Review no 135: The Wedding Ring (2016) – a movie from Niger

NORTH AFRICA

(Technically in West Africa, much of Niger is Saharan desert, and I’ve characterised the country as part of North Africa rather than as part of Sub-Saharan Africa, to keep my categories similar in size)

In Songhoy (Zarma), Hausa and Fulani, with English subtitles

Niger isn’t famed for its film industry, and The Wedding Ring was the first film to be submitted by Niger to the Oscars, in the category of Foreign Language Film. Fully African-funded, this female-led coming-of-age movie, the second film to be directed by filmmaker Rahmatou Keïta, is a really enjoyable, almost cosy watch.

The plot is straightforward. Tiyaa (played by Keïta’s daughter Magaajyia Silberfeld) is a student from a wealthy and highly esteemed aristocratic family, who has returned to the Sultanate of Damagaram in Niger for the winter holidays. While studying abroad, in Paris, Tiyaa has fallen in love with a man from another prestigious family, based not far from her family home. But after arriving home Tiyaa doesn’t hear from him, and begins to doubt that he will come to her to make the formal proposal of marriage that she has been led to expect.

It was interesting to see the Western lifestyle from an African viewpoint. As Tiyaa says, “white people are strange” – from her perspective Parisians have no sense of taboo, and people lack restraint, kissing and touching in public, something that noble girls of her lineage wouldn’t dream of doing at home. However, in Paris she and her beau found themselves adopting a ‘when in Rome’ attitude, and became intimate, almost despite themselves.

Tiyaa speaks openly to her confidante of the pleasures of her newly discovered sensuality, in front of a symbolic night-time fire. Sex she says is “even better” than they say, and she waxes lyrical, comparing her experience to an explosion of silver stars. Young, unmarried women in her culture are supposed to use cold water to wash, while married women “who have known pleasure” use warm water. Tiyaa confides that she has begun to sneak warm water for her ablutions…

The beautifully filmed, romantic movie vividly portrays a close-knit, bustling rural community and foregrounds and pays respect to the gradually eroding traditions of rural Sahelian people. It thus serves to depict on screen Nigerien cultural rituals, based on Keïta’s own experiences as a member of an aristocratic Nigerien family (who has also lived and worked in Paris), and to preserve them on film for future generations. It was an extremely enjoyable film, although I’m not sure how representative it is of the typical Nigerien member of the public, given its focus on the hyper elite.

February 2021 TBR

I had a birthday this week, so my TBR pile, officially already out of control, has become even more so.

Four books arrived from my parents, I unwrapped a book each from my son and my youngest daughter, and a pal dropped off a book, so my new pile looks like this (including the two books at the front that I was already reading):

I’m expecting to review the French TV series Call My Agent for the blog this month, plus Tahmima Anam’s first novel ‘A Golden Age’, set in Bangladesh, and Jacob Ross’s Caribbean crime novel ‘The Bone Readers’. I’ll also be looking at the work of Malian photographer Seydou Keita and reviewing a heart-warming romantic movie from Niger.

Meanwhile, in a little extra birthday news, my eldest daughter made me a fab frog cake, and I have some daffodils blooming in my little kitchen. Enjoying some simple pleasures despite desperately missing my friends and family, longing for nights out at restaurants, the cinema and friends’ houses, and drooling at the memory of spagliattos at my favourite vermouth bar.

Review no 134: Ethiopian ethio-jazz and ‘Sons of Ethiopia’ by Admas

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

I’ve been listening to Ethiopian ‘ethio-jazz’ recently. Of course you have, you mutter.

I’m not generally a big fan of jazz, David Bowie’s jazz-influenced Black Star album apart, and ethio-jazz was a musical style that I’d not heard of until I read an article in The Economist, an unlikely source of music tips.

Ethiopian music was traditionally based around stringed instruments, but in 1924 Haile Selassie visited Jerusalem, where he was welcomed by a brass band composed of survivors of the Armenian genocide. He invited them to Ethiopia, where they were known as Arba Lijoch (The Forty Children), and brass sounds consequently began to creep into Ethiopian music. Arba Lijoch’s band leader Kevork Nalbandian even composed the Ethiopian national anthem.

