Goethe-Institut screens ‘Man Sa Yay ‘I, Your Mother”, ‘Oyoyo’ Thursday
By Editor
ON Thursday, July 4, 2024 at 5:00pm, Goethe-Institut Lagos will screen two films – Man Sa Yay ‘I, Your Mother’ and Oyoyo by Safi Faye and Chetna Vora respectively. The film screening, according to Yali Wetzel, is part of Goethe-Institut’s ‘BE Longing’ project. Venue is 7 Anifowoshe Street, Victoria Island.
Moussa is a young student at Berlin’s Technische Universität. While he does connect with friends and lovers, he is primarily seen alone, working odd jobs, cooking or tidying his apartment. At home is where he reads the letters from family members and his partner in Senegal which structure the film. At once the centre of the film and a conduit for other lived experiences, Moussa serves to reflect and refract two distinct constellations of social connections. Such experiences and desires are mirrored by the sequences of his friends, other West African expatriates making do by hawking “African artifacts” on the street. In each case, we hear the repeated question, laden with longing in some cases, pitched as thinly veiled microaggression elsewhere: “When will you return?”
By the time Faye produced Man Sa Yay for German television in 1980, she had already honed her skills through an impressive suite of projects that reflect on life in her home nation. Effortlessly fluid in style, weaving together fiction, non-fiction, the essayistic and the epistolary.
Oyoyo (1980) is a cine-portrait of an educational internationalism with students from Chile, Guinea-Bissau, the Mongolian Soviet Republic, Cuba and Bulgaria studying economy at the “Hochschule für Ökonomie Berlin-Karlshorst” in the late 1970s. The director is the Indian filmmaker Vora who mobilizes the film-camera as a means to listen to the problems that the students encounter in their education, what they miss in the GDR, and how they imagine their future. The candid conversational scenes situated in the students’ dormitory in Berlin-Karlshorst alternate with music by Cuban songwriter Silvio Rodriguez, the Brazilian singer Nara Leão and songs in Cape Verdean Créole. As a daughter of a communist family from Palitana in Gujarat in India, Vora came to Berlin in the mid-1970s to study film at the Konrad Wolf Film Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg.
