The Bloodettes (Les Saignantes)

Adèle Ado, Dorylia Calmel, Emile Abossolo M’bo

“How can you make a horror film in a place where death is a party?” asks Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo in the outrageous and outrageously good sci-fi day-glo zombie political thriller The Bloodettes (Les Saignantes).

Majolie and Chouchou aren’t able to ignore the moral double-talk of the political class. That’s because they’re sex workers, frequented by the elites of a near-future unnamed African state. But when one of their clients dies in flagrante, they must do all they can to reanimate him, dragging his body as a rebuke through a dirty city with a clean surface.

Playing something like an afro-futurist version of Tangerine, or a Black feminist take on Thelma & Louise (where the corpse joins the road trip), The Bloodettes is riotous, deeply cool and full of the ambivalence and complexity that can only be expressed by genre. A great introduction to modern African cinema.

Please note: Hard-of-Hearing captions are available for this title.

With thanks to Jean-Pierre Bekolo for inclusion in the tour.