First time South Sudanese filmmaker Akuo de Mabior presented No Simple Way Home at the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival, a personal, insightful and poignant documentary on a family who made history.
We hope to discover more productions and perspective from Africa each year and luckily, it’s happening right now at the Berlinale 2022 with 3 titles from Africa selected in this year’s Panorama Section, all of them of documentary form. ‘We, Student!’ by Rafiki Fariala who captures his everyday life as a student of Bangui University in Central African Republic, was the first African title of the section to be announced, back in December. Two other African productions ended up joining this year’s Panorama line up: ‘No U-Turn’ by Ike Nnaebue and ‘No Simple Way Home’ by Akuol de Mabior, a co-production between South Sudan, Kenya and South Africa. What those two have in common is that they are “Generation Africa” productions, created by Steps, a documentary series that is seeking compelling stories to put forward a new narrative on migration from the perspective of young Africans, and whose Malian film ‘The Last Shelter’ has become one of the biggest festival hits last year, winning the top prize at CPH:DOX and screening, among many others, in the Best of Fests section at IDFA 2021.
Making its country’s history as the first South Sudanese film ever to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival, ‘No Simple Way Home’ follows the journey of the filmmaker, Akuol de Mabior, whose father, John Garang de Mabior, who had led the liberation movement for over twenty years, and who is now revered as the founding father of South Sudan, died in a helicopter crash in 2005, three weeks following his inauguration as Sudan’s vice president. Akuol, who was born and raised in exile, was 16 at the time. In ‘No Simple Way Home’, Akuol de Mabior follows her mother and sister to the young republic where they now live and where they have both found their roles. The unmarried and unemployed Akuol made this documentary not just for a homage to her late father or a love letter to her hardworking woman, this personal yet insightful documentary film is a memory of her origins which is intimately connected to the history of a country as she called it as a “home”. The country itself, which separated from the Republic of Sudan in 2011 after a long-civil-war still struggles for its own identity.
Akuol directed this film as an autobiography for her family, mostly talking about her parents stories for taking big parts of their homeland’s independence. The first-timer filmmaker displays patience and care in telling the story of her subjects, with well written and spoken, poetic and lovely lines narrated by herself. Apart from her family story, Akuol also explores South Sudan’s capital landscapes with gorgeous cinematic visuals and its society as the most interesting part for me. From the opening on, it is clear that ‘No Simple Way Home’ is quite a technical piece of cinema that combines vision, heart and braveness. It is a personal film which in Akuol tries to figure something about her real homeland. Akuol’s unbalanced storyline may distract the whole story as she is more focusing on her mother (plus putting her sister’s role near the end with a little proportion) rather than giving South Sudanese lives more spotlight but her journey to it is quite artful and the result is beautiful.
Grade: 3.5/5
