
King of Sanwi (2020)
Overview
A companion piece to Pelourinho: They Don’t Really Care About Us (NYFF57), King of Sanwi continues Akosua Adoma Owusu’s exploration of Michael Jackson as a global pop icon. Here, Michael’s long affinity with the African continent—from the Jackson 5’s arrival in Senegal in 1974 to Michael’s coronation as an Ivorian king in 1992—is captured in vibrant, fuzzy archival video, made visceral by Owusu’s funky audiovisual collage and richly material direct animation effects.
Production Companies
Additional Info
Budget | $0.00 |
---|---|
Revenue | $0.00 |
Original Language | en |
Popularity | 0.1716 |
Directed By
Akosua Adoma Owusu
Crew
Akosua Adoma Owusu
TOP CAST

Michael Jackson
Self (archive footage)
Similar Movies
The Endless Summer
Bruce Brown's The Endless Summer is one of the first and most influential surf movies of all time. The film documents American surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August as they travel the world during California’s winter (which, back in 1965 was off-season for surfing) in search of the perfect wave and ultimately, an endless summer.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
The final 17 years of American singer and musician Karen Carpenter, performed almost entirely by modified Barbie dolls.
Chelsea Girls
Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.
Lapses, Regrets and Qualms
A day in the life of director Boris Lehman: he wanders from cafe to bookshop, cinema to museum, writer to musician, and into the storeroom of the film archive... He celebrates his birthday in an alleyway, with a friend, and finishes his journey with an escapade to Bruges and a stroll by the North Sea. The camera plays dirty tricks and the sound recorder gets carried away, to the point that both are clearly telling Boris to stop filming. Yet he persists…
ROJA
Levin lives in his memories and can't shake his first love. Caught in a spiral of constant changing memories he figures out what he really did. Meanwhile his boss forces him to join an elite group of brokers, who meet to fight each other on weekends. Those meetings are a counter balance to their stressful jobs. Levin decides that his big ego doesn't deserve to live. But instead of going through with this decision, he escapes again, risking the life of his boss during one of the fight weekends.
Le radeau de la Méduse
Iranian Iradj Azimi directed this French historical drama re-creating events depicted in the famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa by Jean Louis Andre Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). The ill-fated voyage of the frigate Medusa begins when it departs Rochefort for Senegal in 1816. After striking a sandbar off the African coast, 150 civilians row safely to shore, but Captain Chaumareys (Jean Yanne) orders 140 soldiers and sailors onto a raft (minus supplies) and has it cut loose. Only 14 survive from the 140, creating a scandal back in France. Gericault (Laurent Terzieff) later talks to three of the survivors while researching his painting. Work on this film began in 1987, but sets destroyed by Hurricane Hugo caused delays, so the film was not completed until 1990. However, it then remained undistributed until an incident in which writer-director Azimi slashed his wrists in front of French Ministry of Culture officials.
The Great Ephemeral Skin
Inside the claustrophobic scenery of a fancy apartment in the city of Frankfurt three men and a woman lock themselves in for ten days. Oskar and Julia are a couple. They have sex and let themselves be filmed. Benjamin and Bastian are behind the camera, trying to get pictures of absolute intimacy. Closeness as it can only be found among lovers.
Dog Star Man
Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.
Karmen Gei
Bizet's Carmen gets a modern adaptation. Seducting, provocating, sensual. All the ingredients for a perfect drama. With her charm, Karmen gets out of many situations.
Let Us Persevere in What We Have Resolved Before We Forget
On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
La Maison en Petits Cubes
La Maison en Petits Cubes tells the story of a grandfather's memories as he adds more blocks to his house to stem the flooding waters.
Crash!
Short film produced by the BBC about JG Ballard's Crash. “The film was a product of the most experimental, darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised. Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, and an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around car crashes. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ by an enraged audience.” (from: http://aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.blogspot.de/2013/01/short-film-adaptation-of-jg-ballards.html)
Meshes of the Afternoon
A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.
Men Boxing
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
Moonwalker
Moonwalker is a 1988 American experimental anthology musical film starring Michael Jackson. Rather than featuring one continuous narrative, the film expresses the influence of fandom and innocence through a collection of short films about Jackson, some of which are long-form music videos from Jackson's 1987 album Bad. The film is named after his famous dance, "the moonwalk", which he originally learned as "the backslide" but perfected the dance into something no one had seen before. The movie's introduction is a type of music video for Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" but is not the official video for the song. The film then expresses a montage of Michael's career, which leads into a parody of his Bad video titled "Badder", followed by sections "Speed Demon" and "Leave Me Alone". What follows is the biggest section where Michael plays a hero with magical powers and saves three children from Mr. Big. This section is "Smooth Criminal" which leads into a performance of "Come Together".
The Sacred Disease
A bereaved epileptic ditches her pills and follows a mysterious woman to the outskirts of her town, where she slips back into the fearsome yet ecstatic throes of the seizure.