Mama Quibdó dresses up for the cinema: The Festival is coming!
- Salvatore Laudicina Ramirez
- Aug 5, 2022
- 3 min read
Sitting on her throne of ancestry and legacy, the matron, adorned with the seventh art, is excited because September, her favorite month, is approaching. The month where the audiovisual is an inheritance of culture, identity and bonds of Afro brotherhood.
You get as excited in Africa as in Quibdó.
For three years now, cinema has taught me that, even if a film is spoken in a foreign language and the central plot takes place in a different territory, the characters run through experiences that could belong to any of my children. Quibdó is a land of fighting men and women, capable of laughing and crying with the same strength, worthy protagonists of admirable stories.
Yes, being Afro in Chocó is not the same as being in Senegal or Paris. But one is moved all the same. In this intrinsic and honest territory, laughter, tears, hopes, fears and longings do not come with subtitles and translations. They simply are. They exist, they are there and they fulfill a vital mission: to give meaning to existence.
When sitting in front of the big screen allows you to tie the laces of those shoes of feelings, intangible but transcendental, faded by so many trips to the confines of those feelings that know no languages or latitudes, that fit comfortably at the feet of my soul and at the feet of the souls of other African descendants, each fiction or documentary film is equivalent to a fraternal embrace that allows you to celebrate your skin color and the road traveled until today.
That is reason enough to run like a child through rural Uganda in Putti Shalom, a documentary by Hungarian director Tamás Wormser, a journey into the murk of a colonialism that covers the life and identity of a Ugandan community, grounded in the moral and religious values of Judaism.
Walking through Côte d'Ivoire and educating myself with Soraya Milla's audiovisual text: Vitiligo.
A narrative where two women try to find each other and build their identity in questioning and doubts, inhabitants of a skin that must deal with depigmentation and sudden changes.
Give my Africanness permission to shudder with the documentary Calling Cabral, dedicated to the legacy of political leader Amilcar Cabral, father of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde; and embark on a fascinating journey into the historical past and present of two countries united by a dream of independence.
To transport myself mentally to Kenya and stay in the body of the erotic Kemunto, the creation of director Lydia Matata, to sit in her wheelchair while immersing myself in the depths of a sexuality that cries out for the visit of pleasure to the volcanic pubic universe.
To keep in my baggage of memories the film The sleeping negro, starring a young African-American, victim of racism, who could have been born in Chocó if the screenwriter and director Skinner Myers had wanted him to, determined to change his thinking to find himself.
Visiting Santo Domingo and playing at being a native to wander at will through the Capotillo neighborhood and meet face to face with the protagonist of the film Bantú Mama, written and directed by Iván Herrera: a French woman of African origin who manages to escape from prison in the Dominican Republic to be taken in by a group of young children, eager for a mother figure and affection, who change her life forever.
To shudder with the fusion of traditional African rhythms and Afro-Cuban music, sonorous pillars of the Congolese rumba, while I discover the argumentative anatomy of The Rumba Kings, cinematographic universe of the Peruvian Alan Brain, a journey to the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1950.
And to conclude the race in the mind of Oneida, muse of the film Cantos que inundan el río, directed by Germán Arango, daughter of my entrails and proudly born in the waters of the Bojayá River, place where she learns to sing alabao with a voice that does not come from the throat, but from the pain of the dead sown by the war that plagues the territory.
In each of the films mentioned by the memory of this old woman who has learned to fall madly in love with the seventh art, as if she were the most loving of husbands, it is inevitable that a shy rain, like those that fall in Chocó at dawn, emanates from the pupils.
Fortunately, September is coming. The heart will dress elegantly to sit in the front row and enjoy the official selection of the 4th edition of the Quibdó Africa Film Festival. I will be there to remind myself at every moment that when you see a film, you get excited in Africa or in Quibdó because laughter, tears, hopes, fears and longings do not come with subtitles and translations.
Quibdó Mama
To see the complete list of films, visit the link:
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