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Maangamizi: The Ancient One Movie Review

Maangamizi: The Ancient One is a 2001 Tanzanian drama film directed by Martin Mhando and Ron Mulvihill and starring Barbara O. Jones. It’s a very intriguing, fascinating movie.

An American woman doctor comes to Tanzania to work at a hospital for the mentally disturbed, with her Tanzanian lover. There, she meets a sometimes catatonic patient, Samahe, who seems to be in communication with another reality. Only through the spirit of Maangamizi, can the women resume their lives with an understanding of the ancestors and their eternal presence in a world of cruelty, hatred and death.

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This is a rare movie made in Tanzania and the first film from the country to be submitted for the Academy Awards. It is also a very rare film that deals with the complicated relationship between people from Africa and the Diaspora as it tries to bridge the gap between these two ultimately very different cultures and experiences.

In what is a messy, but highly fascinating storyline, Maangamizi: The Ancient One deals also with spirituality and the animist beliefs coming from the African continent. This magical realist element is very fitting for an African movie and whenever they have this element, I find the viewing experience to be much more enjoyable.

The characters are solid. They are far from great, but they are still well developed, at least the two main female personalities, who take over most of the movie’s runtime. The relationship that develops between Samahe and Dr. Asira is quite powerful and some moments in the film are genuinely moving.

Obviously, for what must have been a shoestring budget, Maangamizi did seem a bit too cheap in its visuals. The film clearly needed a bigger budget to execute these fantastical sequences and this is the area where it failed the most. The overall score and editing also left a lot to be desired, though the directing is pretty solid, especially fine for what was a dual directorial job. The dialogue is particularly strong and the movie is so engaging in its plot that the pacing issues did not matter all that much. The ending was quite powerful and memorable.

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Maangamizi: The Ancient One has inferior audio-visuals due to its shoestring budget and it doesn’t always work, but for the most part this is a very interesting drama that offers a rare glimpse into the complicated relationship between Africa and its Diaspora as well as the continent’s spiritual beliefs and practices. The result is an engaging, intriguing film that is emotionally investing as well.

My Rating – 4

This is the 24th and final film in my African Cinema Marathon where I watched one film from each African country every day. It has been a strong run with the best movies being The Nightingale’s Prayer, The Silences of the Palace and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection.