‘Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story’ Director Luck Razanajaona Shines a Cinematic Light on Madagascar
variety.comBen Croll World premiering out of the Marrakech Film Festival ahead of a wider and promising festival run, Luck Razanajaona’s “Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story” will offer the cinema of Madagascar its most prominent international showcase in nearly three decades.
The feat didn’t come easy — or quickly — for the Malagasy filmmaker, who graduated from Marrakech’s ESAV film school in 2011 and then spent more than a decade crafting award-winning shorts while developing his first feature.
Throughout that long development period — which eventually brought the filmmaker back to Marrakech for a slot at last year’s Atlas Workshops — Razanajaona honed and refined this story of a barely post-adolescent sapphire miner who returns to his native village in search of identity.
Among the many challenges was the simple question of period: The fact is, given Madagascar’s shatteringly predictable holding pattern, the narrative of dashed hopes and calls for reform could take place at any interval from the 1970s onward. “I wanted to show Madagascar’s cyclical crises,” Razanajaona tells Variety. “Because every 10 years, the same things always happen: Uprisings lead to failure.
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