In “Zinder,” Nigerien director Aicha Macky announces up front her relationship to the desert city that lends her film its name. “I am a daughter of Zinder,” states an introductory title card, capping a more detached scroll of facts about the city’s historical legacy of crime, poverty and social division. This is the last time that Macky will assert any intimate knowledge of her hometown, which she otherwise approaches with an outsider’s curiosity. For Zinder, it emerges, is a place of drastically separate districts and social strata: Checking her privilege early on, Macky plunges into the deprived neighborhood of Kara Kara, traditionally a place to which lepers and other social outcasts were banished, and where bloody, destitute gang culture continues to thrive.
The short, straightforward documentary that follows is a vividly observed chronicle of tough, unforgiving streets. What keeps “Zinder” from feeling touristic, however, is the tension between...
The short, straightforward documentary that follows is a vividly observed chronicle of tough, unforgiving streets. What keeps “Zinder” from feeling touristic, however, is the tension between...
- 4/17/2021
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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