15 min. Hausa, English.
Tatsuniya II is the second film in the Tatsuniya series. Like Tatsuniya (2017) it mostly takes place at Shehu Sanda Kyarimi school in Maiduguri, Nigeria and extends an ongoing collaboration with current students of the school who appear in the film. The film continues on an intuitive and improvisational vein using children’s games, poetry, and exercises from a physical education book for secondary school students as a framework for weaving the narrative together.
We see the students moving from the classroom to dense green forest in dream-like scenes, expanding on the social surrealist language Rahima Gambo developed in 2017. These spaces act as a backdrop to the choreographed moving sequences the students helped created in the Tatsuniya Workshop, a storytelling workshop the artist holds with the students to develop the narratives we see in the film. “Tatsuniya” means a fable, short story, or riddle in the Hausa language.
Rahima Gambo, born in 1986 in London, UK, is a multimedia artist based in Abuja who came to artistic practice by working independently on long form trans media documentary projects. Currently, she explores an expanded moving photography through the narrative and experimental capabilities of “walking” as it intersects with documentary storytelling, psycho-spiritual-geography, socio politics, urban environment, and autobiography. Tatsuniya II is her first work to appear in Forum Expanded.
