Blog Post #10: Afronauts

   

Nuotama Bodomo

 For this week's blog, I chose to read "Parsing the Real and Unreal Stories of the Zambian Space Academy" by Dessane Lopez Cassell. In this reading, we see an interview with Nautama Bodomo, the filmmaker of the 2014 short Afronauts. Throughout the interview, we learn about why Bodomo became a filmmaker and her inspiration for the films she makes. The interviewer starts out by simply asking Bodomo how she started her career in filmmaking. She credited it to a language problem she had growing up. She was born in Ghana but was raised all over the world for short periods of time. This caused her to have a hard time with languages but she realized that films were something people everywhere discussed and she could use it as her language. Throughout the interview, she continues to talk about her film making but specifically Afronauts. This is where I think the most interesting quote of the interview comes from. 

"It was in that practice that I first came across newsreel video of the Afronauts. It was this British reporter who had gone to Zambia to report on [them], and he ends the video with this sardonic way, like, ‘To most Zambians, these people are a bunch of crackpots, and from what I’ve seen today, I agree.’
It was this African story that in its absurdity and just out-there-ness was completely bucking anything to do with proving ourselves for a Western gaze. It was completely out of it in a very affirming way that’s brought up a lot more questions than it’s answered … it so perfectly encapsulates a kind of everyday absurdity that’s part of African life … then on top of that, [it’s a story] that’s like a big ‘Fuck you’ to the respectability that often accompanies trying to tell bigger African stories. Five — no, eight years later, I’m still obsessively in this world."

    Bodomo is reflecting on her experience discovering a video about the Afronauts, a group of Zabanians who in the 1960s aspired to travel to space. But what I found interesting is how she found the story to be absurd and outlandish but she appreciated that it tit not conform to Western standards of respectability. The story's rejection of Western norms has captivated Bodomo and has caused her to obsess over this world so much that she has made a movie about it.