In this striking film by the Nigerian director C.J. Obasi, with the help of a mysterious stranger, a village awakens to what is possible.
The old god is dead. A stranger washes ashore. A rebellion begins to simmer, preparing the way for an emerging era. In “Mami Wata,” the archetypes are familiar, but they work to make this Nigerian film a distinctly economical masterpiece.
Written and directed by C.J. Obasi (also known as Fiery), this modern fable is both haunting and ravishing, transporting us to a seaside village where Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) communes with Mami Wata, a water goddess who provides good harvests and grants Efe powers to heal the sick.
But Efe’s powers seem to dim after one of her daughters, Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh), rebels and steals Efe’s totem.
People begin questioning their god, and, noticing that the other villages have hospitals and schools, security and law enforcement, while they rely on Mami Wata, they blame Efe for the stunted progress of their village. Soon after, a man (Emeka Amakeze) mysteriously washes up on the beach, barely alive, and begins to connect both with Efe’s other daughter, the fiercely loyal Prisca (Evelyne Ily), and a group looking to rebel against Efe. Eventually, things come to a crisis point in this allegory about the battle of new versus old, the corrupting influence of power and the shadow of colonial rule.
Obasi manages to distill themes that are at once primal and complex with virtuosic simplicity via the film’s arresting score, its refined story and dialogue and its black and white cinematography, which is more striking than most any modern Technicolor fantasy. It’s a tightly controlled vision that, like many parables, induces a sense of the suddenly, viscerally new — in the look of a figure against the ocean, or the words of a mother telling her child to run — in what we’ve seen before and have always known.
Mami Wata
Not rated. In West African pidgin English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
