From its bracing first shot through the surprising, aesthetically daring, politically potent story that follows, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was one of the best movies of last year and a highlight of the 2024 Chicago International Film Festival. After two features, Zambian-born writer-director Rungano Nyoni has joined a thrilling movement of filmmakers from Lesotho, Kenya, Congo, Rwanda, and elsewhere who are taking sub-Saharan cinema in bold new directions and drawing the kind of worldwide attention too long withheld from African film artists.

Recommended viewing: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (theatrical run at the Gene Siskel Film Center starting March 14) and I Am Not a Witch (UK/Zambia, 2017), This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lesotho, 2019), and/or Neptune Frost (US/Rwanda, 2021), all streaming on multiple platforms.

Please note: The discussion does not include screenings of films.

For many years, with no hope of gaining admission to the Cannes Film Festival, I cultivated a practice of staging my own. By seizing on the official Cannes program, announced in mid-April, and curating past work by the same filmmakers—however renowned or obscure—I approximated the two-week feast that lucky travelers will soon consume in the south of France. At this lecture, we will thus sample previous highlights by this year’s invited moviemakers and discuss what it means for each to be showcased this year at the world’s most influential festival.

Recommended viewing: Donbass (Ukraine), Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 (Japan), Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius (Brazil), or either Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 or Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come (very different films from Spain). Nobody expects you to watch more than one, much less all five! Staycations, like actual festivals, are about curating to your own tastes.

Please note: The discussion does not include screenings of films.

This April will mark the commercial release of Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, a Korean-American remake of Ang Lee’s beloved and Oscar-nominated Taiwanese comedy-drama from 1993. Part of our session will compare and contrast these two takes on shared material and highlight past work by Ahn, a remarkable, versatile filmmaker whose work deserves more attention. We will also celebrate The Wedding Banquet as a rare and meaningful course-correct in a U.S. film culture that has alternately desexualized and over-sexualized Asian and Asian American characters, only rarely promoting them as romantic leads.

Recommended viewing: Both versions of The Wedding Banquet and, if time, Ahn’s Fire Island (Hulu) and/or Alice Wu’s Saving Face (multiple streaming platforms).

Please note: The discussion does not include screenings of films.