Film
Africa Through the Lens of Fiction and Film
- Director
- Ingrid Sinclair, Biyi Bandele
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 240 mins
Africa Writes – Royal African Society’s annual literature festival – comes to Bristol for the first time for a programme of events that includes this screening and discussion, organised in conjunction with Afrika Eye. At 6pm, a panel of writers and filmmakers (including Kivu Ruhorahoza, Yaba Badoe and Ingrid Sinclair) discuss the intersection of film and literature about and in Africa. How do creative processes compare and move across screen and text? How does financing work and differ for these media? What are the challenges of putting literary fiction onscreen, and what different roles have poets and novelists had in shaping filmic representations of Africa? What are the political implications of putting Africa onscreen in an era of ‘spectacle culture’ and ‘poverty porn’?
This is followed by two film screenings. Inspired by the writer Bessie Head, Ingrid Sinclair’s short film Riches follows the flight of a teacher and her son from apartheid South Africa to an isolated school in Zimbabwe. Based on Chimamanda Adichie’s Orange Prize-winning novel, Biyi Bandele‘s 2013 feature Half of a Yellow Sun follows twin sisters from an affluent Nigerian family who return to Nigeria in the mid-1960s after studying in England, only to find their lives taking wildly different paths. The cast includes Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anika Noni Rose, Joseph Mawle and John Boyega – who went on to find fame in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
