C.J. Obasi, dir. Mami Wata. 2023. 107 minutes. Pidgin. Nigeria. Fiery Film Company, Guguru Studios. Ifind Pictures & PalmWine Media. No price reported.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pidgin.Nigeria.Fiery Film Company, Guguru Studios.Ifind Pictures & PalmWine Media.No price reported.C.J. Obasi is an arthouse filmmaker with a mission to bring Nigerian cinema back to its traditional values with methods, and innovative techniques and stylistics not often found among the works of his contemporaries or pioneers.He cofounded the Surreal16 Collective, which created a manifesto to inspire a new kind of cinema that explores genres like fantasy, sci-fi, horror and crime, thus stimulating a consciousness in arthouse cinematic experimentation.Inspired by Ousmane Sembene, the father of African cinema, and committed to creating films which reflect the socioeconomic and political realities of Nigeria, Obasi is prominent for making the zero budget feature Ojuju (2014).The award-winning director interrogates unconventional, Afrocentric topics such as juju, myths, and traditional beliefs as evident in his films O-Town (2015), Visions: Bruja (2017), and Juju Stories (2021).In Mami Wata, he adapts the West African folktale of the water deity called mami wata (water goddess).His reconstruction of the mythic, the mysterious, and magical in Mami Wata is illustrative of what it means to demystify the water goddess (Mmuo Mmiri in Igbo and Yemoja in Yoruba contexts) as an evil and demonic creature causing harm to human beings in metaphysical terms.Mami Wata is an example of a cinematic piece that elevates and upholds traditional and cultural beliefs in African worldview.Obasi offers a visually compelling narrative, artistically delivered in black and white cinematography, in which he upholds and celebrates Africa's proud communal coexistence.The concept of coexistence also shapes the film's visual narrative.An early scene depicts Mama Efe, her daughters, and community members uniting to support a mother whose child receives traditional medical attention.This collective display of care and solidarity embodies the African values of communal support, shared joy, and collective sorrow.The scene's visual composition reinforces this theme.Shot from a left angle, the medium frame captures the community's collective effort to revive the child.Each character occupies equal space, seated side by side and facing the camera.This framing echoes Africancentered aesthetics, reminiscent of traditional African theatre.Set in the modernity resistant, matriarchal village of Iyi, Mami Wata can be read as a metaphor for the three-way intergenerational conflict currently distressing Nigeria and many other nations witnessing an upsurge in youth populations.Mama Efe, the once powerful and respected, albeit traditional, Iyi leader and intermediary for the water goddess, is currently striving to manage looming crisis at home and in the community.At home, Mama Efe's biological
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.566 | 0.440 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".