tranzania. living. room.

A film about remembering and imagining. About imagining memories. Back when Uli Schüppel was a boy, he often listened to the stories of a friend of his parents. This man had spent a long time in Tanzania and his stories were populated by strange wild animals and tribes with strange rituals. When Schüppel was asked to make a film within the context of the Forget Africa project, and to choose a country for that, he ultimately didn’t have much choice. He had to confront the fantasies from his childhood.
Schüppel was immediately impressed by the vitality and musicality of everyday life in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam. Amongst his recordings of dazzling everyday life, he allows well-chosen ordinary people to fantasise about a German living room. In their extreme contrasts with the images from Dar es Salaam, the descriptions of the imagined Germany say a lot about life in today’s Tanzania.
But Schüppel also went out of town, for he also wanted to see the strange animals from the stories of his childhood. He recorded them on 8mm film. The result transcends memory and fantasy. The images show a feverish dream world. The boy has at last captured his African imagination.

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