Asian directors making movies on African directors

Filmmaker and video artist Jakrawal Nilthamrong is recently back in Bangkok after spending some time Zambia, where he took part in the International Film Festival Rotterdam's ironically named Forget Africa program.

IFFR programmer Gertjan Zuilhof writes about their adventures on his blog.

In Zambia, Zuilhof worked with Jakrawal and China-based Filipinia filmmaker Joanna Vasquez Arong on projects facilitated by Catherine Musola Kaseket, whom Zuilhof terms "the only serious Zambian filmmaker. One of the few African woman filmmakers and I guess the only disabled woman filmmaker on the continent." Joanna is making a movie about her.

Jakrawal's project is more complex. I'll let Zuilhof explain:

Jakrawal came with a quite different plan and quite different ambition to Zambia. While writing his idea about a movie within a movie, about letting an African director making a short movie and putting this movie and the process of making it in his movie - meta movie, yes - he saw the chance of making his commissioned short into a feature. Not that there was a feature budget, but more South East Asian movies have been made like that.

In just a few short months, we should be hearing about a completed film and perhaps by this time next year I'll have seen it myself. So I've got that to look forward to.