Wonder Guchu (Windhoek) - A 1996 movie, Aristotle's Plot, shot in Zimbabwe and Cameroon featuring Walter Mparutsa and Dylan Wilson Max will be screened here at Studio 77 May 30.

The movie that also features  popular actors Siputla Sebogodi, Ken Gampu questions the role of an African filmmaker and what an African film should be.

Featuring South Africa’s and Zimbabweans Dylan Wilson Max, Marco Matshona and Walter Muparutsa among others, Aristotle’s Plot that was directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo reflects the young director’s refusal to be pigeon-holed as a maker of “traditional” films set in a rural setting by the west.
According to Aristotle, a plot should have a beginning, middle and a conclusion but this is what Bekolo is trying to run away from in this film.
While he admires such films, they do not speak for his reality, the young filmmaker wants to make movies that reflect the hybrid reality of contemporary young urban Africans, for whom the struggle to find an identity is their reality.
He is not interested in making films that are self-reflexive subversions of the Aristotelian conventions of linear narrative, mimetic realism, conflict rising to a climax, and catharsis (the purging of inner emotions by means of identifying with fictional characters and eliciting feelings of fear and pity).
He wants to make films in which the spectator is always kept thinking, aware that they are watching a fiction, and wondering what it all means and is much closer to the European avant-garde tradition.
Bekolo, famed for his 1992 film Quartier Mozart, was selected by the British Film Institute in 1992 to make a film that would be about films as part of celebrating the first 100 years of film.
The film opens with the arrest of two men - Cineaste the Filmmaker and Cinema - who are rivals in this film. Cineaste whose real name is Essomba Tourneur returns from Europe to make true African movies while Cinema regards himself an expert after watching more than 10,000 movies.
Sharing Cinema’s passion are folks such as Cobra, Bruce Lee, Van Damme, La Femme Nikita, Saddam, and Schwarzenegger who also hang around pretending to be tough guys from Hollywood.
Disgusted by this lot, Cineaste hires a policeman to evict them from the theatre so that he could get a chance of making a true African film.
When evicted, the lot plot revenge from the bush where they have taken refuge.
The film has its fair share of ironies, generates debate as to what exactly should be an African film, what about and how it should be done.
This is a very powerful film considering that it brings together some of southern Africa’s greatest acting talents as well as for its non-conformist structure.