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Quartier Mozart / Aristotle’s Plot

A man facing a group of men.
May 12, 2024 - 7:00 pm
In-person: 
Q&A with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo, moderated by UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Associate Professor Shelleen Greene.


Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.


Quartier Mozart

Cameroon/France, 1992

Domestic discord is inevitable when a police chief brings home a second wife but it's nothing compared to the delirious trouble that results when his daughter falls in love with a newcomer in town who’s actually a woman living as a man with help from a witch. Around this already intriguing central storyline, Jean-Pierre Bekolo crafts a playful, loving portrait of the quirky and complicated residents of a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé in his internationally acclaimed debut feature. While the film itself blends realism and fantasy, Bekolo’s characters inhabit a multivalent cultural space where invention and reinvention seem ever possible.

35mm, color, in French with English subtitles, 80 min. Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. With: Jimmy Biyong Serge Amougou Sandrine Ola'a.

Aristotle’s Plot

Le complot d'Aristote, Cameroon/France/U.K./Zimbabwe, 1996

The first African film to screen at Sundance, Bekolo’s second feature was commissioned by the British Film Institute as part of a project to mark cinema’s centennial. The only African filmmaker invited to participate, Bekolo challenges the Institute’s motives — ”Was this an act of Christian charity or political correctness” — before launching a full tilt, satiric interrogation of the colonialist framing of Africa and African cinema. The battle, literal and figurative, over whose cinema and whose history centers around a movie theater where a band of outlaws spend endless hours consuming Western action movies until a lone champion of African film challenges their priorities.

35mm, color, in French with English subtitles, 68 min. Director: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Screenwriter: Jean-Pierre Bekolo. With: Albee Lesotho, Seputla Sebogodi, Ken Gampu.