TV☆3SIS presents Nigerien musical drama "Rain the Color of Blue with A Little Red In It" (2015), starring the "Jimi Hendrix of the Sahara" Mdou Moctar as himself, on Blorptube @ 12 AM CET / 6 PM EST
TV☆3SIS presents Nigerien musical drama "Rain the Color of Blue with A Little Red In It" (2015), starring the "Jimi Hendrix of the Sahara" Mdou Moctar as himself, on Blorptube @ 12 AM CET / 6 PM EST
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What's the chef cookin' tonight?
Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, meaning Rain the Color of Blue with A Little Red In It (a reference to Prince's movie Purple Rain), is a 75-minute 2015 Nigerien musical drama film starring famous desert blues musician Mdou Moctar — nicknamed "the Jimi Hendrix of the Sahara" — as himself in a fictionalized version of his life. I cannot find a more detailed description of the plot in a pinch, but given it's based on Mdou's life I can copy-paste from his Wikipedia article:
Mdou Moctar was born in Abalak, Niger. He grew up in the village of Tchintabaraden, then in Arlit, a mining town. After listening to artists such as Abdallah Oumbadougou, he wanted to play the guitar, but his family disapproved of electric music for religious reasons, so he had to build his own guitar using bicycle cables for strings. He is a practicing Muslim who observes Ramadan.
His first album, Anar, was recorded in Sokoto, Nigeria, in 2008 and prominently featured autotuned vocals and influences from Hausa music. The album was not officially released at the time but the songs became popular across the Sahel when they went viral through mobile phone music trading networks. Many of Moctar's initial songs were shared as MP3 files person-to-person throughout Niger via Bluetooth without his involvement.
Incidentally, the part about "mobile phone music trading networks" reminds me of Music from Saharan Cellphones, an album consisting of songs by different artists found through those cell phone networks. Mdou has a song on it! Listen to it! It's good!
Anyways, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai is a real milestone for the cinema of Niger in general, and more specifically it's the first ever fictional movie in the Tamasheq language. Tamasheq is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by the Tuareg people, an Amazigh group native to much of the western half of the Sahara, including the northern half of Niger in the Agadez Region. Afro-Asiatic means that Tamasheq is distantly related to Hausa, Coptic (and Ancient Egyptian by extent), Oromo, Somali, Afar, Amharic, Tigrigna, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.
My impression is that African cinema is mainly associated with Egypt, which is the cultural powerhouse of the Arab world; and Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa; whereas the movie industries of other countries of the "Mother Continent" tend to get largely ignored outside their countries of origin and their diasporas. On Blorptube, I can recall us seeing movies from Egypt, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Angola, and Uganda, so I've been curious lately about more neglected movie industries in Africa. That's when I found out about this movie while showing my mom some of Mdou Moctar's tunes. Given that Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai was in some search results mistakenly listed as NigeriAn rather than NigeriEn… I'd say Niger's movie industry definitely seems neglected by the rest of the world, especially compared to Niger's much more famous similarly-named southern neighbor.
But anyways, if you haven't listened to Mdou Moctar before, let this movie be your introduction to one of my favorite musicians. If you like Tinariwen you'll probably like Mdou as well, though I want to say Mdou is a much more fast-paced virtuoso with more of a psychedelic bent compared to Tinariwen.
Content warnings and accessibility
Audio description: Not available.
Sign language: Not available.
Captions: English hardsubs, dialog only.
Language of audio: Tamasheq.
Content warnings: No content warnings are available. The film is rated PG in Singapore.
♫ Uniting nations at the speeeed of liiiiight ♫[epic sax solo]♫ Station of the '20s — TV☆3SIS! ♫