Of African Female Filmmakers

Hermon Hailay, dir. Price of Love (2015)

"Traditionally denied access to the medium of film, African women have been increasingly taking control of the camera in recent years. Female video makers are exploring cultural conventions and innovative strategies that challenge Eurocentric and male chauvinistic assumptions/readings of black female subjectivity. One of the most innovative video-films by an African woman that emerged from this practice is Veronica Quashie's Twin Lovers (Ghana, 1996). The film is about the consequences of urban life, the lure of the city, promiscuity among young people, and the menace of of 'sugar daddies.' The film revolves around the central character Juliet, who at about the age of 22 is still a virgin until she meets Kobbie - not by choice, but in the company of socializing friends. Her friend Doreen slips a narcotic into her drink making it possible for Kobbie to lure her home to be raped. Kobbie is a rich engineer and, as a notorious Casanova, he uses his charm and other dubious tactics including intimidation and deceit to achieve his goal. As a village girl, Juliet is pure, but the city full of vices, to which she went for education, destroys her ambitions. Now pregnant, she is terrified that her father will kill her if she fails to perform puberty rite, a ritual of honor that makes parents proud. In tranquil villages where tradition is upheld, sex and pregnancy before marriage are abhorred. Here, the film reminds us that villages are where cultures and traditions are preserved in modern Africa, while the city is a confluence of foreign influences. This emphasis on purity and culture also explains why in those days in Africa, civil servants who lived in the cities would go home to their respective villages to marry, ignoring the young city women, who were thought to be contaminated."

Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, 2003, 130

"Video Booms and the Manifestations of 'First' Cinema in Anglophone Africa,"

in Rethinking Third Cinema, ed. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake