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Jean-Pierre Bekolo

Cameroon

Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo was born in Yaounde, Cameroon in 1966. He has taught film at Virginia Tech, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Duke University.

Work

Featured Work

Jean Pierre Bekolo

Jean Pierre Bekolo

Artist Statement

As a filmic artiste, his role has been to subvert the conventions and didacticism of African film and literature with an aesthetic that “tosses it all merrily together” with humor, sarcasm and magical realism.

“Naked Reality is not just a futuristic film from Africa with an incredible cast, powerful images and music. Naked Reality is the cinema of the future.”
– Jean-Pierre Bekolo

Filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo was born in Yaounde, Cameroon in 1966. He has taught film at Virginia Tech, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Duke University. In the late ’80s Bekolo trained as a television film editor in France at INA. He returned home shortly thereafter and worked for Cameroonian television, where he was responsible for editing short films. During this time, he was also involved in the production of films, such as Boyo, Un Pauvre Blanc, and Mohawk People, as well as video clips for Les Têtes Brûlées and Manu Dibango. His first feature film was the award-winning Quartier Mozart (1992), which won prizes at film festivals in Cannes, Locarno, and Montreal and was nominated, in 1993, for a British Film Institute award. The film mixes sorcery and urban realities in a satire of male and female roles. Aristotle’s Plot was the African entry in the British Film Institute’s series of films commemorating the centenary of cinema. Part meditation on the trials of African filmmaking, part action movie, and parody of Aristotelian and African preoccupations, it shows his skill as an “increasingly fearless trickster.” Other feature-length films include Have you seen Franklin Roosevelt? (1994) and Les Saignantes (2005).

Naked Reality
Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Cinematographer: Mandla Walter Dube
Cast: Weza Da Silva, Luthuli Dlamini, Akin Omotoso, Fabian Lojede
Language: English
Duration: 60 Min.
Format: MP4, 1080i
Wanita was leaving home that morning, not knowing that her first prayer to her own ancestors has started her journey to the DIMSI – the earth you can’t see – because we were living in strange times where people were dying from a disease called BAD LUCK. Wanita could not figure out that her journey was blinded by her other self; her desire to be someone else.

It is 150 years from now in a time when African cities have grown into one big metropolis. Operating in a world controlled by the immortals who have taken over our whole being. Everything we put in our mouth, eyes, ears, skin, nose, ass, sex… is theirs… including our prayers. Wanita is the only one who can save us.

Wanita is the first of a new generation that is not just working at a job. She is working to fulfill her mission according to her DNA instructions. If Wanita is so into presenting the weather on television, it is because she is a force of nature that can control other forces such as hurricanes, storms and tornados. But someone has infiltrated her DNA; this is why she can not hear our calling.

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