Die Schlange in meinem Bett & Le Roi n’est pas mon cousin

Different shapes and states of water weave together both films in this program. DIE SCHLANGE IN MEINEM BETT by filmmaker Omah Diegu (Ijeoma Iloputaife) is an epistle to her son that follows the difficult odyssey to apply for his German citizenship in semi-ethnographic, semi-experimental images – a form that Diegu calls ‘abstract documentary’. The film captures her fight against structural racism and the bigamy of her son’s white German father as a poetic negotiation of borders and friendships between Nigeria and Germany. In a more direct dialogue between generations the filmmaker Annabelle Aventurin interviews her grandmother and philosopher Elzéa Foule Aventurin in LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN. Intimate close-ups of Elzéa are intertwined with images of landscapes and private spaces – often set to an uncanny sound design that invokes the ghosts of the colonial past of Guadeloupe. In this film water becomes a site of history, familial bliss and different acts of crossing of what Paul Gilroy has called the ‘Black Atlantic’. DIE SCHLANGE IN MEINEM BETT was screened as part of the 1997 no(wo)mansland program. (fe)

16mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Program:
DIE SCHLANGE IN MEINEM BETT Omah Diegu Germany 1995 16 mm Original version with English subtitles 82 min. 
LE ROI N’EST PAS MON COUSIN The King Is Not My Cousin Annabelle Aventurin France 2022 DCP Original version with English subtitles 30 min