Then in the 1960s iconic Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke became acquainted with foreign sounds, notably being introduced to musicians such as John Coltrane in New York, where Astatke began to develop the musical style that became known as ethio-jazz: a fusion of pentatonic scales typical of Western music with those characteristic of traditional Ethiopian music, which he brought back to Ethiopia.

For a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s Addis Ababa became “Swinging Addis”. But in 1974 the Ethiopian monarchy was deposed by the Derg, a Marxist junta that imposed strict curfews. The “Red Terror” and “White Terror” followed, as the Derg sought to suppress opposition and counter-revolutionaries sought to overthrow the Derg.

Although Ethiopia is probably best known in the West for its chequered military and political history, and the resulting suffering of its citizens, its music has spread far and wide. Kanye West has sampled ethio-jazz, and expat musicians have helped to popularise the genre worldwide.

Listening to 1984’s ethio-jazz classic Sons of Ethiopia by the Washington-based, Ethiopian émigré quartet Admas, I was totally converted. The seven-track album’s mix of funked-up, blissed-out, synth-loaded tunes is irresistible. Scratched-up copies of Sons of Ethiopia had been changing hands for hundreds of dollars on ebay, and when its ongoing cult appeal became evident the album was re-released in 2020.

The music is mesmeric and supremely laid-back, featuring instrumental re-interpretations of Ethiopian classics. Admas’s members were only too aware that they had escaped the Derg just in time, and they sought to escape their feelings of powerlessness and grief by re-evoking the glory days of Addis Ababa’s swinging nightlife in their adopted country. They wove modern technologies and American sounds into their music, using everything from Samba to synthesizers to create a unique, joyful take on traditional music, and incorporating dub and roots reggae influences.

The opening track, Anchi Bale Game, is the weakest, with the feel of superior muzak, but the second track, Bahta’s Highlife, is bouncy and joyful, while Tez Alegn Yetintu is chilled-out with a bluesy lounge bar feel. Kalateshew Waga is more like ethereal space-jazz, while Samba Shegitu challenges the listener to remain sitting down. The closing track, Astawesalehu, is the only one to feature vocals, with its rhythm of call and response evoking African melodies.

While researching this post, I came across a fascinating podcast series, World Music Matters, which features interviews with original band members bass player Henock Temesgen and keyboard player Tewodros “Teddy” Aklilu, who was only 15 years old when he fled the Derg. Now back in Addis Ababa they seemed surprised but delighted that Admas has had such an unexpected and enduring appeal.










	


	





	

		
January 2021 Round-up
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

The picture at the top of this post, taken in my local park this week, pretty much sums up this January. However I’ve kept busy. First, I read three NetGalley books this month, although this slightly took away from the books I had originally been intending to read over the past few weeks!





First was Being Ram Dass (#BeingRamDass #NetGalley), an autobiography of Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, trained psychologist, notorious ’60s Harvard proponent of psychedelics and “luminous” yogi. Typical line: “Both of us were immersed in the great ocean of consciousness“. Faintly interesting if credulity-stretching insight into the mind and life of the former Leary colleague and later spiritual guru.





Second was Artists in Residence: Seventeen Artists and Their Living Spaces, from Giverny to Casa Azul by Melissa Wyse, illustrated by Kate Lewis (#ArtistsinResidence). This was a fascinating examination of the living spaces of a number of 20th century artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keefe and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The only thing that let it down was the preference for illustration over photography. I would have loved to have seen photos of these places, rather than solely an artist’s slightly kitschy interpretation.





Last but definitely not least was Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford, published by Faber & Faber on 2nd Feb. I was excited to get the chance to read this one early and for free, although I keep wanting to call it Infinite Light, which is a much worse title. I really liked the book and my review is here.





Other books I read and reviewed for the blog this month – from Indonesia and Azerbaijan – were disappointing, so I’m due an excellent international read soon.





Books that I especially enjoyed this month, aside from Light Perpetual, were US writer Kiley Reid’s breezy Booker-longlisted story of racial inequalities and stereotypes Such a Fun Age, which I thought was pitch perfect, and Hallie Rubenhold’s slice of social history The Five, about the domestic lives and personal histories of the women killed by notorious Victorian murderer Jack the Ripper. This book was a fascinating insight into the tough lives of working class people less than 200 years ago, and also worked as a belated attempt to restore dignity to these women after largely baseless accusations of lives of prostitution. 





