Yellow Fever

YELLOW FEVER.

NG’ENDO MUKII, FILM DIRECTOR.

My film, Yellow Fever, focuses on the effect of media-created ideals on African women and their perception of beauty. Our media is saturated with beauty ideals that are hard to attain, often unhealthy and increasingly, harp towards Western media’s current concepts of beauty. Ideals to which many African women do not fit. In my film, I consider the things that we, as African women, practice in an effort to try and attain these homogenised / globalised beauty ideals. These include chemically straightening our hair, the use of hair weaves, skin ‘brightening’ (bleaching), etc. I was particularly interested in discovering where the root of this pressure lays.

politically and physically was crucial and I represented this through dance and pixilation (stop motion using people). I experimented quite a bit with the pixilation, and got some unexpected results with the bodies creating some disturbing and beautiful movements.

You can watch Yellow Fever here: www.vimeo.com/ngendo/yellowfever

I realised we are only products of our society. Since our media perpetuates singular ideals to girls and women, and we consume this information continuously from a young age, how can we fault anyone who is susceptible to these ideals (men included), without challenging the institutions that are creating them? The title of the film is based on a Fela Kuti song, Yellow Fever, that attacks women who use skin-bleaching products (with the reduction of melanin, the skin turns a yellowy tone). However, I use it to underline what I see as a mediainduced psychological condition, not very different to anorexia, bulimia, and other body-dysmorphic disorders that are recognised by medical institutions.

It took a lot of experimentation to come up with the general look and feel of Yellow Fever. The subject of the film deals closely with the skin and the feeling of being trapped within one’s body. The issue of skin