty five minutes is not a lot of time and it’s even shorter of a span when it’s being sub-divided between a few different stories and the intercutting between them makes it harder for any of them to build momentum. I’d also say that the connection between them feels a bit tenuous; frankly it kind of feels like the people in this friend group came to the project with different ideas for what kind of movie to make and the format was used as a way to use all of those ideas at once. If that’s the case I’d say the ones who came to the project trying to take a down to earth look at modern teenage life probably had the stronger approach than the ones who wanted to make some sort of crime movie that the film’s production values aren’t able to pull off. That all said, I remember trying to make movies when I was that age and they were a whole lot less impressive than this. Granted these people have access to better cameras and editing software than I did at that age but importantly they seem to have a bit more drive and moxy than most people do when they try to make something like this and that speaks well of them. Hats off.
*** out of Five
Lesotho: Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. (2019)
Lesotho is South Africa’s other tiny enclave countries and unlike Eswatini it’s a true enclave that’s entirely surrounded by South Africa, one of only three such countries in the world (the other two being Italy’s enclaves). Like Eswatini the country was a miniature kingdom that managed to last a pretty long time and entered into a separate colonial arrangement with Britain in order to protect itself from encroachment by Dutch settlers and it remained a separate entity from South Africa under a constitutional monarchy and remains so today. The country is home to the Sotho ethnic group, which is also a major ethnic group in South Africa but they’re nearly the entire population of Lesotho. Given its relatively small population you would not think of Lesotho as being much of a filmmaking hub, and indeed it isn’t, however they actually have produced one of the most prominent filmmakers currently working in Africa in Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, who is one of only a couple contemporary African filmmakers to have gotten a film into the Criterion Collection with his 2019 film This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection. I would have liked that to have been by choice of viewing for Lesotho, but unfortunately for whatever reason Letterboxd only credits South Africa as the country which produced that movie, so instead I went with this earlier film from Mosese with an even more long winded title: Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. which is included as a bonus feature on that aforementioned Criterion blu-ray and is also on Criterion’s streaming service.
This is a film that’s been described as something of a video essay though it’s not an essay in the way that, like, a Youtube video would be with a narrator explaining a point clearly to an audience accompanied by video. Instead it’s kind of structured around a written essay that kind of reads like a poem that’s being read by a narrator which seems to have been recorded on some sort of retro analog format which is a sort of tirade directed at the person’s “mother” who is probably supposed to be code for the country itself. This is accompanied by grainy black and white images of a woman walking through the countries literally dragging a cross behind her as she’s surrounded by some pretty unpleasant conditions. If the “mother” in question is indeed Lesotho then this is a pretty decidedly “unpatriotic” portrait, albeit one that acknowledges the role of colonialism in essentially turning the country into what you’d call a “hurt person who hurts people.” The movie looks good and it clearly has some strong emotions its expressing, however, this is not the easiest movie to watch or interpret and even at a brief 76 minutes it kind of starts to drag a bit as you kind of “get the gist” of it pretty quickly and it doesn’t evolve too much from there. I don’t like to throw around the word “pretentious” but this movie tempted me to at times. Still, it’s best to take something like this for what it is, as a sort of arty side project and I’m still interested in seeing some of Mosese’s other work that I think is a little more accessible or at least narrative driven.
**1/2 out of Five
In Conclusion
And with that we get to cross off one more region of Africa leaving only a couple of countries left in that continent. As I said at the outset I opted to focus on these islands and tiny countries first because they’d be the harder ones to cover and I do kind of feel a little dirty about some of the compromises I made to clear some of them. Obviously I don’t feel great about having used a short film to clear Seychelles (if that country ever produces a feature I have access to I’ll “make it up to them”) and while the film I used to cross off Comoros was technically over the forty minute threshold it still wasn’t really a “movie” and still felt like a cheat. On top of that I don’t feel great that I used movies about white colonizers to cover Madagascar and Eswatini, so there was a lot of cheating going on, hopefully going forward I’ll stick a bit more to the spirit and letter of the project. The Cathedral and Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You. felt like more authentic representatives of their countries though even if both were a little abstract and “arty” in a bad way. So, this probably wasn’t the most successful set of Cinemap entries but I’m still proud of having kept on keeping on and this ultimately wasn’t quite the impossible region I was afraid it would be.
Next time on Cinemap I have some unfinished business to take care of in Oceania as I watch the last six movies in that “continent” if you want to call it that.
The Movie Vampire 