Ndoto ya Mpira wa Miguu Zanzibar/Zanzibar Soccer Dreams (Directed by Florence Ayisi & Catalin Brylla, 2016, 64 mins)
- Submitting institution
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University of South Wales / Prifysgol De Cymru
: A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Output identifier
- 1885861
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- March
- Year
- 2016
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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B - Screen Media
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Co-researched, co-written and co-directed by Florence Ayisi and Catalin Brylla, this documentary maps the lives of Muslim women footballers in Zanzibar. It aims firstly, to foster the emancipation of the women, challenging patriarchal boundaries and social inequalities situated at the intersection between gender, culture and religion. Secondly it aims to shift local and Western perceptions of a traditionally stigmatised community.
Key to these aims is the alignment of a global mainstream audience to the lived experiences of characters. This was pursued by a research-led writing practice of the treatment, proposal, shot list, character profiles and paper edits. Universal narrative and aesthetic means based on cognitive theory models were deployed to generate dispositional and situational attribution in the viewer, specifically highlighting goal-intentional actions. This creates an intimate para-social contact between viewer and screen characters, which reduces the women’s ‘otherness’. On a cognitive level it enhances perspective-taking and facilitates the reconfiguration of negative attitudes. On an affective level, it increases empathic concern, generates vicarious emotions and mitigates negative emotions, such as anxiety due to perceived intercultural identity threat.
We framed this universalist narrativisation within a concrete socio-cultural context in which the women precariously negotiate between subject positions imposed by patriarchal-religious traditions, and roles that deviate from such traditions. Thus, they constitute complex and ambivalent characters who depart from generic schemas of either subjugated or hyper-potent African women portrayed in Western media.
The film was disseminated through international festivals and community events in different countries, several of which attracted interest in Tanzanian diasporas. The underpinning research and an abridged version of the film were presented at conferences including ‘Communication, Postcoloniality, and Social Justice: Decolonizing Imaginations’’ in Villanova University, USA, 2015, and ‘African Women in the Media’, Birmingham City University, 2017.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- Yes
- English abstract
- This documentary film is produced mainly in Swahili with English subtitles. All the main speeches and conversations relevant to the narrative that are spoken in Swahili are subtitled in English. English is also spoken in some interviews