Two events in London this year focused on female filmmakers working in African cinema. This is high exposure for a demographic of the African film industry that is generally low on the radar.

In a recent video interview (first spotted on film blog Shadow and Act), Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu revealed her participation in an exciting new film initiative  ImagiNations. Under the helm of South African producer Steve Markovitz, the producer of hit Congolese film 'Viva Riva!' (2010) and producer of Kahiu’s own sci-fi short 'Pumzi' (2009), ImagiNations is a "pan-African project," with "a series of six feature films based on contemporary African literature."

In the Shadow and Act interview, Kahiu explains that each director will adapt a different book from the cannon of African literature. She will take an East African story, the implication being that each story will be from a different part of the continent. BTW, at a New School event in Manhattan, where Kahiu was interviewed by Sean--more on that later--she added that one story would originate from "each region" and her film would be "a love story."

The initiative is a collaboration between Markovitz and Djo Tunda Wa Munga, the writer/director of 'Viva Riva' under the umbrella of their company Suka! Productions (they appear to be fond of exclamation marks). It’s a high-powered partnership after the success of their Congolese noir, but this recent revelation is an exciting prospect for African filmmaking, for in the spirit of Kahiu’s own foray into sci-fi, it proposes a radical expansion of the scope of African filmmaking.

Adaptation is a brilliant means of linking the wealth of African literature with different media, making stories available to different, and perhaps wider audiences. Lindiwe Dovey, writer of African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen (2009) analyses a number of African films that are adaptations of both African and non-African literature, and argues that film adaptation develops both a distinct filmic identity, while engaging with narratives and aesthetics that transcend cultural and geographical lines.

Quoted in Dovey’s book, the filmmaker Gaston Kabore says: ‘The desire for pan-Africanism undoubtedly has something to do with a sense of shared, past oppression at the hands of the colonizers and, in film terms, it marks Africa as a continent that ‘is trying to reappropriate its image’." Reappropriation, innovation and expansion in the kinds of narratives that are being portrayed is an exciting means to defy stereotypical ‘genre’ expectation of African cinema, and adaptation seems to be an engaged and rooted means of achieving this.

Markovitz has already proved through his involvement with 'Pumzi,' Kahiu’s sci-fi short film, that he is capable of film projects that expand the scope of African cinema, so this ImagiNations project is something to keep an eye on, particularly when the texts to be adapted, and the other directors are confirmed.

At the recent Film Africa film festival in London, the new Ethiopian feature film "Atletu" (The Athlete) was screened to a sold-out audience. Directed by Rasselas Lakew and Davey Frankel, it is a portrayal of Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian runner who won two Olympic marathons in a row, and broke the world record in Rome in 1960, running bare feet. Here's the trailer: http://youtu.be/u5ejavZjLsc The film follows a recent trend in feature filmmaking that weaves archival material with contemporary filmed footage, producing an interesting dialogue between the documentary imaginary and the fictional. The historical ‘real’, in these cases, don’t just provide a narrative framework, or set-dressing aesthetic. They produce a filmic grain that in turn invests in the contemporary footage a sense of historicism and character. I’m thinking of Gus Van Sant’s "Milk," where Sean Penn’s portrayal of the first openly gay congressman Harvey Milk is bolstered by the warmth and nostalgia of the 1970s archival footage that is intercut throughout, or Shane Meadows’s "This is England" (2006), where the opening credits show Margaret Thatcher in a tractor, or Princess Diana’s wedding, or a scared bobby beset by women at the Greenham Common protests. It's an example of the use of archival footage to produce a setting that is spine-tinglingly nostalgic, so powerful in its evocation of a time past, that it transports you into it. The archival material is producing a social context, a milieu and an aesthetic that extends beyond the limits of staged scenes. In the case of the Ethiopian film "The Athlete," the restrained, somewhat sparse pace is made possible by its borrowing of footage from Kon Ichikawa’s momentous documentary "Tokyo Olympiad" (1965), which used 164 cameramen operating 1, 031 cameras to capture godlike athleticism interspersed with the true grit of physical determination and suffering. Here, below, follows the 9 minute marathon sequence from Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad: http://youtu.be/tTO7tFiyBlw If "The Athlete" is a marathon-paced film on the whole -- slow, restrained and rhythmic (the film seems to have 4 ‘chapters’) -- the use of archival material from Ichikawa’s film are the cinematic sprints in time and narrative; they capture a sense of history, of Bikila’s unending determination, and of a nations pride wrapped up in one thin, loping man. Similarly, the images of Bikila running through a torch-lit Rome in 1960, the flourishing music disguising the (imagined) soft patter of his bare feet on the cobblestones is just as powerful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Dppdcy1pyM Illuminated by the headlights of the motorbike filming him, or by the warm glow of the onlookers, Bikila seems to be running in a vacuum, running on an infinite stretch of moving road, with no particular destination. After finishing the Tokyo marathon in 1964 Bikila famously said he could have run another 10 kilometres. It is this unending determinism that "The Athlete" portrays; athleticism is not tied to a certain discipline, and there is no finish line, rather it is an infinite race with the self. When Bikila is injured in an accident, and tragically loses the use of his legs three years before his grand finale race at the Munich Olympics (in 1972), he continues to be an athlete, taking part in the Stoke Mandeville Archery tournament (near to where his rehabilitation hospital was located in Britain), and then in a cross-country sled race with the King of Norway. But back to Kon Ichikawa’s documentary: Bikila’s godlike athleticism, his gentle, composed running style, perfectly symmetrical and ruthlessly resolute is celebrated by Ichikawa. As Bikila enters the Tokyo stadium for the final lap of his momentous marathon (watch the second embedded video, above, again), his loping body is caught delicately by a telephoto tracking shot. Slowed down, it exposes every sinew in Bikila’s long and graceful legs, every muscle dancing to the rhythm of his feet on the track. This sequence of the film is truly remarkable for its deft admiration of the athlete’s body, marvelling at the mechanics of its workings, revealing a photographic trope that revels in the capture of the exposed body (yet perhaps bears some uncomfortable link to colonial fascinations with the black body). And yet, Ichikawa was not seeking the Man as God illusion that is shown in Reifenstahl’s "Olympia" (1936). The camera does not elevate the athlete. Rather, Ichikawa’s camera is close to the ground, zoomed in on the suffering, in the collapsed marathon runner, or in the beads of sweat dripping consistently from Bikila’s chin. The athlete, in the archival footage and in Lakew’s dramatisation of Bikila’s life, is beyond everything, movingly human.

