Image of Change: Cameroon and Cinematography February 2, 2010

Echo Lens Focus: Jean Pierre Bekolo’s “Quartier Mozart” and “les saignantes” January 3, 2010

http://quartiermozart.blogspot.com/

One of the most delightfully unexpected African films in decades, Quartier Mozart
was awarded the Prix Afrique en Creation at the 1992 Cannes Film
Festival and has enchanted film festival audiences from New York to New
Dehli. Told over a 48-hour period in a working class neighborhood in
Yaounde, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film is the story of the
not-very-sentimental education of a young schoolgirl known as Queen of
the ‘Hood. Maman Thekla, the local sorceress, helps her enter the body
of a young man, My Guy, so she can discover for herself the real
“sexual politics” of the quarter. Meanwhile, Maman Thekla herself
assumes the shape of Panka, a familiar comic figure in Cameroonian
folklore who can cause a man’s penis to disappear with a simple
handshake.

Echo Lens Focus: Mr Jean Marie Teno, Pioneering Cameroonian Cinema

http://www.jmteno.us/

Renown Cameroonian Filmmaker, Mr Jean Marie Teno captured this real live incident of vigilante injustice in Cameroon in his 1999 documentary film. In the film, the producer would document the troubling events which he witnessed in his village. One of them being a young boy who was nearly lynched by a mob depicting the people’s justice in a lawless state. He also delves into the tradition that ordains men as ultimate rulers of the family while attending a wedding and discuses the fate of a journalist imprisoned without a trial for writing an article about the health of the president.