KAFI’S STORY/NUBA CONVERSATIONS

Director Arthur Howe / 1999 / UK

Kafi's Story centres on Kafi, a young Nuba man from the remote mountain region of Sudan. His story begins on a bus bound for Khartoum where he hopes to get a job and save enough money to buy a dress for Tete, his bride-to-be. The complexities of his love life, his ambiguous relationship with his first wife, Nurr, and his struggle to make money unfold against the background of impending civil war as the unique cultural traditions of the Nuba are threatened by Arabisation. Winner of the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival in 1999.

Nuba Conversations is Arthur Howe's second documentary tracing the tragic disintegration of the Nuba culture. Protected for centuries by the inaccessibility of their remote mountain homelands, the Nuba lived in peace until the Islamic military regime seized power in 1989 and civil war escalated. Under the ruse of filming military celebrations, Howe returns to show his first film Kafi's Story to those who participated. He finds them scattered but traces survivors and records their stories. These are tales of horror, simply told. This chronicle of a genocidal war hitherto ignored by the west is courageous filmmaking.

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