Aside from reading (and working and opening up my shonky homeschool), I’ve been knitting this month, and made an amazing blanket (if I do say so myself), the first thing I’ve made since the last time I was pregnant over a decade ago. Knitting is an excellent lockdown activity – you can do it while watching telly! – and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it back in March last year. And using comically enormous needles and chunky wool means it only took a few evenings rather than months to complete!










I’ve also been baking with my son and we just made a delicious vegan, gluten-free lemon cake from a Nigella Lawson recipe, so he could enter a home-school home-baking competition! No flour, eggs or butter, but instead polenta, ground almonds, olive oil and almond milk. Sounds disgusting, right? But it’s not. It’s filled with a sort of syrup made from lemon juice and icing sugar, which you heat before pricking the cake all over with a skewer and then letting the syrup gloop down the holes. Not sure how the school are going to judge the cake remotely, mind, since they can’t taste it?! Anyway, that’s for them to figure out.










Away from uncharacteristic domestic goddessry and onto January’s TV-watching. My husband and I have been watching the filthy and hilarious The Great on Channel 4 (extremely loosely based on the history of Catherine the Great), as well as the fourth and final season of the wonderful French dramedy Call My Agent on Netflix (though this season isn’t as good as the others). Then we’ve watched  Russell Davies’ devastating AIDS drama series It’s a Sin, which was moving and humane and unflinching, but also a celebration of love and friendship and kindness and the undeniable joys of hedonism. (Then when my son asked why I was crying, instead of telling him that I was a sentimental old fool my eldest daughter told him that me and his dad were getting divorced, which was untrue and uncalled for!) All of these were much better than The Queen’s Gambit, though I did like the aesthetic of that show.





Finally, Marvel’s entertaining and extraordinarily intriguing WandaVision is currently streaming on Disney Plus, and it is the only thing my teenage daughters will actually sit down and watch with us! However, they have deigned to agree to watch the whole Marvel film library from beginning to end (so that I have at least a faint clue about the characters’ back story), and we started with 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger last night. 





Other films watched this month include Asif Kapadia’s 2019 biopic Diego Maradona, using diverse footage to chart the footballer’s rise and fall; 2009’s bizarre and uneven George Clooney movie Men Who Stare at Goats; the newly released Disney movie Soul; and, finally, the 2019 film Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. This provides a fascinating insight into the life of eccentric Marion Stokes, who made it her life’s work to record 24/7 news coverage from across the USA from the late 1970s until her death over three decades later.





The pandemic didn’t really affect us directly during the first wave, despite living at the epicentre in London, but this time round I know lots of people who’ve had COVID over the last few weeks – friends, colleagues, my kid’s school friends, their teachers – it’s everywhere. My parents live in the countryside where it’s less prevalent, but I’m very pleased they got their first dose of vaccine this week. We’ve seen them once since last March so fingers crossed things improve soon. They could hardly get worse. Keep safe out there!

	


	





	

		
Review no 133: Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford (UK)
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

EUROPE





(I read Francis Spufford’s much-anticipated new novel Light Perpetual this month via #NetGalley.)





In the novels’s opening chapter, t+0: 1944, the narrative details an imagined rocket attack in chilling, slow-motion detail, as it strikes and instantly kills five children, out shopping in South London on an ordinary Saturday with their families: five-year-olds Alec, Vern, Ben and twins Jo and Val. The  vivid unspooling of the catastrophe brought to mind the opening story in Mark Haddon’s powerful short story collection The Pier Falls in its sense of dispassionate inevitability.





“It cannot be run backwards, to summon the dust to rise, any more than you can stir milk back out of tea. Once sundered, forever sundered. Once scattered, forever scattered. It’s irreversible.”





Nevertheless, fiction does have the power to rewind time, and Spufford recreates a future for his tragically snuffed-out characters. This deeply humane novel conjures those children up with the incantatory “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light. Come, dust.”





We skip forward in time by five years, and the children  – untouched – are now 10. We learn things about these normal working class children that will stay with them throughout their lives: whether it’s a love of music, a keen intelligence, or a searing sensitivity.





We revisit Alec, Vern, Ben, Jo and Val at intervals, a bit like the ’60s TV series 7 Up, as we watch the ways their lives diverge, their sadnesses and successes, their bad and good decisions, and the way those decisions influence the course of their lives, however outwardly mundane they may be.





