“Sous les figues” opens the eleventh edition of Ellas Son Cine next Tuesday, June 20 at the Sala Berlanga.
– Women for Africa has been organizing this showcase since 2013 to give visibility to women’s cinema from the continent.
– The screenings will take place from June 20 to 24 at 7:30 p.m. at the Sala Berlanga in Madrid.
– Films by filmmakers from Tunisia, Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon and Morocco will be screened during the showcase.
For the eleventh consecutive year, the Women for Africa Foundation is offering the exhibition Ellas son Cine, organized by the foundation and curated by Guadalupe Arensburg. Five films made by African women directors will be screened at the Berlanga Hall, offering a plural, innovative and feminist vision of the African film scene.
Erige Sehiri, director of Sous les figues, will be present next Tuesday, June 20, at the opening of Ellas Son Cine 11. Sehiri, although born in Lyon, has developed her entire film career in Tunisia, the country where her parents are from. Now she arrives in Madrid to promote and comment on her film, which will be released in commercial theaters next July. Sous les figues is her debut as a fiction director, a choral film where the weight of the action falls on the female characters, who, with a cheerful and fresh character, express their desire to grow and be free in the heart of a patriarchal society that stifles them.
On Wednesday, June 21, it is the turn of Shimoni, a small Kenyan town that gives its title to Angela Wamai’s debut feature film. Another film set in the rural world that, in the director’s own words, is “about the devastating power of silence”. A dark film with psychologically complex characters that has won awards at several festivals, such as the FESPACO of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), where it won the Bronze Étalon, the third prize of the competition. The world premiere of this film was in 2022 at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.
A year earlier, in 2021, Neptune Frost, a film co-directed by Rwandan Anisia Uzeyman and African-American Saul Williams, also premiered in Toronto and can be seen on Thursday 22 at the Berlanga Hall, like all the films, at 7.30 pm. It is a futuristic musical where science fiction is combined with a strong social criticism of the inequalities of the Central African country. A risky bet that could be seen at the Gijon Festival and that is a visual spectacle rarely seen on the big screen.
On Friday 23rd will be screened Mon père, le diable, a film directed by Cameroonian Ellie Foumbi, nominated at the Spirit Independent Awards last March for best independent film. Like Shimoni, it is a story of revenge and redemption, but this time told through the eyes of an African refugee in the south of France. A disturbing thriller that crudely deals with the traumas of the past in people’s present.
Ellas son Cine will close on Saturday, June 24 with a film that has already been screened in our country, The Blue Caftan, by Moroccan director Maryam Touzani. The Blue Caftan, a film that represented Morocco in the previous edition of the Oscars and was selected in the shortlist, is a romantic drama where Touzani captures with brilliant sensitivity the taboo subject of homosexuality in the Arab world. Adam, Maryam Touzani’s previous feature film, was already present in the 2020 edition of Ellas son Cine.
Ellas son Cine is the main audiovisual project of the Women for Africa Foundation. The aim of the exhibition is to promote knowledge and enjoyment in Spain of films directed by African women. Prior to this eleventh edition, Ellas son Cine has screened 57 feature films and 7 short films from 23 countries.