Moneycontrol
HomeEntertainmentMoviesHow this African escaped war to study cinema in India and went to Cannes
Trending Topics

How this African escaped war to study cinema in India and went to Cannes

Ethiopia’s Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay, a SRFTI Kolkata student made ‘A Doll Made Up of Clay’ featuring Nigerian Ibrahim Ahmed, who’d come to Kolkata to play seven-a-side football. The short film was selected at La Cinef competition of 78th Cannes Film Festival. Those behind the film talk about its making and the racism Africans face in India.

June 28, 2025 / 19:06 IST
Story continues below Advertisement
Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. (Photo: Stephanie Cornfield)

Dibakar Das Roy’s comedy Dilli Dark hit theatres last month. This is Samuel Abiola Robinson’s second Indian film after Zakariya Mohammed’s brilliant Malayalam sports drama Sudani from Nigeria (2019). In 2021, Tarun Jain’s short film Kaala, too, set in Delhi, showed a deep-rooted Indian racism. Jayan Cherian’s Rhythm of Dammam (2024) is the first ever full-length feature film on the Siddis (descendants of Bantu people of East Africa) of Karnataka’s Yellapur. This year, A Doll Made Up of Clay, a short film from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute of India (SRFTI), about an African in Kolkata, was officially selected at the 78th Cannes Film Festival last month, among the 16 finalists from a global pool of 2,700, at La Cinef student-film competition.

These films humanise their African protagonist — what the Indian mainstream films and society are loath to do. If novelist-activist Arundhati Roy underlined in an interview how “Indian racism towards Black people is almost worse than white peoples’ racism”, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk spotlights the dangers of a “single story”, which “creates stereotypes” and “robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar,” Adichie said, adding, “It is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person.”

Story continues below Advertisement

In all of the aforementioned films, one stands out because it is an African’s story told by an African. The Yoruba-Bengali short film A Doll Made Up of Clay has been directed by Kokob Gebrehaweria Tesfay, an Ethiopian scholarship student of direction and screenplay writing at Kolkata’s SRFTI.