Event

NAKED REALITY

Dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2016.
South Africa / Cameroon. 62 min.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo occupies a unique space in post-colonial African cinema. Twenty-five years since his exuberant debut QUARTIER MOZART, the Cameroonian director remains playfully genre-defying, conceptually inventive, and utterly unpredictable. Following the dystopian subversion of 2005's LES SAIGNANTES and up-to-the-minute political-media discourse of 2013's LE PRESIDENT (all of which were included in a full retrospective at Spectacle in 2013), he's now traveled 150 years for the fascinating post-modern future of NAKED REALITY. Paired against LE PRESIDENT, which we're bringing back, the two form a complex portrait of Africa today and into the future.

In an entirely urban Africa 150 years from now, energy is scarce and power lies in the past, channelled via prayer in defense against the genetic disorders of "Bad Luck". Weather forecaster Wanita's DNA may contain ancestral solutions, pulling her out of her life and into a post-modern odyssey. But no synopsis can suffice to contain the open-ended and constantly shifting world of the film: genetics, technology, time-travel, doppelgangers, the body as text, and meteorology appear as ambiguous signs along the hero's journey. Each scene offers its own insights and reconfigures what came before, as the layers of artifice peel back towards the elusive reality of the title. The future, here, is evoked with icy minimal space that suggests its own meanings: if non-urban space has ceased to exist, perhaps this world of digital overlays and empty sound stages is an indication that all non-virtual existence will also be a thing of the past.