PUMZI

PUMZI. Wanuri Kahiu, director, script. South Africa/Kenya: Inspired Minority Pictures (production) / Awali Entertainment (Kenya, all media), Focus Features (USA, all media), 2009. See IMDb for other details of distribution.[1] 21 minutes.

Logline on IMDb: "A sci-fi film about Africa in the future, 35 years after World War III, the water war."[2] Wikipedia entry more respectfully and exactly puts the film "squarely within the genre of Afrofuturism."[3] In the film, "The Maitu community is powered by manual energy production machines: treadmills and rowing machines which produce no pollution." See below. "Each citizen is allotted a small amount of daily water, and they are meticulous in their conservation of water. For example, in the bathroom, urine and sweat are recycled and kept in a personal water bottle."[4]

Reviewed by Ritch Calvin, SFRA Review #292 (Winter 2010): pp. 20-21.[5]

We then see the protagonist, Asha, asleep at her desk within the museum. She is a curator, a keeper of the relics of the past. Asleep at her desk, she wakes into a dream and sees a large green tree in the desert. As she reaches out to touch the tree, she is awakened by a computer voice: “Dream detected. Take your dream suppressants.” [...] As she walks from her office to the bathroom, she passes by windows with vast cityscapes, through hallways that are well maintained and lit, and past workers who manually power energy-production machines — treadmills and rowing machines. The voice on the public announcement celebrates the fact that they are one hundred percent self-sufficient and produce no pollution. [* * *] Asha “meets” virtually with the Maitu Council — a body of three women. They deny that life is possible outside; to prove them wrong, Asha places her hand on a scanner, which then projects her dream of the green tree and the pool of water on the screen. They dismiss the visions as “dreams” and deny the visa, and the Council immediately sends in security to destroy all evidence. Asha is hauled from the lab and compelled to produce energy on one of the machines.

Interestingly, none of the characters actually speak any lines. The lines that are delivered are typed into a computer (using a very cool, flexible keyboard), and the computer voice speaks the typed text. On the one hand, the citizens feel as though they have no voice. The authoritarian government silences all dissenters. On the other hand, technology is represented as an oppressive force. In this case, the lack of speaking suggests that all voices are mediated by technological intervention. Although the technology has kept them alive after WWIII, it simultaneously has separated them from their connections with the natural world. (Calvin, p. 21)

Note the intertwining of a dream — which clearly can be monitored (AI? simpler commuter?) — the tree, and technology. Film's end suggests the tree is as real as anything else in the film, but also mythic, using a classic image. Calvin notes that

we see the tree growing rapidly, apparently right out of Asha’s body. [...] Just as the beginning of the films fixes the time and location[...], the ending of the film refuses to fix the time. We do not know if the tree is growing in real time or elapsed time. As the camera shot widens even more, we see an entire expanse of green. Has the forest been there all along? Has it erupted spontaneously? Has an indeterminate amount of time passed? The closing credits roll over the peals of thunder.

Although the ending could be explained by rational, scientific means, Asha’s visions and the magical growth of the tree out of Asha’s body suggest [...] that technology has separated the citizens of the Maitu Community from their own past, from their own connections with the soil.

RDE, finishing, 24Mar21