#RolexInZimbabwe International Images Festival for Women (IIFF) Review

I first knew about the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) in 2018 when we were trying to bring Tsitsi Dangarembga, its organizer and a legendary writer from Zimbabwe, to Uganda for the Writivism Festival. She couldn’t make it because she was running IIFF at the same time.

As I was heading to Zimbabwe to begin the #MuwadoSADCtour, I reached out to Tsitsi to see if I could record a podcast with her about the Zimbabwe creative economy and, once again, she was unavailable because the festival was around the corner and she was busy trying to ensure everything was ready. We agreed on future dates for the podcast recording, but the timing of the festival was the same week I’d be in Harare so I decided I’d attend as much of it as I could and use it as a base to meet other storytellers.

The theme for this year’s 21st edition was Women of the Future. The festival features films that have one woman in at least one leading role in order to engage with women’s problems and lives. This also serves as an explanation for women to the male community, encouraging tolerance, understanding and improved relationships.

By the time I got to Harare, the opening ceremony was done. There was still a loaded program ahead so I wasn’t too worried. I made my way to the National Gallery on Day 3 of the festival. There were also art exhibitions happening there so I got to enjoy some quality Zimbabwe art.

The attendance wasn’t great because, besides me, it was 2 older white ladies present. The film that was starting when I arrived was Nowhere Special’ from the UK. It is about a window cleaner in his thirties who learns that he has only a few months left to live. He decides to find a good family who can adopt his three-year-old son before his time is up. We are more familiar with single moms, because men are more infamously known for getting indefinitely lost when they go to buy milk, so the single dad angle doesn’t get our attention that much. From this movie through, the struggles are the same and, from the grapevine, the instances of this happening are increasing. Parenting in and of itself is not a simple undertaking and even 2 parent households struggle so what I picked from this particular movie is how important the aspect of community has been lost in the parenting journey, because why are you looking for strangers to adopt your child? One of the white ladies in the audience and a volunteer had very emotional responses to the movie because of relatable single-parenting experiences.

The other movie of the day was ‘Beloved’ from Iran. The story is about an old lady living in the mountainous villages of the Northern part of the country who is fond of her isolated lifestyle in nature with her cows. It gave us a look into the simple life these folks live and the beautiful landscapes. The story for me was how none of her 11 children no longer came to visit. Even folks that live in the same city as their parents sometimes take forever without visiting so you can imagine what it’s like when the parents are in a remote area. Even though the character insists she likes her solitary life and refuses to retire, there’s a scene where she’s praying crying about her children that brought a tear out of me. Check on your old folks.

I did manage to attend one masterclass at Alliance Fracias and this was on feminism in filmmaking. As with most sectors of society, filmmaking has been dominated by men at most of the important decision-making levels but thanks to feminism, there’s been an increase in female participation in the sector. The masterclass was conducted by Carla Sospeadra, a Spanish filmmaker, and took us through the progress that’s been made in trying to make the industry gender-balanced. There’s still a very long way to go but you feel the progress. One of the concepts she shared is a feminine economy/capitalism which intends to rethink the current state of capitalism by men. It’s very idealistic but hey, one must start somewhere. I for one look forward to seeing some of the concepts come to life because it’s an economy of ease and I like me some ease. I wasn’t made for suffering. It also spoke to some of the inspirations for Muwado which is trying to do something about the state of the creative economy that really isn’t working out well for storytellers.

The other movie I was able to watch was Divertimento from France. It’s the story of an Algerian family in France and is based on a true story, centred on renowned conductor Zahia Ziouani and her sister, cellist Fettouma Ziouani. Set in 1995, the twin sisters are both musical prodigies who have just joined one of those best-of-the-best highly competitive schools for classical symphonic music. One of them, the star of the story, is trying to become an orchestra conductor and dealing with overcoming the challenges associated with breaking barriers in a male-dominated area (currently 11% of conductors are women so you can imagine what that was in 1995), and the 2nd one is finding her way as a cellist. The younger brother is a budding football star trying to match his overachieving sisters. There are very many layers to this movie from the different characters we are introduced to and I enjoyed how it brought out the aspect of how genius needs nurturing and support from family and experienced supportive mentors to flourish. Alliance Francais Harare has a regular movie night and this was a collaboration with the film festival.

We were also treated to the ‘From Huts to Pots’, a documentary about the women hut painters from the Matobo Hills and how they have taken their Ndebele hut painting traditions to the next level thanks to the My Beautiful Home competition, and a project supported by the Ekhaya Gaia and the German Embassy to monetize and preserve this skill by putting this art on pots. There’s not much money to be made after painting your hut apart from tourism, which can be intrusive, and this skill set didn’t seem transferrable to painting other people’s huts since everyone in their community does it and urban builders do things differently. Pots can be sold as decoration and it was great to hear how some sales had been made and the excitement from the women on how this could transform their lives economically.

The meetings I was having for Muwado kept on clashing with the movie screenings so I missed most of them. The question of attendance numbers kept on coming up. It didn’t help that the majority of the screenings were in the day when most people were working. The evening and weekend shows had bigger numbers. Students are usually a great demographic for weekday activities but proximity comes into play here because students have budget issues. I liked that they spread out the screening locations to other locations to cater for as diverse a range of audiences as possible.

I managed to make it for the tail end of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Hakuna Zvakadaro and Kusagadzikana Book Launch at Alliance Francais. The books – Nervous Conditions (Hakuna Zvakadaro) and Book of Not (Kusagadzikana) – were translated from English to Shona by academics Ignatious Mabasa and Tanaka Chidora respectively. I missed the panel about the books but I know Nervous Conditions, the first book published by a black woman from Zimbabwe in English in 1988, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1989, and one of the BBC’s top 100 books that changed the world in 2018. A Book of Not was published in 2006 as a sequel to Nervous Conditions. Another Zimbabwe writer I was chatting with at the networking session remarked on how the panel was in English to cater for the sizeable expat crowd, which seemed to contradict the reasons for translation. That’s what you get when foreign entities are the biggest supporters of African arts. I’m sure there’ll be something for the intended audience.

The closing ceremony happened at the National Gallery. Being on a Saturday evening, this was very well attended and everyone looked glamorous. The closing film was ‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ directed by Rungano Nyonyi. It follows the main character, Shula, a young Zambian lady who discovers her Uncle dead in the middle of the road. We are then taken on a journey through the funeral process and all the associated drama. The exaggerated mourning. The generational clash between the aunties who take these processes seriously vs the younger women who don’t see the necessity. Property squabbles between the family and the widow’s family. A very central theme was sexual abuse. This particular Uncle, as it turns out, was a menace and the layers of how bad it was kept on peeling back as it progressed. I liked the pacing of the movie though another film-maker I talked to after said it could have been a short movie. He continued that this movie only got funded because the director was a woman. That is why festivals like this exist and are vital. Even if we don’t like these stories, probably because of the light in which they shed men, they still need to be told because this is the lived experience of the other half of the world’s population.