Ghosts, Coming Home- A Short Film

Hi. My name is Henry Thulani Mpofu, and I am very happy to be creating a short-film with my good friend Antonio Medina Reubke for our final diploma semester. We decided to go above and beyond, and make something we'll be proud of. Something directly inspired by our time in Berlin. We need your help to make our dream possible. All money raised goes towards funding everything to do with our short film, including labour costs and catering. Any donation is enough. Thank you :)

Story/Logline

In desperate need for cash, a paid offer to kill a politician pulls a young immigrant into the world of political extremism.

Director's Note/Premise

The concept of this story came out of the idea that we wanted to make a movie that directly engaged with societal issues and political thought, from the perspective of people of colour, specifically immigrants and refugees, in Berlin. We also didn’t want to just highlight an issue, but instead also engage with the political discussion that is in direct contrast with them. We begin with Hakim, an African American studying film in Berlin, who is aware of the problems around him, but lacks the courage or the will to resist. It’s an act of racially motivated violence against him that unites him with a more radicalised and politically conscious friend, Zafina. Together they meet with a political extremist who lays out the idea of violent resistance to the characters and the audience, something which the extremist concludes is an inevitable conclusion to years of exploitation of the earth and global south met without sufficient resistance. Hakim is forced into almost every situation in the short, and throughout the night is eventually also forced into being outspoken about what he wants.

We chose surrealism and drama as the two genres through which to tell the story, largely influenced by the television show, Atlanta. We understand that as the film is being produced in Germany, and the characters acknowledge and are affected by their environment, the majority of the audience will be people who are not like these characters. Discussions about serious topics, such as being the victim of a hate crime and political extremism, are had with jokes in between and a relaxed tone from the character that indicates this is not out of the ordinary. When Zafina and Hakim are taken by the police, in a situation that seems absurd, they are more annoyed than enraged. By highlighting the normalisation of the absurdity, it relates to the normalisation of the absurd experiences and treatment of refugees/immigrants of colour living in Berlin.