Emile Dinneen, Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley will attend the screening.
The award-winning Still Films, fresh from the successful Build Something Modern (which screened at last year’s JDIFF), return with another unique and striking look at cross-cultural ambitions, encompassing their now hallmark visual and storytelling flair. Nightdancers, directed by Irish-Ugandan filmmaker Emile Dinneen, is a story about a group of African b-boys taking a show based upon semi-mythological fire-breathing human-flesh eaters to London’s biggest hip-hop dance theatre festival, Breakin’ Convention, in May 2011. Dinneen charts Africa’s hottest new dance talent (the Tabu-Flo dance crew) creating their show based on a contemporary belief in Uganda in abasezzi or nightdancers.
These are humans who become zombies after dark and are said to strip themselves naked and dance feverishly in the slums or at the edges of the villages, their mouths filled with fire while they feast on the flesh of the recently buried dead. As the breakdancers research the background story to their show, they discover that nightdancers are not just myth; that in fact, these grave-digging cannibals actually exist and convene on certain days of the year to dig up decomposing corpses from graveyards on the outskirts of the city.
As the stories get darker and they are introduced to a real nightdancer, things start getting remarkably strange for the b-boy collective. - Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival
