MAANGAMIZI – THE ANCIENT ONE

Spirits walk among us in Tanzania's tantalizing first entry in the Academy Awards (Jonathan Demme was one of the executive producers), a tale of clashing beliefs and lore, unique as a predominantly Swahili-language feature. Samehe is a patient in Dr. Moshi's rural African mental hospital, a mute orphaned “under mysterious circumstances” who has not spoken a word in 20 years. All day she sits at the window, watching and waiting, and at night she produces remarkable drawings of lost people and places. When she was a little girl Samehe communed with ghosts of her ancestors, and felt the powers of the forests, of the rivers and the mountains. Her native-bred animist spirituality outraged her father, a fire-and-brimstone Christian minister, whose piety drove him to commit a heinous act that plunged his daughter into the limbo of psychological trauma. Now Samehe's powers are beginning to emerge again. And present to witness the soul-shaking phenomenon is Asira, an African-American doctor newly-arrived at the institution. Although hailing from Mississippi, Asira finds herself drawn, like nobody else on the hospital's staff, into Samehe's private world, a realm of tribal mysticism and magic. There, on an unconquered psychic plane that is Mother Africa, both women will experience a visionary encounter with Maangamazi, Grandmother of all grandmothers. (Partially in Swahili with English subtitles)