Synopsis
Pier Paolo Pasolini has a project for a film adaptation of Aeschylus Orestia that he would like to have played by Africans. He travels through Uganda and Tanzania in search of people who could convincingly play Orestes, Agamemnon or Clytemnestra. At the same time, he reads passages from Aeschylus Orestia, theorizes about ancient Greece, about archaic Africa in the process of tipping over into modernism. Back in Italy, he presents a selection of the collected images to a group of African students at the University of Rome. The final film will never see the light of day.
A word from Tënk
I came out of the screening of Notes Towards an African Orestes a few years ago at the Cinéma du réel festival. It set off red flags in my head: a film by a white director looking at a continent that he considers, in spite of himself, as the "third world". I felt something like that… The same signals came to me when I saw ABC Africa, which I consider to be a more than clumsy film, even though I love Kiarostami's cinema! I've been carrying this Pasolini "notebook" around in my head and despite the red flags, on every page I find what I'm looking for in cinema: people, their faces, their shared words and the strength of their silence. All this emerges from the street to those who know how to see!
Mamadou Khouma Gueye
Filmmaker, programmer and coxer
Presented in dialogue with Xaar Yallà by Mamadou Khouma Gueye
With the support of
