International music specialists, Soundway have organized a great warehouse party in Hackney for Saturday September 10, centered round a screening of the film Black Goddess at which the Quietus and many other DJs are playing music until 4am in three rooms.
Written and directed by Ola Balogun and shot on location in Brazil and Nigeria in 1977-78, Black Goddess had the distinction of being the first collaboration between an African country and Brazil in the field of film production. It won the International Catholic Film Office prize for best motion picture at the Carthage Film Festival in 1978 and was honoured at a special screening in the widely acclaimed New Films, New Directors programme at the New York Museum of Modern Art in April 1980.
Just to whet your appetite, here is a clip:
This is a synopsis of the film, written by Ola Balgun:
Black Goddess is a love story that spans two centuries.
In 18th Century Yorubaland in Nigeria, Prince Oluyole is taken prisoner in the course of internecine warfare fanned by overseas slave traders. He is sold into slavery in Brazil.
Flash forward to the 1970s in Lagos, capital of Nigeria. A dying man bequeaths a sacred carving of Yemoja to his son Babatunde, to whom he entrusts the task of travelling to Brazil to retrieve the duplicate of the carving. The carving that Babatunde is to seek out is supposedly held in trust by members of a branch of their family who remained behind in Brazil when Babatunde’s forefathers returned to Nigeria after slavery was abolished in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century.
In Brazil, Babatunde meets unexpected assistance in his quest from a young female devotee of the cult of Yemoja, who falls into a trance in his presence during a religious ceremony in one of modern Brazil’s African religious temples known as candomblé.
At Yemoja’s prompting, the young woman undertakes to guide Babatunde to a deserted village in a remote part of Brazil, where they encounter the same mysterious woman to whom Prince Oluyole owed his survival two centuries earlier.
As the interaction between Yemoja, Babatunde and his guide deepens, the adventure evolves into a fresh blossoming of the tragic love affair between Prince Oluyole and Amanda which was cut short by her premature death two centuries earlier…