The evocation of each decade of the latter part of the 20th century is a feat of pastiche, which, if it occasionally lapses into cliché, is counterpointed by its pinpoint accuracy.





I found sensitive Ben most vividly drawn, diagnosed at a young age with schizophrenia, whose nightmare years are balanced by a period of domestic contentment. This part of the book gives value to the notion of perseverance through the darkest of times, in the hope of a brighter future: and although it could easily seem trite, Ben’s story is so well-handled that it feels genuinely wise and hopeful.





This a deeply humane novel, with light a reoccurring motif, and with a whiff of benevolent religiosity. However, the prose is spiritual rather than hectoring, and at its best both illuminating and luminous. The book opens with the words “the light” – in that case the terrifying, destructive light of the murderous rocket attack – and it closes, too, with light: “The grass grows bright with ordinary light … and the light is very good“. 





With its opening pages awash with wish fulfilment and second chances, there are obvious thematic parallels with Kate Atkinson’s instant classic Life after Life, as well as Ian McEwan’s canon-fodder Atonement, but Light Perpetual is far from derivative and easily holds its ground next to those two novels.





In 1944 a V-2 rocket killed 168 people in a branch of Woolworths on New Cross Road in London; 15 of the dead were younger than 11. Light Perpetual does not attempt to unearth or reimagine the histories or thwarted futures of those real children, but the author acknowledges that the novel is “partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century“.





Frances Spufford has written one previous, extremely well-received novel, the multi-prize-winning work of historical fiction Golden Hill, as well as some diverse works of non-fiction: The Child that Books Built (about his childhood love of reading), Unapologetic (about his Christian faith) and Red Plenty (about the USSR in the 1950s). This new work may be his best yet.






	


	





	

		
Review no 132: Ali and Nino by Kurban Said (Azerbaijan)
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

Translated by Jenna Graman





NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST, CENTRAL ASIA AND THE SOUTH CAUCASUS





Ali and Nino owes a debt to Romeo and Juliet. It is a tale of thwarted love between the patriotic Muslim Azeri Ali and the beautiful Georgian Orthodox princess Nino, who is from a more liberal background. Ali and Nino live in oil-rich Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, which has been a consistent lure for exploitation by the West, while their opposing ideals and the encroaching war place their love story under constant threat.





Nino represents a cultivated European-influenced civility and enjoys vices such as wine. She longs to travel throughout Western Europe and loves to walk through the whispering trees. Ali, in contrast, is from a deeply conservative and strongly patriarchal background. He is spooked by forests and is all wild desert and bloodlust and unbridled masculinity. I mean, he’s actually a total nightmare. He gallops around on a rare red-gold horse, and during one battle he literally drinks the blood of his enemies. He’s a massive stereotype. But you can’t deny he really feels things. 





Ali’s old school friend, the devout Imam-to-be Seyd, says things like:





“A wise man does not court a woman. The woman is just an acre, on which the man sows.”





Seyd even advises Ali that women lack intelligence and a soul:





“Why would women have either? It is enough for her to be chaste and have many children.” 





Wow. So wise!





He advises that it is ok for Ali to marry Nino without requiring her to convert to Islam as





“No Paradise or Hell is waiting for a woman. When she dies she just disintegrates into nothing. The sons of course must be Shiites.”  





Right, that sounds reasonable.





Like Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, this book is set in the world of the blood feud, a state of affairs that is set in stone:





“The blood-feud is the most important basis of state order and good conduct, no matter what Europeans say.”





Kadare covers his territory with much more nuance, however, and is, let’s face it, a Nobel Prize nominee and all round better writer.





The cover design of the edition of Ali and Nino that I read, printed by Vintage and with an introduction by Paul Theroux (which contains spoilers), looks like it’s been produced by a bot, it is so riotously clichéd. The bottom half of the front cover features a camel caravan in silhouette beneath an image of a young woman’s intense eyes, which gaze out from the upper part of the cover.





The identity of the author who wrote under the pseudonym Kurban Said was shrouded in mystery when Ali and Nino was first published in Vienna in 1937.





Was the writer the Austrian countess who had signed the publishing contract, and if so how on earth did she know so much about pre-First World War Azerbaijan?





