Zanaka, Thus Spoke Felix

Andaboy is a sacred beach in southwestern Madagascar. The ancestors say the beach should be left untouched, as a shamanic musician sings in trance. The local fishermen are therefore deeply concerned when Australian company Base Toliara proposes building a harbor there, displacing 8,000 residents. The fishermen were already troubled by the Chinese trawlers that are decimating fish stocks, and now they fear an even greater invasion.

The Chinese make everything and the Malagasy fix everything. The people of Madagascar pride themselves on producing things out of nothing: tires transformed into shoes, oil lamps made out of light bulbs, wheelbarrows fashioned from scrap metal. You see ingenuity, not underdevelopment, in their practices. A return to a conservationist lifestyle that encourages recycling, fraternity and self-reliance is entirely of the moment and makes perfect sense in the midst of a global economic crisis. Will the world pay attention? Filmmaker Nantenaina Lova venerates the family business, the clever artisan, the resourceful craftsman and those who possess the ability to create using everyday objects. The Malagasy Way is a poetic, proverb-packed lesson in creativity and resistance that offers fresh logic on how to live. By cultivating lifes treasuressharing, ancestral knowledge, a good soul and the sweetness in bitternessthe Malagasy hope to teach the Western superpowers a thing or two.

On Comoros, the women’s national basketball team is training for the Indian Ocean Island Games. In the past, this tournament played between different archipelagos in the Indian Ocean was the scene of political tension: in 2015, the team from the island of Mayotte, which is still French territory, decided to carry a French flag, prompting the athletes from the three independent islands to storm out.

2067. A mother tells her daughter about her ancestor’s struggle against a large-scale rare earth mining project in Madagascar, and the resistance of the people in the north of the Great Red Island, faced with the systematic plundering of natural resources in the name of the economic interests of the globalised North.

Does farmer Ly have dealings with the Chinese, who have recently been tampering with the infrastructure of the village of Sitabaomba, not far from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, director Nantenaina Lova asks as bluntly as mischievously. Ly denies it. However, it becomes increasingly clear in the course of “Where Zebus Speak French” that the various development measures, often introduced by foreign initiatives and fuelled by corrupted politicians, also affect him.

The Malagasy government discovers an unlikely revolutionary weapon, made of artisanal rum and water from Lake Anosy (the most polluted lake in the country) and decides to sell it to the highest bidder in order to improve the country's economy. By the greatest of coincidences, North Korea wins the auction, and the entire geopolitical balance of the world is upset. The incredible parody from the Red Island!