Portal:African cinema/Page to screen/13

Tug of War (2021) is Tanzanian film directed by Amil Shivji based on the award-winning Swahili novel Vuta N’kuvute by Adam Shafi. A coming-of-age political drama about love and resistance set in the final years of British colonial Zanzibar, the film was awarded the Tanit d'Or, the top prize at Tunisia's Carthage Film Festival and was Tanzania's entry for the Academy Award Best International Feature category. In Shivji’s own words:

I read it as a high schooler, as it was a part of the teaching material in our Swahili class. It is one of those novels that you just can’t put down once you begin reading it. The writing is extremely descriptive and cinematic. All I could picture were moving images, sounds and tastes of Zanzibar island. That’s when I decided to adapt it for the big screen

After analysing chapter by chapter, I chose characteristics first before I chose characters. The novel is quite long with a lot of faces and places. I combined different traits into one or two characters to allow a smaller ensemble cast to flourish. For the revolutionaries cast, I spent time talking to politically active comrades from the time who shared stories of themselves, or their loved ones who were up against the British in the ‘50s. This really fed into backstories for Denge and the boys. Mwajuma, the taarab singer was modeled around the famous Siti Bint Saad who is still considered the mother of Taarab in East Africa."