Zanzibar International Film Festival – Saturday, July 15, 2017

A Fuga (Brazil) – An animated short about an escaped prison in Egypt 50 BC. As he struggles across the desert he embarks on a journey of a lifetime. If I knew anything about Egyptian mythology, I am guessing I would have understood the symbolism of the things he saw. 7/10

Kaleidoscope (Kenya) – A haunting piece where a woman in a bad relationship ends up in an inescapable room. I did not understand the ending, but the movie was sufficiently haunting. 6/10

Give a Man a Mask and He Will Tell You the Truth (Zimbabwe) – Here is my second 10/10 of the festival. How do you tell the story of men having sex with men, something that is illegal in Zimbabwe? You flip filmmaking upside down and make sure that things are beautifully out of focus, so you can hear the voices when the identities are protected. The filmmaker also used beautiful masks – to represent the mask the men must wear, lest society discover who they are – in a technically outstanding documentary. 10/10

Black Head Cow (Tanzania/UK) – I have to go based on what I saw, not on what the filmmakers said about the film after I saw it…Dealing with the sensitive issue of young women being married off early and not being allowed to go to school, this film did a nice job of setting up the dilemma for the audience to ponder. There were no answers given – and that may be the best way to handle this. 7/10

Cream (South Africa) – This short film about racial identity goes a bit overboard. There is no question the attempted lightening of skin happened. There is no question that people have problems with how police handle race. There is no question that there are messed up families. To accomplish throwing everything together there was a lot of forced pontificating. 5/10

The Secret of Happiness (Rwanda) – There was no ice cream, no elephants, no giraffes and no cats in the movie, so I am not sure it was my secret of happiness. This is another film that looks at questionable traditions, in this case the requirement for young women to stretch their labia to please one’s husband. The topic certainly needs to be discussed, but this film isn’t the best path to that discussion. 6/10

Cheusi Dawa (Tanzania) – This is a weak after school special with bad translations. If only it were as simple to turn your life around as it is in this movie…one sister fails school but after a few months gets her dream job because she is a focused hard studier and the other sister has to choose her career or her man. Coincidentally, her hero is available to talk to her. 4/10

Binti Zanzibar (Tanzania) – Author’s Note: I know at least one person in this film. I have tried to not let that raise my film rating too much. This film was a laugh fest. Dealing with the issue of a young woman missing out on education and being forced to marry (see Black Head Cow above), this movie does it completely wrong. The filmmakers were there and listened to all the laughter (at the movie, not with the movie) – and then tried to talk about how it was a serious subject. Bad ‘B’ movie. 1/10

Thank You for the Rain – (UK/Kenya) – This one was very close to also getting a 10. This movie is about a Kenyan farmer who tries to get his community to take climate change seriously as his village suffers from devastating droughts followed by even worse floods. He then gets the opportunity, as people in Europe hear of what he is doing, to go speak at the Paris Climate Change Conference. The farmer himself films parts of the film and it is very well done. But it could have been a little better. 9/10