Nyanga

A striking contrast runs through this film: on one side, the almost childlike lightness of a deceptively simple shadow puppet animation; on the other, the weight of the narrative, carrying a painful memory—that of slavery.

History still echoes cruelly in our present: the 12 million Africans who were once deported find a troubling parallel in the 12 million undocumented migrant in the United States today, trapped in a system that renders them invisible and increasingly vulnerable. Some migrants, like enslaved people in the past, are torn from their land; others are forced to leave in search of a better world—a world that, all too often, exists nowhere.

The filmmaker chooses to center her narrative on stories of resistance, on those who fled, who chose marronage. In 2001, I accompanied filmmaker André Gladu to Louisiana as an assistant during the shoot of Marron, a film that traced those same stories of escape—lives torn from an unnamed system of oppression, deep in the bayous.

Nyanga, a multi-awarded film, exists so that we do not forget. It is a tribute to those who escaped, and to all those who, still today, are striving to break free.

Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker