News: Two African films to have world premiere at HOT DOCS festival

219 films from 66 countries have been chosen from the 2300 that applied to be part of the official selection of the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival to be held at the end of April in Canada. Among these 219 films, two African documentaries (the only ones by the way) have been selected and will make their world premiere during this edition.

My Mohamed Is Different directed by Ines Marzouk, is an Egyptian documentary released in 2020, produced by Kesmat El Sayed, Dora Bouchoucha and Paolo Maria Spina. The 70-minute film explores a practice that dates back to the 1980s or 1990s in Egypt. During this period, young men took old white women as their wives. These marriages were not motivated by love but by the desire for a better future for these men by marrying these foreign women. In My Mohamed Is Different we follow Sarannah, Nerchia and Monica as they leave their countries and go to Egypt to have a love affair with Hamdy, Khaled and Abdel respectively. If Sarannah feels revived by her husband Hamdy, who is 30 years her junior, it is not so easy for Nerchia who had to accept that her husband Khaled takes a second Egyptian wife because he wants children. For Monica, after a month of romance on the internet with Abdel, a tourist guide and father of two children, she decides to move to Luxor in Egypt and promises to take care of Abdel. Between business and love, this documentary makes us live the realities of these 3 women.

The second film is The Colonel’s Stray Dogs by Khalid Shamis. It is a 75 minute South African film. It talks about the current crisis in Libya from a historical point of view and through the eyes of some high-level government figures, who were opponents of Gaddafi. These are opponents who were exiled, who were hunted down, some died, some were imprisoned, but now they are free and have returned to power and see a Libya quite different from the one they left. A country different from the one they had dreamed of, so now they face a crisis: what to do for the future? Khalid Shamis’ father was one of these men, so he grew up in London as the son of a Libyan exile. For more than 30 years, he lived the journey of these men. He tells the story of his homeland through a new point of view, which had not been heard, let alone explored, until now. He tells the story of their journey, their difficulties, their miseries while revealing the vices of the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Both documentaries will make their world premiere at Hot Docs in Canada, which will be held online at hotdocs.ca from 29 April to 9 May 2021.

Lydie Pierre Nsakamo