Repented
At the beginning of 2017 British director Agnieszka Piotrowska was asked by Stanley Makuwe, a Zimbabwean NAMA award winning playwright (NAMA is an award similar to BAFTA) to direct a new play of his entitled Finding Temerarie. The play premiered at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in May 2017 to great acclaim. Piotrowska and Makuwe then made this into a one hour adaption of the play, called Repented. Repented is a 46 minute film which was completed in 2019. There is also an experimental version of the work which runs at 20 minutes, called Tessellation. There is also a plan to create an audio visual installation of the work.
The play (and the film) takes place in a deserted mining village, and deals with gender issues against the background of colonial and post-colonial trauma.
After serving a 25 year jail sentence for the grisly murder of her newly born child, a woman wants to face the man that made her pregnant before she can face the world. Primrose travels back to a small mining town where they both lived and worked, to seek to seek revenge.
In the film adaptation, Piotrowska used an additional layer of archive, treated here like found footage, to create a sense of history. The notion of colonisation as being pervasively affecting negatively personal relationships is at the heart of this film.
The award winning cast: Charmaine Mujeri and Eddi Sandifolo are long term collaborators of Piotrowska's and appeared, for example in her productions of Escape ( 2017) and The Suitcase (2015). .
The film was shot by an acclaimed Zimbabwean cinematographer Obrian Mudyiwenyama with Josh Changa being the production designer. The film is edited by Anna Dobrowodzka, the graduate of the famous Lodz Film School in Poland.
Repented previewed at the British Association of Film and Television and Screen Studies in April 2018 in Canterbury, Kent, UK and at the NECS conference in Amsterdam and in Gothenburg at Film Philosophy in July 2018, the Durban International Film Festival in July 2018 and in October 2018 at the International Symposium on Psychoanalysis, Nationalism, Ideology, at Gdansk University, Poland :
https://psychoanalysisinourtime.wordpress.com/programme-7/,
as well as at a special screening again in Amsterdam in December 2018 at the cult venue Perdu:
https://perdu.nl/nl/r/a-day-on-the-essay-film-visual-erosions-sprouting-words/.
Further screenings took place in 2019 at the Columbia University in New York, USA, at the Visible Evidence conference in LA, USA. There were events at the Gdansk University, Poland,at the Jagilelonian University in Krakow, Poland, at the cult Gallery Bunkier also in Krakow as well as at the Practice Research events in the UK www.cteo.space
The work continues to be screened internationally.