Final Girls Berlin Film Festival June '17 Edition | Page 7

An atmospheric portrait of a lonely woman obsessed with
synthetic Nollywood dramas, that lives in the city of Lagos,
Nigeria. The central device in this short experimental film is
the practise and significance of wig-wearing in Nollywood
film; a practise Zina has invested with deeper
psychological as well as science-fiction layers.
Underpinning this central idea, however, is a critique of the
unforgiving treatment of single women in Nollywood and
Nigeria and a meditation on loneliness and mental illness.
Phyllis (15:40)
Written & Directed by Zina Saro-Wiwa, Nigeria, 2010
Disco Inferno (11:21)
Directed by Alice Waddington, Spain, 2015
A weary hell minion is on a mission to rescue her boss,
where she encounters several hybrid and otherworldly
creatures.
Saturday, 10 June 2017
14:00 Workshop: Fear is Other People: The Other as Monster
Nine Yamamoto-Masson & Nisha Damji
The horror genre is typically very gendered and built around
variations of recurring tropes. Women are portrayed as weak,
innocent, preyed upon, or, when wronged, as the source of mayhem,
violence and destruction.
The main characters that the viewer is directed to empathize with are
either the woman-victim or the man-hero – and both are usually white.
People of color are routinely either absent or appear as very minor
background characters. When they do play a more significant part in
the narrative, they are often one-dimensional and reduced to racist
tropes such as the “mythical Black man” or the “Native American burial
ground” motif.
In this workshop, Nine and Nisha invite you to explore and
deconstruct the treatment of race and gender in mainstream US
horror – and probe its repressed political psychology.