Seeing the birth of a character from a designer’s pencil is always a magical moment: the black tip of the marker runs over the sheet and a whole world appears. But then when this world comes to life, the magic happens. Author and screenwriter Marguerite Abouet now gives life, on screen, to her character Akissi, a mischievous little girl from Abidjan drawn by Mathieu Sapin (ten volumes published by Gallimard Jeunesse).
A special 26-minute episode was broadcast in France on France 4, and in Africa on Boomerang Africa. It is available on the Okoo platform (Akissi on France 4).
A short film broadcast while in Annecy, the international animation film festival at his best. We also welcome the Portuguese director José Miguel Ribeiro, whose first feature film Nayola is among the ten films in competition.
Yara is the name of a rebellious young rapper from Angola who defied the police with her free texts in 2011… She never knew her parents, was raised by her grandmother, and her story is intertwined with that of his mother Nayola, who, sixteen years earlier, in 1995 and in the midst of civil war, is looking for her lover Ekumbi.
At the origin of Akissi, there are comic book albums. For Nayola, it’s a play (The Black Boxwritten by Mia Couto and José Eduardo Angualusa, two renowned writers in Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries such as Angola).
Also showing in our cinema this week, news from 7th art in the world and the last Disney/Pixar film Buzz Lightyear, censored by a dozen countries in the world for a sequence showing a tender kiss between two female characters (correspondence in Los Angeles by Loïc Pialat).