Director

Teboho Edkins

France, South Africa, Netherlands | 2020 | 79 min | Sesotho, Fujianese, Mandarin, English

• Producer Janja Kralj, Don Edkins, Derk-Jan Warrink, Koji Nelissen
• Production Company KinoElektron, Day Zero Films, Keplerfilm
• Screenplay Teboho Edkins
• Cinematography Samuel Lahu
• Editing Laurence Manheimer, Cédric Le Floc'h
• Sound Jaim Sahuleka
• Cast
• Contacts

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About the Film

Days of Cannibalism takes place against the backdrop of the already consolidated China- Africa relationship that mainly foresees the dominance in business of the former over the latter. Whoever has recently been in Africa may have noticed that everywhere, it seems like only China is building roads and other infrastructure.

On a smaller scale, Chinese migrants and entrepreneurs are rapidly spreading through the continent. Each year, a swarm of Chinese ‘trailblazers’ leave China and reach the most remote areas of the globe, looking for business opportunities. A handful of settlers have also reached the state of the rural Lesotho. Relationships with the inhabitants are strained because of strong cultural differences. Actually, there are no possibilities at all of integration between the two cultures: for the Basotho, for instance, the cow is referred to as ‘the wet-nosed god,’ an indication of the animal’s primacy in almost every aspect of daily life. Men who own large numbers of cattle are respected in their communities; for them, the cow has great symbolic importance.

For the new Chinese immigrants, though, cows are just meat (the sequence in which a whole cow is transformed in little bricks of flesh and bones in the Chinese slaughterhouse is extremely meaningful and symbolic), exactly the way that part of the Basotho people that the modernization of mines have left jobless are just cheap manpower for their factories. Eventually, the blending of the two cultures—as it is (ironically) wished for by the speaker of the local radio, with the Chinese teaching to the Basotho how to run a wholesale shop, and learning from the Basotho how to take care of cows, “maybe even singing a song to them”—is just wishful thinking. What is happening is the economical cannibalization of one side on the other, like the cows at the end of the film that are eating the bones of their slaughtered sisters. The noise of their teeth crushing them stays in the ears and the conscience of the viewer long after the end of this poignant, compelling film.

Teresa Cavina