original title:
Maka
directed by:
cinematography:
editing:
music:
producer:
production:
5e6, Stony Brook University
country:
Italy / USA
year:
2022
film run:
55'
format:
colour
status:
Ready (01/05/2022)
festivals & awards:
Maka is a documentary about Geneviève Makaping, a Cameroonian-Italian anthropologist, writer and the first Black woman news anchor on Italian television, as well as the first Black woman to be named the director of a newspaper in Italy. The film offers a detailed account of Makaping’s perilous journey of migration from Cameroon across the desert and the ocean, her arrival in Italy in 1982 following the tragic death of her partner, her success as a journalist and television host, and her more recent relocation and current teaching job in Mantua. Maka focuses on questions of national belonging, and it reflects on how the perception of migration and race has changed since Makaping first came to Italy in the 1990s. Questions of identity and national belonging are also addressed by the reflections of the director, a son of Moroccan parents who grew up in Lombardy. The making of the film was also influenced by the anthropological research method defined by Makaping in her landmark text Reversing the Gaze. What if You Were the Other? (2001), Maka interrogates how our perception of Italy today changes when viewed from the perspective of a Black woman.