ActionAid Filmaker Focus: Tsitsi Dangarembga with Q&A

The internationally acclaimed Mother's Day is an idiosyncratically offbeat, indelibly unique fusion of social satire, nursery rhyme, musical fantasy and interpretive dance from celebrated Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga. Educated at the universities of Cambridge and Zimbabwe and the German Film and Television Academy, Dangarembga is established in Africa and beyond as an accomplished novelist, scriptwriter and documentary maker.

Her tour de force debut novel Nervous Conditions was translated into twelve languages and hailed around the world as a seminal literary work. Mother's Day is her first personal feature film production, and its release put Zimbabwe on the map as a new exciting centre of creative film production in Africa.

The award-winning film was envisioned equally as a universal parable on man's innate capacity for greed and human cruelty, and a tribute to the limitlessness of the human imagination. It is a film unlike any other—a musical re-telling of an ancient Shona folktale about a heroic mother and her impoverished family driven to famine by a lazy, selfish husband—at once joyous, poignant and absurd. A fascinating example of African filmmaking from Zimbabwe's first published black woman.

Mother's Day, dir Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe 2005, 30 mins, subtitles