By Basia Lewandowska Cummings We British are very good at honoring the dead. Last Friday Prime Minister David Cameron, his deputy Nick Clegg et al attended the annual Remembrance Day ceremony; our political elite competed to appear most sombre, respectful. Central London was peppered with war memorials--heavy sculptures in dark metals, the lists of names seemed endless. However, what Britain isn’t good at remembering – never mind honouring – are the thousands who fought alongside the British; the Nigerians, Kenyans or Sierra Leoneans who enlisted in the colonies, fighting on the multiple fronts of the war, for a country whose interests were far from their own. In the newsreels that show hundreds of African’s marching toward possible death, the voiceover remarks: ‘strong, tough, the most magnificently built race in the world! Negro soldiers march bare foot to their encampment …Africans fight for their cause, and ours’. But it wasn’t their cause and therein lie the fascinating questions that Barnaby Phillips’ documentary "Burma Boy" addresses. Through the remarkable figure of Isaac Fadoyebo, a Nigerian who fought for the British against the Japanese in Burma, the story of the 100,000 Africans enlisted in the Second World War is told. Isaac, still alive in Lagos today, sustained appalling injuries during a confrontation in the Burmese jungle. Left for dead, he managed to survive thanks to the generosity of a family in a nearby village who nursed him and his friend David Kagbo back to life. For nine months the two men hid with Shuyiman and his family. Sixty-seven years later, by some miraculous stroke of luck (and a good researcher) Phillips is standing in monsoon season in the Burmese jungle--rain thundering on a tin roof--face to face with the family who saved Isaac, showing them photographs of the man who has become part of their family history, and part of village mythology. Barnaby admits,

We went to Burma not knowing we would find them, I was sceptical. Isaac’s directions were not the best, they were along the lines of ‘if you are coming down the river from India, its on the right hand side’… which means that’s the west bank of a river that is 300 miles long’. And yet, they found the family thanks to another soldier’s account of the skirmish, where many men were killed. ‘We just didn’t know if the village was still there … it was incredibly emotional for me that we found them…even once we located them I had no idea what they thought about it, and it was amazing to see that they felt about it the same way that I did. This is something they’ve known about for sixty years, it must have been miraculous to them that this stranger from England turned up, talking about it’.

For Barnaby, this encounter was powerful for two historical reasons:

We think of Africa as a disaster, a continent that has failed in places. And in this particular instance, the people that saved Isaac’s life are in the same village, doing exactly what their parents did, and he has gone on to a (relatively) much more prosperous and comfortable life. He has flown around the world, he has children who are doctors and lawyers, he owned a car, and so for that reason I find it very interesting. The Burmese conflict also complicates the ethical compass of the Second World War. It was not only the free versus the fascists, the good against evil. In Burma it was more clearly a case of two empires fighting for the spoils of war, in somebody else’s country. So in a sense both the Burmese local people and the African soldiers were victims of that imperial struggle between Britain and Japan’.

Barnaby’s film complicates the narrative of the war; it isn’t just a European tragedy, and Britain was not only fighting for freedom, but for gains elsewhere. And this was to be the empires own undoing, for "Burma Boy" shows that colonized countries were radically changed by the journeys the war necessitated. The contagious, subversive ideas of autonomy could not be contained once African soldiers had fought for somebody else’s right to freedom. While Britain desperately tried to prop-up its empire against the Japanese, the Nigerian’s came back with a virus

... Once the genie was out, once they had a better understanding of their place in the world, once they had seen the fallibility of Britain, they could relate to white people as human beings.

Indirect rule in Northern Nigerian kept the white district commissioners far away from local people, then ‘suddenly they would be on a boat with some swearing cockney sailor or navvy from Liverpool, and the scales would drop from their eyes about what Britain was, so it was an empowering experience.’ Does Isaac perhaps personify the shifts in attitudes between peoples?

‘Yes… many of the East African soldiers ended up fighting for the Mau Mau against – in some cases- the same officers who they had been with in Burma. One of these describes how Burma was a seminal moment for him, as it taught him to fight in the jungle, it taught him new ideas, he met African-American troops who questioned why he was fighting for the British, so for all sorts of people it transformed their perspective’.

Barnaby’s documentary is a clear, historical approach to a part of Britain’s legacy that has been fogged, clouded by the will to remember those closer to home. Similar to Idrissa Mora Kpai’s film "Indochina, Traces of A Mother" (2010), that follows the story of the 60,000 African soldiers enlisted by the French to fight the Viet Minh, Barnaby’s documentary departs from the normal, perhaps neater narrative. It is all the more poignant, that at this years Remembrance Day ceremony in Lagos, Isaac was guest of honour, finally recognized for courage and support in Britain’s battles. You can watch Barnaby Phillips’ documentary in full-length here (on Al Jazeera's site) or on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BREOezfAJSU