Telling Our Stories: Stonard Lungu

About

Some listeners will remember Stonard Lungu (Malawi’s own Ali Farka Toure, Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan, according to the filmmaker) for his often out-of-tune box guitar (sixth string unattached to give the music a unique feel) and his potent lyrics. Telling Our Stories: Stonard Lungu is an ‘untuned’ attempt to capture an average day in one of the toughest terrains in the world, the hand-to-mouth living for most of Malawi’s (in central/southern Africa) urban dwellers, with Lungu providing the soundtrack. More than that, the film is an attempt to capture the dignity interlaced through that struggle which Stonard Lungu was certainly one of its best chroniclers. The film, shot on a minus zero budget, was inspired by documentation (text, audio, video) done by African ethnomusicologists and anthropologists like Hugh Tracey, Moya Malamusi and Gerhard Kubic.

Archive

Open Images (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), in Open Images (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)

Licence or status

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, as the Open Images (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) states it.

Credit

Michael Mutisunge Phoya (filmmaker), FirstDawn Arts / MM Phoya Production (producers)

Language

Dutch

Country

Netherlands

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed