Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts interprets the 1964 story of a Zambian schoolteacher’s failed dream for his recently liberated nation to beat the United States and Russia into space and become a significant player in the international community through an ad-hoc space program that he invented. Bodomo tells the story from the point of view of Matha Mwambwa, the seventeen-year-old girl that was selected to be Zambia’s first astronaut. Part of a broader trend towards low-fi sci-fi in contemporary African cinema, Afronauts raises complex issues—on personal, political, gendered, and racial levels—regarding alienation, access to technology, and the significance of failure.