The book was eventually attributed to a friend of hers, Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish émigré and convert to Islam who had fled the Azerbaijani capital Baku during the Russian Revolution.





A copy of Ali and Nino was later unearthed in a Berlin market by Jenna Graman, who translated it, and the novel was duly published in English in 1970. To be honest, I wish she’d left it on the book stall instead.






	


	





	

		
Review no 131: As I Open My Eyes (À Peine J’Ouvre les Yeux) – a movie from Tunisia
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

NORTH AFRICA , MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA





As I Open My Eyes is a  2015 coming of age movie directed and co-written by Tunisian film maker Leyla Bouzid. The action takes place in Tunis, just before the revolutionary Arab Spring of protests kicked off in Tunisia in 2011.





Farah (Baya Medhaffar) is 18, wealthy, confident, rebellious, very pretty and naive. She has a  protective mother, Hayet, who is focused on her daughter’s glittering academic prospects, and a father who works away from home, managing troubled phosphate mines in Ghafsa.





Farah is not keen to fulfil her family’s expectations and train as a doctor. Instead, she sings (fairly badly to my ears!) in a band, Joujma, and is swept away by her romance with the cool but kinda gittish lute-player Borhene (Montassar Ayari) – she drinks and dances in male-dominated bars, smokes and makes out in the bushes.





She reminded me a bit of a  young Siouxsie Sioux, while the music was a mix of lyrics full of political rebellion crossed with more traditional rhythms (with music by renowned Iraqi oud player Khyam Allami). The band’s often dangerous themes, though, ultimately attract unwanted attention from the police.





Baya Medhaffar’s performance makes the film, which sometimes veers into melodrama, while the plot line often covers familiar ground. I found the movie was interesting for the way it evoked the febrile atmosphere of 2010 Tunisia.





It also effectively portrays the challenges that come with being young and female in a highly conservative country (although Medhaffar has been quoted as saying that “I feel the same when I walk on the streets in Tunisia or in Paris”), and the difficulty of balancing the roles of a daughter and of a teenager yearning to spread her wings and grab her independence, both artistically and romantically.









	


	





	

		
Review no 130: The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha (Indonesia)
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALIA





Translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein





A bored 20-something English teacher in Jakarta, a “city of thwarted suicidal urges“, longs for adventure far away. Unexpectedly, she summons a demon (her “lusty Lucifer“), has wild sex with him, and subsequently enters into a sort of Faustian pact, which allows her to travel throughout the world … though at what price?





Bequeathed a pair of Wizard of Oz style red shoes (the Demon Lover informs her that “Their owner is a witch, but she is long dead … I warn you, these shoes are cursed“), our heroine is mysteriously transported to New York.  Referred throughout as “you”, she finds herself in a cab, on the way to the airport, with a ticket for Berlin.





What follows is reminiscent of a choose-your-own-adventure book from the 1980s. An intelligent, adult take on a genre for which I held much childhood affection was a tantalising prospect.





However, the story that I found myself embarking on was frustratingly incoherent. Perhaps the book itself is supposed to be a meditation on the limits and powers of narrative. But perhaps it was also let down by the translation, and in parts it was definitely badly edited. 





I tried two permutations of the story: in the first, “I” remained in New York, feeling cut off and strangely marooned, before engaging in misguided experiments with a mystical mirror, an event that rapidly ended in a surreal and opaque fairy tale ending. 





In the second version, I travelled to Berlin via New York, and then headed on to Amsterdam, after an encounter with a mysterious, snow-globe toting old man, where I found myself sharing an apartment with a complicated prostitute.





I found the conceptual nature of the book the most difficult to engage with. Some reviewers have suggested that its mythical and magical elements serve to demonstrate that however free we may think we are in our wanderings (if we are lucky enough to secure that elusive visa or green card, or to have the nationality, uncontroversial name and language skills that facilitate unfettered movement around the globe), there are ultimately only a finite number of stories to be played out in the world.





Perhaps the book is an extended riff on the lengths people will go to to leave unsatisfactory lives behind and travel to the West, and the uncertain outcomes of such a determination: after all, to cite the Wizard of Oz, a story that is repeatedly revisited throughout this labyrinthine novel: “There’s no place like home“.





