Mozambican short film about drought reaches Film4Climate Award final

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Mozambican short film about drought reaches Film4Climate Award final

1:00 CAT | 07 Nov 2016

Lusa

A short film about the effects of drought in southern Mozambique has been selected for the finals of the World Bank Film4Climate award, whose jury is headed by Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci.

The short film, entitled ‘Kutxintxa’ (change in the Shangaan language), is an independent production by Ivan Mauro, a communications expert with a master’s degree in development anthropology, who learned of the existence of the award one week before the deadline and directed the film in just two days in Boane district, Maputo province, where there has been almost no rain for two years.

The film shows the contrasting realities of two communities, where one benefits from a borehole powered with solar panels serving green farmland, while another relies on a pond shared by humans and animals alike in the midst of dry, dusty soil.

“That water is used for drinking, cooking, washing clothes and bathing and I thought it all made sense in the context of climate change,” Ivan Mauro told Lusa.

The scenes portrayed in ‘Kutxintxa’ of men, women and children using plastic bottles for drinking water became typical of southern Mozambique, which faces a prolonged drought resulting from the most powerful El Niño climate phenomenon in decades, and which has left 1.5 million Mozambicans suffering from food insecurity.

“This is happening only 50 kilometres from Maputo,” says Ivan Mauro, a civil servant born 34 years ago in Dondo, Sofala province, who says that he reported the case to the authorities but nothing was done.

Nearly 900 works were submitted to the Film4climate award, which selected “Kutxintxa” for inclusion among the sixty finalists. The winners will be announced on November 13th, as part of the COP22 climate summit which starts in Marrakech today.

According to the award criteria, videos must submit a personal narrative about the importance of climate change to be evaluated by a jury which, in addition to Bertolucci, includes directors Fernando Meirelles and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Lawrence Bender (producer of Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’), actor Christopher Lambert and former President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed.

“It is an honour to be among these finalists with this great adventure called ‘Kutxintxa’ and be able to show the world that Mozambique, despite its lack of resources, can implement resilience measures,” Ivan Mauro says.

To demonstrate, the author focused on a Boane community where people have to walk 15 to 20 kilometres to gain access to clean water.

In Mahalane, a hole powered with solar panels pulls water from a dry riverbed, which is then stored in two tanks for community and agricultural fields supply developed by the Association 7 April.

“We had no water here, but now we can draw water to produce cabbage, tomato and lettuce. It is a help to us,” Cecilia Samuel, head of the local association, says in the short film, where “the narrative is told by the very actors” with background sound by the band Mussodji Shamwari “to give an African rhythm”.

According to Alexandre Chivambo, another local leader quoted in the film, 1,386 people are benefiting from this well.
Although hard hit, communities are “not fully aware” of climate change, and after the film, Ivan Mauro wants to create an organisation called ‘Kutxintxa’ to help the government raise public awareness.

On October 25, a tropical storm has left at least 12 dead and a trail of destruction in Maputo, catching the unsuspecting population at rush hour, an event which, Mauro says, signals the importance of a good warning system and compliance with the National Climate Change strategy.

“If we do not we take these measures seriously, we will have serious problems with loss of life, crops destroyed and increased poverty,” the film director says, who ends with the message repeated by several characters in the film: “Kutxintxa ka ti nkuva [The climate is changing].”

Source: Lusa