Cameroon, Magic Realism / 1992 / 80mins / Comedy / French

Re-imagining several folk tales into a contemporary setting, director Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s first feature film recounts the story of a young girl who is magically transformed into a swaggering Casanova nicknamed “My Guy.” While the focus is on “My Guy,” several offbeat characters crowd the show, including a polygamist police chief whose daughter “My Guy” seduces and a witch whose handshake can make men’s genitals disappear. The combination of highly westernized characters and the charged folk tale atmosphere form a vision of today’s Africa. Quartier Mozart is as humorous as it is revealing and depicts the powerful influence of western pop culture.

Jean-Pierre Bekolo

Jean-Pierre Bekolo was born in Yaounde, Cameroon in 1966 and is now known to subvert the conventions and didacticism of African film and literature with an aesthetic that “tosses it all merrily together”. He has taught film at Virginia Tech, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Duke University. In the late 80’s 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). Miraculous Weapons, his 2017 drama, was nominated for the Tanit d'Or at Carthage Film Festival. Learn More