There are hints throughout of multiple simultaneous realities, which might partly explain my confusion on my first reading. In this case the book may benefit from multiple readings, to follow all the various possible threads.





In the Amsterdam iteration, for example, I read that “If a city can have a twin, maybe you and your red shoes do too. What kind of life might your red shoes be having in New York?” However, because multiple story strands at times use the same interlinking narratives, the coherence of the story, already looping and meandering, broke down at times.





I’d been very eager to read this book (published in Indonesian in 2017, and in English by the Harvill Secker imprint of PRH in 2020) but, overall, I felt that its intriguing premise didn’t live up to my expectations.






	


	





	

		
Review no 129: Albanian artist Anri Sala
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

EUROPE





Prize-winning Albanian video, installation and photographic artist Anri Sala was born in isolationist, still-communist Albania in 1974. He currently lives in Berlin, and has been widely exhibited internationally. 





The Marian Goodman Gallery in London describes his oeuvre as: “transformative, time-based works … constructed through multiple relationships between image, architecture and sound …” So what does this art-speak actually mean?





The 2003 video installation Dammi i Colori (Give me the Colours) takes as its subject matter changes introduced under Edi Rama, a central figure in 21st century Albanian politics. He was Mayor of the capital, Tirana, when the video was filmed, and is currently the Albanian PM.





I know more about Albanian politics than most people living outside the Balkans, due to the nature of my day job. But I had no idea until today that Rama used to be a painter, and actually flat-shared with Sala in Paris.





A bit of background: Albania came close to civil conflict in 1997, following the collapse of pyramid investment schemes. The country has, of course, opened up significantly since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and has been on the path to reform, but it still has a long way to go before it is likely to fulfil its goal of European Union membership.





Under Rama’s leadership, and as part of a programme of urban regeneration, in the early 2000s the city’s buildings were painted in vivid colours (presumably as a less costly alternative to an expensive construction project). Dammi i Colori pans through the streets of Tirana, while Mayor Rama explains what it involves and his desire to see the capital transformed from ‘a city where you are doomed to live by fate [to] a city where you choose to live’.













The film’s title references an aria from Puccini’s 1900 opera Tosca, sung by an artist working on a portrait of Mary Magdalene (while reflecting on his lover Tosca). The title can, thus, at a stretch, be interpreted as reflecting Rama’s ambitions for the city, as it sought to recover from instability and the past unrest that had resulted in significant damage to the capital.





Tate Modern quotes Sala: “I wanted to show images from a place where speaking of utopia is actually impossible, and therefore utopian. I chose the notion of hope instead of utopia. I focused on the idea of bringing hope in a place where there is no hope … It is about dealing with the reality where the luxury of time and money is missing.”





Having lived through the rapid period of change that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in early 1990s, Sala’s work is, as artmargins.com neatly put it, preoccupied with “capturing disappearance in progress“. (And he’s not above mining an influential friendship to do so.)





Jumping forward 10 years, Sala’s punningly titled work Ravel Ravel Unravel, shown at the Venice Biennale,  explored not only a piece of music, but the unintended act of asynchronicity. It was inspired by Ravel’s 1930 piano concerto, Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major, which was commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (elder brother of the famous philosopher), who had lost his right arm in World War I.





Sala separately filmed two expert pianists performing the left-handed work, their right hands remaining still. Both films were then screened, simultaneously, in a single room under the title Ravel Ravel. The walls of the gallery were treated, to dampen any echoes, so that minor discrepancies between the two performances were thrown into relief. Sala felt that the performances “paradoxically create an ‘other’ space”, quite apart from the two individual video performances.





Another two rooms, titled simply Unravel, featured a French DJ as she attempted to sync two vinyl recordings of the performances. The film in the first room of the two was silent, focusing only on her face, while the other room allowed visitors to the gallery to both hear and see her actions.













Other works have used fireworks and informal DJ sets, and one was produced in co-operation with the rock band Franz Ferdinand. But music isn’t always central to Sala’s work.





Whizzing back in time to 2002, No Barragán, No Cry (below) is a photographic work created in response to the former Mexican home of the late architect Luis Barragán. On the roof terrace there had been a wooden sculpture of a horse, mounted on a plinth, but the contents of the house had been disrupted after Barragán’s death.





