Staff Pick: Liz Chege, Festival Director

"He goes all the way to the madness of the act of questioning"
-António Tavares

Nuno Miranda and the Negrume Collective's vision Kmêdeus (EatGod) is a spell-binding tapestry blending folktale, collective memory and an inquiry into the notion of legacy. I was moved by the way the film expresses the shared experience of Africans across the continent to grasp at ancestral memory and find a path of our own untainted by colonial pasts. This choreography of past and present while mitigating the challenges of the now, is beautifully expressed by Tavares' performances and passion for self-discovery.

Presented in three distinct acts, the film presents an examination of how society handles those living on the margins who "we call crazy just to simplify". These wanderers, philosophers, lunatics and artists are in effect mirrors of ourselves because to value one another, we need to know ourselves first. Kmêdeus is a clarion call for us to beware of myth-making each other, to stop projecting our own ideas onto others so that we can all have a sense of ownership in the communities we build. With the state of things as they are, it's an incisive, timely, moving work of art that delineates the perilous cycle of fictionalising our realities as a survival instinct. Miranda's voice is necessary, refreshing, bold and visionary.

By Liz Chege

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Kmêdeus screens in Africa in Motion 2020 from 7:30pm on Thursday 12th November. It will be available to watch for 48 hours.