Quartier Mozart / Aristotle's Plot

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Quartier Mozart

Cameroon/France, 1992

Domestic discord is inevitable when a police chief brings home a second wife but it's nothing compared to the delirious trouble that results when his daughter falls in love with a newcomer in town who’s actually a woman living as a man with help from a witch. Around this already intriguing central storyline, Jean-Pierre Bekolo crafts a playful, loving portrait of the quirky and complicated residents of a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé in his internationally acclaimed debut feature. While the film itself blends realism and fantasy, Bekolo’s characters inhabit a multivalent cultural space where invention and reinvention seem ever possible.

DCP, color, in French with English subtitles, 80 min. Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. With: Jimmy Biyong Serge Amougou Sandrine Ola'a.

Aristotle’s Plot

Le complot d'Aristote, Cameroon/France/U.K./Zimbabwe, 1996

The first African film to screen at Sundance, Bekolo’s second feature was commissioned by the British Film Institute as part of a project to mark cinema’s centennial. The only African filmmaker invited to participate, Bekolo challenges the Institute’s motives — ”Was this an act of Christian charity or political correctness” — before launching a full tilt, satiric interrogation of the colonialist framing of Africa and African cinema. The battle, literal and figurative, over whose cinema and whose history centers around a movie theater where a band of outlaws spend endless hours consuming Western action movies until a lone champion of African film challenges their priorities.

DCP, color, in French with English subtitles, 68 min. Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. With: Albee Lesotho, Seputla Sebogodi, Ken Gampu.