Friends of the Goethe Institut, Nigeria are in for a thrill in the next season of film screening of “Black in the Western World” by Wanjiru Kinyanjui and “Everything will be Fine” by Angelina Maccarone.
Indeed, the screening is part of the cultural institution’s film-series “BE Longing,” which is coming to an end soon.
Here’s what you need to know about Black in the Western World (Wanjiru Kinyanjui, 1992, 23min).
Set in Germany in the early 1990s: Racist caricatures, picture books and advertisements circulate within popular culture and are consumed by white audiences without second thought. In school playgrounds and classrooms, racist games and songs are part of everyday life.
Filmmaker Wanjiru Kinyanjui and her interviewee Tsitsi Dangarembga analyse these supposed gags in a cool, detached fashion despite the traumatising violence of the images they contain.
These scenes are cross-cut with others showing two men from Malawi and Namibia discussing right-wing extremism in Germany and encouraging Black people in Europe to fight against racism and neocolonialism.
Back in the spotlight after an extended slumber in the archives, BLACK IN THE WESTERN WORLD uses interviews to deliver a sharp critique of racist as well as capitalist structures.
Made while Kinyanjui was studying at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB), the film raises awareness, strengthens and emboldens. (Can Sungu – Fiktionsbescheinigung).
Here’s what you need to know about
Everything will be Fine (Angelina Maccarone, 1998, 90min)
Nabou, an Afro-German slacker, desperately wants to win back her ex-girlfriend Katja, a club kid. Nabou becomes a housekeeper for Katja’s neighbor, Kim, who is a workaholic striving to become a partner in an advertising agency.
A refreshing romantic comedy with the ingredients of a classic lesbian feature: whimsical sexiness, mistaken identity, and general madness and mayhem.
The film Alles wird gut was groundbreaking when it was first broadcast on German television in 1998 in that it was the first German comedy film to feature non-white protagonists; that the plot is driven by a lesbian love story between two Afro-German women makes the film so unorthodox in Nigeria where there is a law against same sex marriage.
Directed by Angelina Maccarone and co-written with Fatima El-Tayeb, the film was commissioned by NDR for television broadcast as part of its ‘Wilde Herzen’ series and was premiered at the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1997.
