Akuol de Mabior. Belonging to a Continent

South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior, one of the youngest voices of African cinema, speaks with writer and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga about the power of cinema to transform the predominant imaginaries of the continent of Africa.

South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior is from a family that led the process of liberation and creation of the state of South Sudan, a family legacy that is evident in her filmmaking, which she claims as a tool for renewing the African imagination. In her work, she draws on her own biography to raise relevant questions about the present and future of the continent. What does it mean to call a country “home” when you didn’t grow up there? And when you cannot speak your parents’ language? Why is Africa always presented as a place of catastrophe and conflict? These questions, arising from Akuol de Mabior’s personal experience and expressed through the visual lyrics of her filmmaking, become an inquiry into feelings of belonging and identity which is addressed to a whole continent and its diaspora.

Akuol de Mabior is a new director in African cinema and was the first South Sudanese filmmaker to premiere at the Berlinale. In this session, she speaks with Tsitsi Dangarembga about the political and social role of cinema and its power to transform the predominant imaginaries of the continent of Africa.