Suchergebnisse

This community impact study maps the development of women's football on the predominantly Muslim island of Zanzibar as portrayed in two documentary films: "Zanzibar Soccer Queens" (2006, Florence Ayisi) and "Zanzibar Soccer Dreams" (2013, Florence Ayisi, Catalin Brylla). "Zanzibar Soccer Queens" contributed to the development of local women's football by challenging traditional gender divisions, promoting the renegotiation of female self-identity and subverting stereotypical media portrayals of African women. Thus, the film encouraged a paradigm shift within Zanzibar, as well as within an international public, medial and academic context. This impetus resulted in considerable transformations in the local community, which "Zanzibar Soccer Dreams" and a related community impact study (http://www.zanzibarsoccerdreams.com/home.html) map with regards to education, emancipation and the new status of women's football. Both documentaries focus on Zanzibar's first women's football club, Women Fighters FC, and its coach, Nassra Mohammed, who founded the club in the 1980s. Nassra has been a driving force in developing women's football in Zanzibar, despite obstacles generated out of orthodox socio-cultural and religious traditions. Women Fighters is not only a club but also a community of women that has resisted traditional definitions of womanhood and the male-dominated oppressions impeding women's participation in outdoor sports. The government has listened to Nassra and responded positively by changing its policy to allow girls to participate in football as part of sports education in schools.

This paper discusses the development of women's football on the predominantly Muslim island of Zanzibar as portrayed in two documentary films: "Zanzibar Soccer Queens" (2006, Florence Ayisi) and "Zanzibar Soccer Dreams" (2013, Florence Ayisi, Catalin Brylla). "Zanzibar Soccer Queens" contributed to the development of local women's football by challenging traditional gender divisions, promoting the renegotiation of female self-identity and subverting stereotypical media portrayals of African women. Thus, the film encouraged a paradigm shift within Zanzibar, as well as within an international public, medial and academic context. This impetus resulted in considerable transformations in the local community, which "Zanzibar Soccer Dreams" maps in relation to education, emancipation and the new status of women's football. Both documentaries focus on Zanzibar's first women's football club, Women Fighters FC, and its coach, Nassra Mohammed, who founded the club in the 1980s. Nassra has been a driving force in developing women's football in Zanzibar, despite obstacles generated out of orthodox socio-cultural and religious traditions. Women Fighters is not only a club but also a community of women that has resisted traditional definitions of womanhood and the male-dominated oppressions impeding women's participation in outdoor sports. The government has listened to Nassra and responded positively by changing its policy to allow girls to participate in football as part of sports education in schools. Times have truly changed in the playing fields of football in Zanzibar since the 1980s. This presentation will include two short video clips from both films.

Western media has consistently misrepresented or underrepresented African people and cultures. This article focuses on Florence Ayisi's documentary film practice, which engages with alternative realities and images that portray the lived experiences of African people and how these are manifested in audio-visual representations, including narrative structure and point of view. Her multiple positions as African woman, film lecturer, and filmmaker mean that these documentaries provide a space to challenge the myriad of simplistic representations of African life and societies. The ideas explored in this article will be illustrated through a cross-disciplinary analysis of Zanzibar Soccer Queens (2007, 87 mins.) and Art of This Place: Women Artists in Cameroon (2011, 40 mins.). The academic discourse of this article is situated within several academic disciplines: audience reception studies, cognitive film theory, phenomenology, representation, and African film practice, where the experience of filmmaking is politicized and emerges from postcolonial struggles to redefine and counter cultural misrepresentations.

This paper is based on a pilot audience reception study using focus group research in an African context. We aimed to explore how Cameroonian women respond to, and interpret Sisters in Law (Florence Ayisi & Kim Longinotto, 2005), and thus establish the kinds of meanings and debates generated in the process of actively watching and discussing a documentary film within a specific socio-cultural context. Sisters in Law was funded by Channel 4 Television and has been distributed and exhibited widely around the world in festivals, cinemas and on broadcast television. Within the wider context of the life cycle of a film text (production – exhibition – reception), our study focuses on the premise that the way audiences interpret a film is directly related to the film text itself. Consequently, this paper will evaluate the responses of the individual focus groups in relation to how film language generates and conveys meaning, and also take in consideration the demographic background of the respective groups. This neo-pragmatic perspective within film hermeneutics ascertains a degree of "textual facticity rather than infinite elasticity or malleability," (King, 1998) and acknowledges the importance of the audience's background, as well as the form and aesthetics of audio-visual representation. Thus, our study will encompass close readings of the film, considering notions of narrative structuring, character identification and phenomenology. In addition, our paper politicises the study of audience reception and places it into a post-colonial and transnational context. Given that this documentary was not targeted to the local (Cameroonian) market, our study aims to also explore how the indigenous audience understands a transnational representation of their own society. This objective is situated within the wider discourse of decolonization of culture, and also what Mahoso (2000) calls a "valuable opportunity that allows the postcolonial 'silent audiences' to explore their own consciousness, their own memory, their own space". Therefore, the wider scope of this reception study is to establish Cameroonian women as cultural readers, and to find out what kinds of debates, dialogues and meanings are generated from their experiences of actively watching a non-fiction film that reflects 'real' issues, people and places that they can connect with in relation to identity, gender and religion. The results sketch a portrait of differing reactions, views and interpretations based on the different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds of the respondents. The conclusions will be expanded to a media-political sphere where we argue that Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser, 1970) need to embrace more self-reflexive and pluralistic practices, whereby the representation of African women and culture becomes a conscious ideological discourse.