The Bloodettes / Naked Reality

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The Bloodettes

Les Saignantes, Cameroon, 2005

Jean-Pierre Bekolo has described this futuristic action-horror fusion as a “trance object” and it’s possible to experience his lo-fi world building through precisely orchestrated music cues, bold visual compositions and ethereal voiceover as a form of incantation. In Cameroon 2025 when, we are told, “not much has changed,” Majolie (Adèle Ado) and Chouchou (Dorylia Calmel) are best friends and sex workers, a.k.a. Bloodettes, who turn the death of a government official in Majolie’s bed into an opportunity to transform their own destinies. Whipsmart and wildly entertaining, Bloodettes mobilizes myth and genre to satirize patriarchy, masculine posing and political corruption.

DCP, color, in French with English subtitles, 97 min. Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. With: Adèle Ado, Dorylia Calmel Emile, Abossolo M'bo.

Naked Reality

Cameroon, 2016

150 years in the future, Wanita (Weza Da Silva) is a young African media professional who becomes aware of a race of immortal beings who secretly control reality after she herself becomes dislodged from the linear flow of time. The title of Bekolo’s vivid experimental feature reflects Wanita’s galvanizing revelation as well as his larger meta-commentary on the media’s production of meaning and images of Africa, specifically. Her consciousness liberated, Wanita enters a dimension of green screen sets that become the field on which Bekolo projects an array of dazzling video and montage effects as she confronts the immortals — with support from her spiritual ancestors — to free humanity from its fate.

DCP, b&w, 62 min. Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. With: Weza Da Silva, Luthuli Dlamini, Akin Omotoso.