Pumzi Breath. It just tells its story. Kahiu hopes to expand the short into a full-length feature. Ahsa mediates a transition from the past when Africa was on the brink of ecological destruction (now), to the filmic time of Asha’s post-apocalyptic world; her actions ultimately set off a chain of events that lead to a utopian future. In a reverse of the opening scene, the camera pulls up. It was screened at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival as part of its New African Cinema program. As Asha contemplates her next move, she plucks from the mound of trash a kanga, an Eastern African machine-stamped cloth wrap now faded from an eternity in the harsh sun. Just over 20 minutes long, this movie short from Kenya is set in a post-apocalyptic future where a global war has rendered the surface of the Earth dangerously radioactive and completely barren and water has all but disappeared. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. You could also do it yourself at any point in time. Directed by Wanuri Kahiu. These statements communicate the shared anxiety about lumping the black body in with the mounds of trash, to search for some kind of distinction that can be made by referencing the basic humanism of the figure. All outside life is dead. As do so many futuristic films, Pumzi allows us to glimpse our time as an image of history. And when it came to the more technical shots (with VFX) I would collaborate with Simon Hansen about how to best achieve the shot. A placard marks a seedpod of the Mother Tree, contained in a glass jar. She plants a dried old seed in it and, miraculously, it grows. An old film projector is now a holographic projector, a flatbed scanner has an increased penetrative ability to examine Asha’s thoughts and biological makeup. Wanuri Kahiu is a passionate woman; passionate about her craft, about storytelling and about this earth. She sees the tree of her dream: a mirage. 5 The museum scene was the most challenging because of all the elements involved. Let’s compare this photo to Fred McDarrah’s of Robert Rauschenberg in an empty lot, Rauschenberg being the most famous postwar artists to use trash in his work, drawing out distinctions from Duchamp’s readymade. Portions of the community are visible through the window, which gives the sense that the community is large, though not how large or how extensive it is. We’re told that the location is post-apocalyptic Kenya, and some words in the film are in Kikuyu (although the dialogue is in English). The smile, the white shirt, the shiny shoes all jump out of the mound of detritus on which he sits. It continues to provoke discussion in film circles and everyday life on the future of the continent, given our planet’s challenges. It premiered at the Kenya International Film Festival in October, but it’s official World Premiere took place at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010. Even though she has never seen the outside world, which is full of, mostly plastic, garbage. That is, the visual trope of the mound is the psychological condition of paralysis from techniques of ecology. The oversignification within pieces like Mthethwa’s is matched by the overwhelming number of pieces in the exhibition as a whole, a borage of information, a sublime inability to absorb it all. Impossible, she knows – but she pops some of the soil into a jar, pours water into it and inserts one of her hydroponic plants into the soil. Simon Hansen of Inspired Minority Pictures (Producer on Pumzi) was one of the people who helped create the prototype camera of the SI-2K. It must have been in Zanzibar, where we screened it to an audience of mainly children, with men and women. Both of these animals on the endangered list at risk of extinction. Paired with the troubling commentary on the news media following Hurricane Katrina that Gulf Coast looked like America’s “third world”, the pseudomorphism of blight became the theme of many works in Prospect 1. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! In Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi, a futurist dystopia set in Africa 35 years after the so-called water war, the heroine Asha escapes her enclosed pod community, where water is scarce and electric power is generated by rowing machines and treadmills.She opens the escape hatch of her enclosed pod-world to begin her exodus into the surrounding desert, having been entrusted with a … Pumzi was part of the anthology, Africa First: Volume 1.[8]. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

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