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On the third day of our Moscow visit, on Sunday morning when I was getting ready for a breakfast and a possible visit to a gallery before our departure back to Holland, I got a short message on my mobile: “Number sixteen, I’m getting delayed, will be in the hotel lobby ten minutes later. Number eighteen.” A gentle smile crossed my face while I was reading it. Foreigners just love playing around with secrets and numbers while in Moscow (the agent 007 very much engraved in their minds and the most favorite one). I will explain you the meaning of this message later on.
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The seventh African filmmaker came with a serious delay because of visa problems. By the time he could go to China I was already back home writing my contributions to the catalogue. Zhu Rikun, the artistic director of our partnerfilmschool took care of him and that’s why I asked Rikun to write an episode in my blog.
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Maybe all filmmakers are special and some are even more special than others, but for sure the Angolan filmmaker Henrique Narciso, called Dito, belongs to the most special ones. For the Forget Africa program last year I invited his gangster hip hop movie Guerra do Ku-Duro. The Hubert Bals Fund paid for the subtitling and Dito came to Rotterdam.
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Maybe Caroline Kamya (just Carol for us), filmmaker from Uganda, was de most formally educated of the filmmakers in the project. She studied in England and got her MA in TV Documentary at Goldsmith College, University of London. Very few African filmmakers from non-French speaking countries have a training like that. She also made her first feature length fiction film, called Imani, that toured the festivals this year. A very professionally made film that on a technical level has few equals in Africa. And on an artistic level as well I should add.
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Filmmaker Amour Sauveur is from former French Congo. The smaller Congo. Congo Brazzaville. So Amour speaks French and for his film production in China we had to find him a French/Chinese speaking filmmaker as mentor.
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No more than a year ago Yves-Montand (yes, in Africa they really respect the origin of a given name) Niyongabo was an anonymous film student in Rwanda. And not long before that he was a just as anonymous law student. Now he is well on his way to becoming a seasoned and travelled international film maker. How could that happen overnight?
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It is mid-October, and the temperature here in Dushanbe is 27 degrees Celsius. The air is dry and dusty. We are staying in a hotel where during the last war all the foreign correspondents and embassies were hosted and I have an apartment that is probably bigger than my flat in Amsterdam. Tajikistan may be a poor country but it is full of people with big hearts!
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Last year, I was invited by Safar Haqdodov , the director of the IFF Didor in Dushanbe - the capital of Tajikistan - to sit on the jury for the 4th edition of this film festival in October 2010. Safar called me two months ago to share the good news that they had managed to receive some financial support from the Soros Foundation and from a Swiss foundation, which meant that the festival could take place again this year.
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30 September 2010
We have seen the effect that the appearance of KwaZulu-Natal (South African) filmmaker Omelga Mthiyane has on the average Chinese person. She became a bigger attraction than the Great Wall. Somehow Omelga had anticipated this, because already at home in Durban she thought she could use this effect in her movie. Omelga makes a special kind of personal documentaries and in China she would do so again: special and personal.
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19 September 2010
For the Raiding Africa project we did not intentionally choose an artist town like Songzhuang. Rather, the place chose us when we found the Li Xianting Film Fund and School as a partner in the project. The School and the artists both originally had the same reasons for moving to a place somewhat removed from the centre of Beijing: it is out of sight of the authorities, and it is cheap. So that is how we ended up in a town that feels like a village and where there’s an artist behind every door.
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