28/04/2022 - The 31st edition of Milan’s African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival will be opened by Mali Twist, the latest offering by French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian

The 31st edition of FESCAAL – The African, Asian and Latin American Film Festival will be officially opened on Friday 29 April, in Milan’s Auditorium San Fedele, by an Italian premiere of Mali Twist [+see also:
film review
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film profile]. This latest offering by French film master Robert Guédiguian tackles a subject which continues to be taboo on cinema screens: the consequences of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Mali. The movie will be presented by its young protagonist and child prodigy of French film Stéphane Bak.

This year’s festival is set to be a hybrid event, unspooling in person and online until 8 May, promising meetings with the selected directors and special events pertaining to the films and cultures of 3 continents, screened in 5 different venues and online via MYmovies. Almost all the films in competition are co-productions with European countries.

Several first works and their associated new talent are winging their way to the festival from Cannes 2021, namely Gessica Généus with Freda [+see also:
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film profile] (Colombia/Sweden/Qatar), which sees her playing a teenage mum caught in a race against time to save her son who has been conscripted into the army; Algeria will offer up a film bearing the name of a woman: Soula, by Salah Issaad, which paints an unprecedented picture in Arabian film of an antiheroine trying to escape the conditioning meted out by a conservative society, and yet another female story is central to Shawkat Amin Korki’s The Exam [+see also:
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interview: Shawkat Amin Korki
film profile] (the winner of the FIPRESCI Award in Karlovy Vary 2021), which takes us to Iraqi Kurdistan where two sisters are battling so that the youngest, at least, can continue her studies and have a stab at a better future; there’s a cameo appearance courtesy of Geraldine Chaplin in Juan Pablo Richter’s 98 segundos sin sombra, where she plays the grandmother of a bright and witty girl in 1980s Bolivia, caught between drug traffickers, capitalism and social reform; and, last but not least, from Cannes’ Critics’ Week comes The Gravedigger’s Wife [+see also:
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film profile] by Somalian director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed (the victor of FESPACO 2021 and the recipient of Turin’s Amplify Voices Award in 2021), which tells a story of love and survival in a country almost entirely absent from African cinema: Djibouti.

Two documentaries are set to round off this year’s festival selection. There’s We, Students! [+see also:
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film profile] by Rafiki Fariala, from this year’s Berlinale, which offers up a snapshot of student life in the capital of the Central African Republic, in which the rap singer director and his university friends reveal their uncertainties over the future as well as their private lives (the movie is distributed by Karta Film in Italy), but there’s also the champion of Amsterdam’s IDFA, Children of the Mist, by director Ha Le Diem, which follows in the troubled footsteps of two adolescents belonging to the Hmong people who are betrothed to one another in a remote village in the Vietnamese mountains, where “marriage by abduction” is still a common practice.

As for the festival line-up dedicated to Italian directors, this includes Mother Lode [+see also:
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interview: Matteo Tortone
film profile] by Matteo Tortone, which graced Venice’s Critics’ Week in 2021, Amuka by Antonio Spanò (DRC/Belgium/Italy) and Los Zuluagas [+see also:
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film profile] (Italy/Colombia) by Flavia Montini.

(Translated from Italian)