Festival gems

It’s always a wonderful thing as a programmer when the films you’ve selected begin to speak to each other. Reflecting on the feature films that my colleagues and I programmed for this year’s BFI London Film Festival, I’m fascinated to see the links between them. 

Eloise King’s feature debut The Shadow Scholars could seem, on the surface, like any other investigative documentary. A person is on a mission to uncover a secret, following false leads and making discoveries. But unlike traditional documentaries, Professor Patricia Kingori, one of the subjects of the film, has a real stake in the game. As the youngest ever Black professor at Oxford, she has dedicated her career to unpicking truth and lies. When she learns about shadow scholars, a group of Kenyans who write essays for students in the global north for a fee, she’s naturally intrigued. But as the film continues, we learn not just about Kingori’s discoveries about the shadow scholars, but about her own life and career and, most importantly, her frustrations as a Black woman academic. The ways in which her life intersects with the scholars, who in any other film could be painted as villains, is really fascinating.

The Shadow Scholars was not the only film to flip traditional documentary stereotypes on their head at this year’s festival. Jazmin Jones’s Seeking Mavis Beacon is also an investigative documentary – one that follows Jones and her co-investigator and ‘cyberdoula’ Olivia McKayla Ross on a journey to find the woman behind a piece of computer software that was formative for their careers – but it’s also about the construction of these kinds of documentaries as well as of Black women’s internet identities. It’s no coincidence that Seeking Mavis Beacon references Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996). Dunye’s observation in her pioneering film that “Black women’s stories have never been told” is still as prescient as ever in 2024.

Seeking Mavis Beacon dares to ask an ethical question that not many investigative documentaries do: what if the person you’re looking for doesn’t want to be found? Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire answers this in a way. Césaire, a key figure in the anticolonial Négritude movement, is often overshadowed by her husband Aimé, a poet and politician. But what if this was her choice? Hunt-Ehrlich’s film reveals that Césaire wrote constantly during her life, but also burnt her papers, essentially erasing herself from history. As the actress preparing to play her in a film-within-the-film must ponder: how do you portray someone who most likely didn’t want to be portrayed, while wanting as a Black woman to give a voice to Black women?

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is haunted by unspoken but ever-present legacies of colonialism and slavery, themes that were shared by many films by Black women at the festival. Sugar Island, Johanné Gómez Terrero’s stunning debut, follows an Afro-Dominican expectant mother who, through a series of learnings and symbols, experiences a political awakening and an understanding of her history.

One of the biggest talking points of the year has been Mati Diop’s Dahomey. A follow-up to her compelling Atlantics, (2019), the film won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. It follows a group of Beninese students who debate what to do with looted treasures that are repatriated to their country. But beyond this, the film shares a touch of magic realism with its predecessor, as these treasures are not merely static items. Through voiceover, they come back to life. Diop, like Hunt-Ehrlich, reanimates the dead in her filmmaking. 

I Am Not a Witch director Rungano Nyoni also returned to the LFF with her second feature, which won the Un Certain Regard Best Director award at Cannes. Like her debut, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (pictured above) uses a sharp combination of humour and melancholy, this time to explore issues around abuse, the silencing of women and intergenerational trauma. The interrogation of familial legacies also runs through Denise Fernandes’s lovely debut Hanami, in which a Cape Verdean girl comes of age among her father’s family, before being reunited with an absentee mother. Both films allow audiences to fill in gaps in family histories through punctuated silences. Legacies of colourism unspool in Hanami via its subtle commentary.

Spanning continents and genres, these films speak to one another; and therein lies their richness, reflecting Black women’s global experiences as vast and open to multiple interpretations. Long may that conversation continue.