Week 11/2025

Although Ousmane Sembène had already earned international recognition with La Noire de… (1966), it was the satirical comedy Xala (1975) that led to the Senegalese director’s major breakthrough. Often called “the father of African film,” Sembène’s cinema provides a commentary on the tensions that shape Senegal’s post-colonial reality. In Xala, which is based on Sembène’s eponymous novel, he mocks the “new African bourgeoisie”, criticizing their hypocritical and corrupt behaviour.

Besides being Věra Chytilová’s first feature film, Something Different is also the film that ushered in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Through a double-narrative structure, it intercuts two storylines about a housewife and a gymnast. Although their lives never merge, parallels are drawn in how the female protagonists navigate a male-dominated society. While the conventional narrative structure and the cinéma-vérité approach are less radical than the surrealist experiments Chytilová would later develop in Daisies (1966), Something Different (1963) already shows signs of a nascent modernist desire to break with classical cinema. As the Czech filmmakers puts it: “If there’s something you don’t like, don’t keep to the rules – break them.”

As an ode to German filmmaker Wolfgang Kolb, who passed away last year, CINEMATEK shows two of his dance films. In Muurwerk (1987), Kolb engages with a choreography by Roxane Huilman. Rather than simply documenting or archiving it, he filmically translates the dancer’s movements to the screen, including the claustrophobic spatial awareness they convey. In Hoppla! (1989) Kolb adopts a similar approach, using the camera as a tool to interpret rather than record the work of Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker, almost becoming part of the choreography himself.