Day Two of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival 2025 marked the beginning of the Film Salon, a curated platform where young and seasoned filmmakers share their work and engage audiences in dialogue about creativity, memory, and survival through cinema. Set against the backdrop of this year’s theme, “The Orbs Beneath the Nile Lead to Kongo,” the salon became a meeting ground for art, history, and spiritual reflection.
The evening began with a series of short films by Ukrainian filmmaker Solomiia Zhmuro. Her works explored how intimate struggles intersect with cultural mythologies and the pressures of modern life.
on my ultimate wish to be the most beautiful rib offered a piercing video essay on the transmission of patriarchal ideals across generations, exposing the fragile line between imposed beauty standards and the pursuit of authentic selfhood.
and then i will notice my nails growing back, my skin becoming clear investigated the repetition of trauma and how childhood wounds shape adult intimacy. The poetic fragments suggested both rupture and renewal, pointing toward healing beyond inherited pain.
can you please sleep with me tonight? i’m so scared that i won’t wake up tomorrow examined the anxiety of hypochondria in an age of relentless online medical information, raising questions about how digital culture blurs reality and fear.
These films invited the audience into deeply personal yet widely relatable spaces, sparking reflection on the universal tensions between selfhood, love, and memory. The viewers connected with Zhmuro’s layered meditations on vulnerability and healing.
The final screening of the evening was Muhammida El Muhajir’s When Malcolm Smiled, a luminous reimagination of Malcolm X’s 1964 visit to Ghana. Rather than the fiery orator, this short film captured a rare glimpse of Malcolm smiling, laughing, eating, reconnecting with his ancestral homeland.
Drawing from archival sources and oral histories, it evoked his encounters with figures such as Maya Angelou, Shirley Graham DuBois, and President Kwame Nkrumah, whom Malcolm described as offering him “the highest honour of my life.” Yet El Muhajir’s vision was not about politics alone. It was about the revolutionary act of joy: Malcolm as a human being, grounded in community, nourished by food, sun, spirits, and fellowship.
Earlier in the day, festival-goers had the privilege of engaging with El Muhajir herself via Zoom. She shared her motivations for the project, explaining that 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birth. For her, digging into the archives to reframe Malcolm’s story was an honour and a responsibility, to highlight his resistance and his humanity.
The conversation that followed the screening was the climax of the night.
Some of the cast were present in Accra to discuss the film around the subject of liberation, spirituality, leadership, and the role of joy in sustaining resistance.
Audience members reflected on how reclaiming joy even fleetingly can itself be a radical act of freedom. The exchange wove together voices, memories, and possibilities, leaving participants with a sense that cinema is a portal to the past and a liberatory future imagined collectively.