Manthia Diawara In Residence
Location(s)
Presented in partnership with Film at International House and the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Cinema Studies
As filmmaker, cultural theorist and art historian, Manthia Diawara has had a major impact on the programs of Scribe Video Center. During his tenure as Associate Director of the Center for Study for Black Literature at the University of Pennsylvania he partnered with Scribe to create the Issues in Black Cinema screening and discussion series – introducing Philadelphia audiences to filmmakers Marlon Riggs, theorist Wahneema Lubiano, and the works of Charles Burnett. He is also responsible for helping forge natural collaborations between scholars and filmmakers in the production of documentaries that have strengthened both the art of the academy and the scholarship of indy historical documentaries films.
Diawara’s own work as a filmmaker has documented the cultural giants of our time
(Sembene Ousmane: The Making of African Cinema); and his African cities project (Conakry Kas, Bamako Siki Kan) has presented a view of a modern and post-modern African that is rarely seen in mass media. As part of Scribe’s 25th anniversary celebration, we are very pleased to have Manthia Diawara in residence for the Philadelphia premiere of his most recent documentary Who’s Afraid of Ngugi?.
6:00 PM - Rouch in Reverse (1995, United Kingdom /US, 52 min) In conversation with
French ethnologist/filmmaker, Jean Rouch, Diawara places Rouch's films in the context of the on-going struggle of Africans to construct their own vision of modernity.
8:00 PM - Who’s Afraid of Ngugi (2006, US/Kenya, 87 min) about the acclaimed author’s return to Kenya, with his political activist wife Njeri, after years of exile. As they are welcomed home by joyous and hopeful crowds, they also must cope with those who still find their revolutionary words and deeds threatening.
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More Films by Manthia Diawara
Wednesday, November 12
Scribe Video Center
4212 Chestnut Street, Phila
Free Admission
Noon -- Sembene: the Making of African Cinema (1994, 60 min)
This rich documentary follows the legendary Senegalese filmmaker Sembene Ousmane as he revisits locations of his films and reminisces about his career and discusses his craft.
1:30 PM -- In Search of Africa (1997, 26 min)
In 1996, Diawara returns to his boyhood home of Guinea, thirty-two years after he and his family were expelled from the newly liberated country, to a homecoming which is unlike anything he expected.
2:00 PM -- Conakry Kas (2003, 82 min)
Diawara visits Guinea-Conakry to see what is left of the artists (Ballets Africains, Bembeya Jazz National) and intellectuals (D.T. Niane, Telivel Diallo) of the Guinean Cultural revolution, and how the citizens of Conakry cope with globalization. The film casts a nostalgic look at Pan-Africanism in the 1960s, and asks “What is the utopia of the Guinean youth today?”.
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New African Documentary with Manthia Diawara
Wednesday, November 12 @ 5:00pm
Location: 401 Fisher-Bennett Hall, 3440 Walnut Street
University of Pensylvania
$10, Scribe members and students FREE
Manthia Diawara, surveys the trends and developments of contemporary African cinema. A cinema that took form during the early years of independence, film in Africa has been both a cultural and political force. Diawara will screen selections created by a variety of film artists from across the African continent and attempt to put the work in historical and social context.
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Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Independence Foundation.