The UK Tigritudes programme expands on a project initiated by filmmakers Dyana Gaye and Valérie Osouf in 2020. The series offers a subjective, chronological anthology of Pan-African cinema, through 68 film screenings. Together, the works included in the season span decades, running from 1956 - the year of Sudan’s independence - to today. Organised chronologically, the screenings take place across venues in London, including at BFI Southbank and the Garden Cinema. Each tells the story of a moment in time, creating resonances between works, and allowing viewers to identify geopolitical or formal connections.
Today’s screening presents two films from 2019, who have in common their masterful use of silky black and whites, but differ in length and narrative. The first, by Mozambican film director Inadelso Cossa, Karingana - The Dead tell no Tales, is short and silent, while the second by Lemohang Mosese is a part-poetic, part-documentary feature around displacement.
Curated with Valerie Osouf and Dyana Gaye, this is the second and last screening at Tate. The cycle continues in partnering venues across London.
About the films
Inadelso Cossa’s Karingana portrays Nkomba Yengo, a young man who returns to his native village after 30 years in the exile. In search for the old Yamba, whose stories populated his childhood, he finds him deaf and mute, and haunted by Civil War traumas. The filmmaker’s first fiction project, Karingana reflects on the impacts of terror and forced displacements on Mozambican peoples.
Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You analyzes the complexities of Lemohang Mosese’s relationship to his native country of Lesotho from his home in Berlin, Germany. Addressing a mother figure who embodies the idea of home, the narration unfolds over an elegiac procession of black-and-white visions. Exploring the links between land, history, and spirituality, the film succeeds in creating a political chronicle of sorrow, which journeys from a personal farewell to a radical defection from the motherland.
Programme
Introduction
Inadelso Cossa, Karingana - The Dead tell no Tales 2019, video, colour, silent, 10 min
Lemohang Mosese, Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You 2019, video, black and white, sound, 76 min
Conversation with Lemohang Mosese and audience Q&A
Dyana Gaye
Straddling two cultures, French and Senegalese, Dyana Gaye chose cinema as a medium after having studied music dance for many years. A multi-hyphenated actress, screenwriter, programmer and producer, her main activity remains filmmaking. In France, she worked for several years as a programmer for ACID (Agency for Independent Cinema for its Distribution).
Valérie Osouf
Long based in Dakar, Senegal, documentary filmmaker Valérie Osouf initially devoted her research to African film distribution in West Africa. She had successive careers as a radio presenter, reporter, freelance journalist, and as a filmmaker and artist. In recent years, she has been a member of the School of Mutants collective, a research platform co-founded with Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro.
Inadelso Cossa
Inadelso Cossa is a film director, producer and DOP, member of the (AMPAS) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science since 2020. Founder of 16mmFILMES, his films address themes such as post-colonial memory, post-Civil War trauma, silent voices and collective amnesia in Mozambique. The unofficial history of his country is the core vehicle of his cinema where the director positions himself on a personal perspective. His first feature-length documentary: A Memory in Three Acts was selected for Locarno Open Doors 2014 and made a world premiere at the festival IDFA; and his second feature The Nights Still smell of gunpowder (2024) had a world premiere at Berlinale Forum 2024 and international premiere at CPH:DOX 2024.
Lemohang Mosese
Born in Lesotho, filmmaker and visual artist Lemohang Mosese investigates identity and its amorphous quality in relation to time. His works are a layered exploration of the physical cycles of life, death and rebirth in relation to human subjectivity. A self-taught filmmaker, he produced his first feature-length, visual essay film Mother, I am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. Since, the film premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019 and continues has been screened in film festivals and exhibitions, all around the globe.
This event will be BSL interpreted.
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