Terra Mater – Mother Land

The hulking form of a great landfill dominates the screen for much of Kantarama Gahigiri’s new film Terra Mater – Mother Land, which received its world premiere as part of the Berlinale Shorts competition. It’s a ten-minute marvel that combines sobering documentary, hypnotic beats, Afrofuturist aesthetics, ornamental tableaux, and a pointed message to a world that has ignored the ecological bearing on the African continent scoured for its resources. Gahigiri’s film may not hang its message on a recognisable linear narrative, but, if anything, its experimental edge lends the story it is telling greater sophistication and undeniable power.

In its earliest moments, Terra Mater appears to take the form of a landscape film – static shots capture the undulating shapes of hills, valleys, and paths, but they are those of a colossal junkyard. Gahigiri toys with the way that the grandeur of African landscapes is so familiar to audiences but replaces its very structures with the heaped detritus of the technology industry indifferent to the damage it causes. The vista is populated by scavengers who in some moments chant, whisper, and sing the names of precious minerals that they search for in the wreckage, while at other points they stand in stylishly composed arrangements alongside the marabou storks that have famously colonised such vast African dumps.

While the people working on the landfill begin to angrily rail against the lack of respect that they and their land are shown – “Leave! Leave!” – others, decked out in clothing augmented by technological waste look to a young woman, named in the credits as Earth Spirit (Cheryl Isheja), who seems to represent both a powerful deity and the chief mourner. In the film’s closing moments, the action shifts to an unknown jungle environment that may or may not represent a leap back through time to a juncture before the onset of hyper globalisation and the neo-colonialist ravaging of the African continent in the clamour for ever smarter devices. We are warned that we “fail to understand that you cannot just harm someplace and think it is separate from you… it is not.” Gahigiri and her film are unequivocal about the need for swollen capitalist economies to take responsibility for their impact, and the message is forcefully delivered by a goddess standing proudly atop a landscape of ruin.

Director, screenwriter: Kantarama Gahigiri
Cast: Cheryl Isheja
Producers: Kantarama Gahigiri, Daniel Bleuer
Cinematography: Daniel Bleuer
Editing: Jules Claude Gisler
Music: Coco Em feat. Sisian & Kasiva
Sound design: Kathleen Moser
Sound: Eugène Safali
Production design: Kevo Abbra
Production company: Films du Léopard (Rwanda), RGBW (Switzerland)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Shorts)
In English, Swahili
10 minutes