filmmaker, podcaster & more
A FATHER A SON AND SANKARA is an intergenerational manifesto on anti-capitalism and humanity. What unites us and what space can we share in a world dominated by white capitalism? The film is a bridge between the Global South and the North, shot over ten years of shared family life.
This documentary blends the personal and political lives of three men confronting the systematic oppressions of capitalism, colonialism, and racism, and illustrates how power structures infiltrate and undermine our intimate lives. Filmed over ten years in Algeria, Niger, France, and Germany, and using archival footage of the Marxist and Pan-African revolutionary Thomas Sankara, the film questions utopian revolutionary thinking on transnational anti-capitalism and the family ties that connect us all.
The film focuses on the evolving relationship between Bouzid and Andreas. Both fathers of young sons, they meet at a school gate in Berlin. Connecting through fatherhood, they develop a deep conversation, a translation process over their thirty-year age gap, and explore those areas of our lives still subjected to capitalist, colonial, and racial logic. Andreas films their exchanges over ten years, which unfold through a revisiting of the violence Bouzid’s family endured during colonization in Algeria and the liberation movements Bouzid participated in as a journalist alongside Thomas Sankara and Che Guevara. The political and the intimate are reimagined in the relationship between Bouzid and Andreas, based on a shared home of love and care, and a rejection of the normative gendered family institution.
Examining the determining mechanisms through which global capitalism shapes our public and private existence, including the nuclear family, Andreas is forced to reflect on his own personal history growing up as a child of divorced parents in Germany, a country haunted by its past, and to pose the ultimate revolutionary question of the necessary conditions to imagine and remake the world open to a radically different future.