Synopsis

Re-imagining several folk tales into a contemporary setting, director Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s first feature film recounts the story of a young girl who is magically transformed into a swaggering Casanova nicknamed « My Guy ». While the focus is on « My Guy », several offbeat characters crowd the show, including a polygamist police chief whose daughter « My Guy » seduces and a witch whose handshake can make men’s genitals disappear. The combination of highly westernized characters and the charged folk tale atmosphere form a vision of today’s Africa. Quartier Mozart is as humorous as it is revealing and depicts the powerful influence of western pop culture.

Technical data

Original title : Quartier Mozart

Directed by :  Jean-Pierre Bekolo

Country : Cameroun

Available Format : Fichier Numérique

Scenario : Jean-Pierre Bekolo

Runtime : 78 min

Language : France

Casting : Serge AMOUGOU, Sandrine OLA’A, Jimmy BIYONG
Distributeur : SATCHEL-MARGO FILMS

Awards

Prix Afrique en Création décerné par le ministère français de la Coopération durant le festival de Cannes Prix Swissair et Carte jeune au festival de Locarno Mention spéciale au festival des Films du Monde de Montréal.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo

1992 Jean-Pierre Bekolo is a noted African film director from Cameroon. He already garnered attention at the Cannes Film Festival with his debut film Quartier Mozart made at the age of 25, with a style that is playful, comic, and sardonic became the representative of a new generation that has been working against the restrictive expectations of African cinema, mixing genres and linking pop with politics. Quartier Mozart won number of awards (Locarno, Montreal… and was nominated for the Surtherland Trophy in London along with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.)

An advocate of artistic freedom, Bekolo is committed to realising Africa’s philosophies and cultures. Quartier Mozart shows the hybridity, complexity and humour in urban Yaounde in a playful, hip-hop reinvention of a traditional tale about gender, power, magic and politics.

1995 He directed Aristotle’s Plot, the African entry in the British Film Institute’s series of films commemorating the centenary of cinema that has included the participation of artists such as Scorsese, Bertolucci, Frears, Miller, Reitz, and Godard. Part action movie send-up, part parody of Aristotle’s rules, part satire on Africa’s preoccupation with itself, this first African film selected at Sundance shows Bekolo to be an « increasingly fearless trickster. »

Aristotle’s Plot parodies rules and definitions, action movies and ‘African’ cinema made for European audiences, while aesthetically reflecting on the nature of existence, its ambiguities and absence of rigid categories.

1996 Bekolo’s work on the re-representation of Africa also includes insightful documentaries that seek to educate, such as Grandmother’s Grammar on groundbreaking Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety.

2005 His avant-garde political thriller Les Saignantes premiered at the Toronto film festival, was nominated in two categories at the French Césars (2009); it is considered to be the first African sci-fi movie. Les Saignantes won the Silver Stallion & Best Actress Awards at Fespaco (Pan African Film Festival Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) in 2007.

This dystopian, sci-fi comic thriller with stunning surreal visuals, presents extreme corruption, feminism, social decay and intergenerational conflict for review.

2013 Banned in Cameroon in 2013, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s controversial film Le President (2015 AMAA Awards Best screenplay and Jury Special Prize) Aiming to incite viewers to conceive an alternate reality, his fake documentary The President is a hilarious, biting satire on African leaders who cling to power.

2015 Les Choses et Les Mots de Mudimbe on the renowned Congolese philosopher, multi-linguist and uber-polymath. This 4 hours documentary was part of the official selection of the 2015 Berlinale. « An unusual film, as fascinating as its object/subject, opulent, sensitive, clever, and radical. Another station of delightful postcolonial, cosmopolitan filmmaking ».

Jean-Pierre Bekolo won the 2015 Prince Claus Award. He is awarded for his creative resistance, irreverence and eclectic African reworking of dominant cinema conventions; for creating a unique body of innovative work that both entertains and transmits profound socio-political messages; for his highly original aesthetics; for challenging misrepresentations of African cultures; and for re-affirming the power of film. He was in 2015 a fellow of the Artists Program at the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Berlin.

Filmography

2015 : Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe (doc. 243 mins)
2013 : Le Président (mocumentaire, 63 mins)
2006 : Avez-vous vu Franklin Roosevelt ? (en cours)
2005 : Les Saignantes (Etalon d’Argent, Fespaco 2007).
1996 : La Grammaire de ma grand-mère (TV – 8 mn)
Le Complot d’Aristote
1992 : Quartier Mozart

Press release

Africiné – Quartier Mozart de Jean-Pierre Bekolo

La projection de ce film sera précédée de Fifty Fifty, mon amour

Présenté par Dyana Gaye et Valérie Osouf (programmatrices)