film-directors-from-zimbabwe

"Partner with people who know more than you and be prepared to learn from the ground up. I’m a newbie in the gaming space, but I constantly reach out to experts who can teach me. Collaboration and curiosity are everything"

"People are more accepting and curious. In film, the glass ceiling isn’t shattered yet, but it’s cracked. Locally, it’s relatively easier for African women to make films, though funding is always a hurdle. Globally, it’s tougher, but tough doesn’t mean impossible."

"One of the first things I thought of was how exciting it was to have an African story that follows a lead female action hero when for a long time, my go to for an action reference was Lara Croft–Angelina Jolie. I just always pictured Angelina Jolie, I never pictured an action hero with an afro. I actually coined the term, ‘Aflo’ because she walks with it like a halo. It’s so powerful she is our African angel superhero"

"It is obviously unbelievable, completely surreal but also absolutely humbling. I can’t believe that I am so lucky, but also I sit in total gratitude for sitting, arriving and being at a place that proves that all the work, all the dedication, and all of the persistence has paid off"

"I'm a straight woman who has now played a transsexual character, and was able to fool you as possibly a heterosexual man. Don't ever let your sexuality stop you from being whatever you want to be, whether is in storytelling or real-life"

"The biggest misconception about me is definitely that I'm a man. I'll state that I'm proudly a heterosexual woman"

"We take clothes for granted. What I started to feel when wearing Wandi's clothes – the girl clothes – the soft fabric of dresses and feminine underwear made me automatically click into myself. But I had to remember that I'm still this character"

"Yes, I'm a method actor. I take my work very serious, I go very deep. Physically, what I do when I play the boy character is that I walk into my dressing room and my chest is strapped."

"When people come to me and tell me that I feel proud to have done my job the correct way and raise awareness"

"It's such a deliciously groundbreaking character that has heightened my level of appreciation for performance. I find it very honourable and moving that members of the LGBTI community come to me and tell me that this story is being told so truthfully"

"When I read the brief initially I remember feeling and I think this is something that happens when you finally align with your purpose and your calling."

"I don’t ever have to take off my top (to confirm my gender) because people stare at my breasts anyway. All the time. It has really empowered me and my body because I often have to say to people ‘you know you’re staring right?’."

"You also get to see we are represented in our clothing, our hairstyles, different images, different ideas of what it means to not only be beautiful but what it means to be a star within your own right. ‘Do I wear my weave, am I black enough, do I wear my fro, am I bold enough and do I wear my braids, what does that mean? What do I think of myself’ and so all of those things to be seen and celebrated by this beautiful, talented people was one of the most honourable and glorious things for me to experience and be a part of"

"If [Kenneth] Pinyan didn't die, those guys he hung out with would still be fucking horses today and no one would have suspected anything. It was a paradise for a horse fucker. I'm sure they were so angry because they must have thought, We had it so good!"

"Some laws come directly from God. There is a thunderbolt, the smoke clears, and there they are, the Commandments on a stone tablet. Most laws, however, do not have their origin in God but in man, which is the case with the law that will soon ban bestiality in the State of Washington."

"The state wanted to punish this man for horse fucking but because there was no law against it at the time the horse fucking occurred, the state could only charge him with a crime as boring as drunken driving, serving booze to minors, a failed attempt to turn a trick."

"There are two possible reasons for this surprising omission from Washington State's legal code: Either the State of Washington overlooked bestiality (which is not a bad thing to overlook considering there are much bigger problems to worry about—wars, poverty, earthquakes, health care... These issues are pressing; horse fucking is not), or, the reason for the law's absence—the one I believe is much more likely—is that no one wanted to contemplate horse fucking, much less talk about it. The formation of any law requires a lot of thought and even more talking. To pass a measure against bestiality means you have to picture it, write about it, and describe it in great detail."

"[…] [R]eading the law that was drafted by Senator Roach is very much like reading hardcore porn. Here is the last paragraph of the bill: "'Sexual contact' means any contact, however slight, between the sex organ or anus of a person and the sex organ, mouth, or anus of any animal, or any intrusion, however slight, of any part of the body of the person into the sex organ or anus of an animal, for the purpose of sexual gratification or arousal of the person. Evidence of emission of semen is not required to prove sexual contact.""

"Once the law changed, and bestiality was made illegal in Washington, everyone sort of said, "It's over and it will never happen again. And if it does happen again, we'll know what to do." No one has been arrested for bestiality in Washington since, to my knowledge."

"Everyone in Enumclaw is very close to horses. It's a quiet, rural suburb with a view of the mountains. Everyone is a horse person, and as you know, the town included all types of horse worship. It was a place where you could fuck horses, and no one could tell."

"It disrupted them— [Kenneth Pinyan’s zoophile friends] lost a lot by his death. If you have a moral problem with horse fucking, you might not find this to be a cool way to look at things, but I think the truth is that they lost a lot: stability, a weekend vacation getaway place, something to look forward to. They lost a community."

"[Kenneth Pinyan and his fellow zoophiles] had preferences! They would figure out which horse was too strong, which had the biggest cock, which was the quickest fuck. It was like going to a horse auction."

"Dan Savage and I would talk about if it was a fetish for animals, or a fetish for massive cocks. […] To me, it's clearer today that these guys had this worship of cock that may have had nothing to do with horses. […] The horse that killed Mr. Hands was nicknamed "Big Dick," right? It wasn't called "Nice Horse," or "Beautiful.""

"There's already enough trouble about people deciding if we should keep doing tests on chimps, but to talk about if we should be allowed to fuck them, too?"

"It wasn't African literature that I came to first. It was the Afro-American women writers, I found them very helpful. (Such as, for example?) Toni Morrison, who is really incredible. Then I read Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, and of course there are several others I can't remember right now."

"I wrote the book just after Zimbabwe’s independence to encourage young Zimbabweans to develop themselves in spite of the challenges they would face doing so. There was also a lot of talk after independence of going back to one’s cultural roots. I wanted to interrogate that idea by examining aspects of the culture we were being told to go back to that affected women in my environment negatively. I was a newly minted feminist at the time and very eager. I also wanted to look at the ongoing effects of colonialism in the new dispensation. At the same time, I hoped to write a book that would be eminently readable, with recognizable characters."

"Christine has that layer under her skin that cuts off her outside from her inside and allows no communication between the person she once believed she could be and the person she has in fact become. The one does not acknowledge the other's existence."

"People who fear greatly can sometimes substitute themselves for the thing they fear"

"Can you cook books and feed them to your husband? Stay at home with your mother. Learn to cook and clean. Grow vegetables."

"The skills I had learned for prose didn’t work in film. Those telling details, they’re completely different. Or the fact of these inner monologues in which you can write a whole book. Whereas prose is teasing out, film is stripping down, concentrating and compacting. I found I could not learn the one while doing the other. So it was a big struggle, actually. It took me years."

"I realize that creative women often do not fit easily into certain paradigms. I think to myself, Then where do they go? Where do they go? Because I feel that these women have so much to contribute, that they just see things in a different way. Every society has people like that and marginalizes them in some way. So it’s a very difficult situation."

"The racism in England was not so institutionalized. Well, it was institutionalized, but then it was so efficiently realized that it didn’t need institutions, if you understand what I mean. In England, it was much easier not to be affected by it to that extent because my parents were students and people were somewhat respectful."

"The writers in Zimbabwe were also [like the characters in the literature they produced] basically men at the time."

"As for my sisters, well, they were there. They were watching me climb into Babamukuru's car to be whisked away to limitless horizons. It was up to them to learn the important lesson that circumstances were not immutable, no burden so binding that it could not be dropped,"

"What I experienced that day was a short cut, a rerouting of everything I had ever defined as me into fast lanes that would speedily lead me to my destination. My horizons were saturated with me, my leaving, my going. There was no room for what I left behind."

"Keening. I remember keening that seemed to go on all through the night: shrill, sharp, shiny, needless of sound piercing cleanly and deeply to let the anguish in, not out."

"Plunging into these books I knew I was being educated and I was filled with gratitude to the authors for introducing me to places where reason and inclination were not at odds. It was a centripetal time, with meat the centre, everything gravitating towards me. It was a time of sublimation with me as the sublimate."

"You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions."

"“How about forgetting?" you say. "Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering when nothing can be done." "Forgetting is harder than you think," says Nyasha. "Especially when something can be done. And ought to be. It's a question of choices.”"

"“You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice and that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice.”"

"“You begin to suspect that Cousin-Brother-in-Law and Nyasha are not being honest, that they found each other because neither possesses the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect.”"

"“He says he wants to go back to Germany,' Nyasha confides. 'As soon as he's finished his doctorate,' she goes on, as though both completion of his research and departure are imminent. You realize she does not know Cousin-Brother-in-Law is mulling another thesis because he is no longer interested in his subject. You are surprised your in-law is behaving in the way you expect your own black men to do, first of all by being so indecisive and then by not telling his wife.”"

"“How, with all your education, do you come to be more needy than your mother?”"

"“What we heard all the time is that you were not working. That's what was said, that that degree of yours was just a piece of paper sitting, silently rotting."

"Stars below instead of above! I wanted to see them straight away. I prayed for a miracle, for the sun to set."

"I have seen enough to know that blame does not come in neatly packaged parcels."