“We pore over material relating to Italian colonial Ethiopia (Abyssinia), recently unearthed in a private film archive. We scour those individual film frames of colonialism, studying them with a magnifying lens, and transcribe the captions. The material was intended for private home viewing, in silence. In these filmic fragments, examined by hand, without a projector, are indic...
African Diary uses footage from a filmed personal diary shot in Algeria by an anonymous Frenchman between 1927-1936. Here, they reprise his cinematic jottings as he followed in the footsteps of the 19th century Orientalists like Flaubert.
The film starts with a very long section of footage that shows a journey by railroad in a beautiful mountainous region, it's quite beautiful but not immediately apparent what the relevance is. It may be that attention is being drawn to the actual track itself (the final sequence is exclusively looking down at the tracks), perhaps slave labour that went into building it, and bla...
A director revisits the diaries of Angela, a fellow film-lover and companion, many years later.