Synopsis
During the colonial era, Gaspar Yanga was kidnapped from the African coast, brought to Mexico, and enslaved. Though forced to work on the master’s plantation, he never stopped dreaming of freedom. Based on historical facts and using shadow theatre with hand-drawn animation, Nyanga pays tribute to the resistance against the chains of colonialism.
A word from Tënk
A striking contrast runs through this film: on one side, the almost childlike lightness of a deceptively simple shadow puppet animation; on the other, the weight of the narrative, carrying a painful memory—that of slavery.
History still echoes cruelly in our present: the 12 million Africans who were once deported find a troubling parallel in the 12 million undocumented migrant in the United States today, trapped in a system that renders them invisible and increasingly vulnerable. Some migrants, like enslaved people in the past, are torn from their land; others are forced to leave in search of a better world—a world that, all too often, exists nowhere.
The filmmaker chooses to center her narrative on stories of resistance, on those who fled, who chose marronage. In 2001, I accompanied filmmaker André Gladu to Louisiana as an assistant during the shoot of Marron, a film that traced those same stories of escape—lives torn from an unnamed system of oppression, deep in the bayous.
Nyanga, a multi-awarded film, exists so that we do not forget. It is a tribute to those who escaped, and to all those who, still today, are striving to break free.
Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker
