African Folktales, Reimagined

Brilliant cinematography. Storylines cultural, alternative, refreshing and engaging. Nuanced and layered. Mysterious, meditative, calls for us to question connection to self, people, the world and spirit. Themes explored - connection to self, self belief, intuition, good and evil extremes of humanity, emotions, family, purpose and nature. Presence is required. Split over 6 episodes, each episode a different theme on the African continent, emotive actors superbly embody the essence of their character, we feel as if we are meeting them in real life, phenomenally cast, actors excellent. This is a very important and groundbreaking piece of Art and should be celebrated. I felt the same about Love Death and Robots.

From the title I expected classic folklore. This was very exciting to me, as I know very little African tales. I guess it is partly up to my misplaced expectations that I did not enjoy the series, but my expectations do not influence my rating. Because even without considering them, this fell short in various ways.

Each episode is half an hour long, plays in a different part of Africa and is from a different director. These tales will be quite different in genre, era, etc. There are stories that take place in the past and stories that take place in the future. So in some regard, this is a bit like love, death and robots. It even shares some of the mistakes. This is where my personal disappointment stems from. The reimaginations are all over the place, but seem to lack motivation, grit, they never managed to really draw me in.

There are better and worse episodes, but they sadly never reach great heights. The different styles and qualities of the episodes make it difficult to give an impression of the whole season. Several of them felt like they didn't know where they want to go/end up at or are uninspired, there is surprisingly little mysticism considering these are folktales.

My favourite episode was Enmity Djinn, because the ethereal elements with the shadowy figure who seems invisible to those around the cast in the Mauritanian landscape with elements of mystique of the malevolent spirit was captivating. However, if the other episodes was including a lot more oomph, in terms of having different tribal groups to do an intense rituals like the Maori tribe before a battle could of added more intensity and intrigue to the viewers, as savage it may sound. What you have is few episodes with little bit of drama and actions, and usual traditional rituals and lots of scenes of individuals in humdrum scenes, it feels like being by myself in a quiet corner having a pint. But the first episode was kind of impressive.