Sala notes that “the thing I most remembered was the thing that was no longer there.” So, yes, Sala grabbed himself a horse, and briefly balanced it on the plinth. This image disturbs me, and although Sala claims the horse was not harmed in any way I can only image it was put through something of a stressful ordeal. Animal welfare issues aside, however, the artist’s obsession with “capturing disappearance” remains evident.  





No Barragán, No Cry (2002, colour photo)






	


	





	

		
Review no 128 – This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection: a movie from Lesotho
	


	
		

			
		


			
	

		

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA





In Sesotho with English subtitles (2019, running time 2h)





A film based around plans for the disinterment of family members is about as far away from the Hollywood mainstream as it is possible to get (though there was Coco I guess).





Written and directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection opens, mythical, atmospheric and mysterious, with the line: “This place. Legend says it used to be called the plains of weeping.” Foreign missionaries in contrast, we learn, called it Nazareth.





Soon we are introduced to an old woman, Mantoa (played by Mary Twala Mhlongo, who died in 2020). She is so worn and thin as to be, at first sight, virtually genderless, crying out for her recently deceased adult son. Her husband is long dead, her daughter and grandchild too, and her face is deeply lined and etched with grief. With this final loss, the loss of her son, in a South African mining accident, her life has become meaningless.





The unnamed narrator (played by Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha), accompanied by a wooden, piping instrument, the lesiba (hear what they sound like here), informs us that “now that her son was dead she didn’t cry, nor look up to the heavens. Besides God, reality too felt further and further away“.





Putting on her best dress, Mantoa goes to bed and waits for death to come for her in the house her husband built, though it remains punishingly absent. Her grief enfolds her completely, and she takes what amounts to a vow of silence, “regarding God and
nature in silent contempt”.





This is sad film, but also a film that is gorgeous to look at, set among the beautiful and ethereal mountains of rural Lesotho, which is surrounded on all sides by the territory of South Africa. Mantoa’s small house is shot with painterly care, too, with its sparse interior, its deeply coloured internal walls contrasting with the yellow flowers to the side. The camera lingers lovingly on the detailing of her ornate, black lace, high-collared dress, while all the time that haunting, piping music plays.





Mantoa, speaking out to complain about the state of the neglected cemetery, learns that the villagers, who have lived peaceably for many years, are to be forcibly resettled; their land is to be flooded and a dam built. The Ministry will provide funding to those who choose to move the graves of their family.





The old woman unexpectedly finds within her an untapped spirit of defiance, which she uses to inspire her local  community. She angrily, unsparingly, ignores the exhortations of the local priest, telling him bitterly that there was no meaning in the deaths of her husband, her children, her grandchild, and no meaning in the death of his own wife who “will die over and over again for the rest of your remaining life. That’s grief. It’s a senseless suffering, there’s no meaning to it.“





Nevertheless, in an impassioned address, Mantoa expressed how she feels attached with an inviolable bond to the soil that contains generations of her relatives, “their umbilical cords and the placentas of her mother“, and asserts that the whole land would need to be exhumed in order for them to be able to leave it. I’ve since learnt that in parts of Africa the tombstones of ancestors can serve as a sort of marker of land ownership. 





Meanwhile, the villagers are increasingly afraid of losing their livelihoods. The land they live and work on has been leased on trust for generations, eroding any sense that they lack official rights of ownership over it – while they have already witnessed the destruction of other areas of the local environment to make way for the march of (unwanted but inevitable) infrastructural development.





The film is a totemic meditation on life and death and the imposition of unsought change, and successfully re-creates a way of life that is threatened by the pervasive drive towards modernisation, while also evoking a more spiritual world, where the dead continue to occupy an important space alongside the living.





It is a beautifully shot, lyrical film, filled with arresting imagery of the natural world, with enormous skies taking up most the screen, and those astonishing mountains. It is a film that is slow and sorrowful – and was described by 2020’s Africa in Motion film festival as gentle, but I didn’t find it gentle, I frequently found it brutal.





In 2020 the film was a worthy winner of a special jury prize at Sundance for “visionary filmmaking”, and it has been nominated by Lesotho in the category of best international feature for the 2021 Oscars. It is the first time that tiny Lesotho has entered the competition. This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection is, no doubt, not for everyone, but I for one am glad to have watched it.