JEMINA & JOHNNY

Filmforum Ludwig   Ticketshop

In 1958, Notting Hill in West London erupted in vicious race riots. In South Africa in 1963, Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, was imprisoned for life. Ngakane, a fellow ANC member, was exiled from South Africa and came to Britain to be a film director. JEMIMA & JOHNNY, his first fiction film, portrays the developing friendship between a white English boy and the young daughter of recent immigrants from the Caribbean, against the backdrop of a Notting Hill simmering with racial conflict. (Africultures)

TAHAR CHERIAA co-founded Africa’s oldest film festival, the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage in Tunis, in 1966. As the festival’s artistic director for many years, he was one of the most important pioneers of an independent African cinema, the legendary ‘Baobab Group’. This consisted of directors such as Ousmane Sembène (Senegal), Moustapha Alassane (Niger), Med Hondo (Mauritania), Timité Bassori (Ivory Coast), Ferid Boughedir (Tunisia), Gaston Kaboré (Burkina Faso) and Haile Gerima (Ethiopia), whose films also received international acclaim. They founded the filmmakers’ association FEPACI in Tunis alongside South African filmmaker Lionel Ngakane, whose anti-racist parable JEMIMA & JOHNNY is also being shown as a supporting film. With director Mohamed

JEMINA & JOHNNY Direction: Lionel Ngakane, digital, OF o.w., 26 min

Guest

Mohamed Challouf

Mohamed Challouf, born in the Tunisian city of Sousse, graduated from university in Italy in 1979, where he co-founded the Africa Film Festival in Perugia in 1983. Later, he also worked for festivals in Milan, Locarno, Hergla and Tunis. He published a book of photographs depicting childhood in Africa and completed his training in film production at the FEMIS film school in Paris. In 2001, he created his first documentary film, OUAGA, CAPITALE DU CINEMA, which earned him an invitation to the Venice Film Festival. Since then, he has made several documentaries, including one about Tahar Cheriaa, founder of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage.