Sara Chitambo-Hatira, dir. Black People Don’t Get Depressed. 2024. 82 minutes. English, Zulu. Bemba, USA. No price reported.
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Sara Chitambo-Hatira, dir.Black People Don't Get Depressed.2024.82 minutes.English, Zulu.Bemba, USA.No price reported.Sara Chitambo-Hatira's feature-length directorial debut is a treasure trove of images and words.Like all works born from a tangle of complex experiences and private emotions, Black People Don't Get Depressed demands to be seen several times to appreciate its richness and become a tool for research and learning.This is because talking about mental suffering in African countries and in the diaspora means not only deciding which diagnostic categories to suggest and which to abandon, but also plunging oneself in a history of arbitrariness, indifference, and tragic misunderstandings.African cinema does not have many works on the theme of mental illness: the fact that it is female directors who explore this territory of violence, wounded worlds, and loneliness is not insignificant.On the French-speaking side, we can recall the work of Khady Silla, a Senegalese filmmaker and writer who passed away in 2013.Her Une fenêtre ouverte [An Open Window] is a unique testimony in its density and delicacy, and, like Chitambo-Hatira, tells the first-person story of a woman, an intellectual who looks into the deepest folds of her illness, trying to talk to another patient in an attempt to establish a difficult friendship.Shot in South Africa, Zambia, and Canada, the film aims to bring to light stories of suffering and resistance, where diagnostic categories lose the arrogant clarity of their boundaries and definitions as soon as they are submitted to the historical lens.Psychiatric diagnosis in Africa, in the colonies or elsewhere, has often been an instrument of domination, complicit in an "economy of denial" (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term) of the social and historical roots of suffering.For instance, in colonial Algeria, feeling persecuted by spirits who ordered them to cut their throats "because otherwise the French would do it" was, for Suzanne Taïeb, a Tunisian psychiatrist, just another expression of beliefs and "ideas of influence" characteristic of North African culture.It is in these acts of denial that epistemic injustice and diagnostic racism became intertwined, creating a unique tangle where subjugation speaks the language of psychiatry, and resorting to other idioms to express one's pain was often dismissed as mere tradition or cultural belief.As Chitambo-Hatira states, when you are struggling with depression, nothing is safe from it.This is something to keep in mind, because mental suffering invades every corner of your existence, placing itself outside and against common sense.But is this sense really "common"?The world has been crossed by a line of color that, even when ignored or masked, has divided experience like a scalpel, even that of illness and its destiny.But why has the possibility that
Source: African Studies Review
Author: Roberto Beneduce
Institution: University of Turin
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4415097825
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