Flame

The role of women in guerilla struggles and in post-liberation societies is depicted in a story of the women freedom fighters of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. FLAME is perhaps the most controversial film ever made in Africa --certainly the only one to be seized by the police during editing on the grounds it was subversive and pornographic.

Ingrid Sinclair's moving tribute to women fighters in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle aroused the ire of war veterans and the military because it revealed officers sometimes used female recruits as "comfort women." Flame's real crime may have been that it exposed not just past abuses but continuing divisions within Zimbabwean society. Many of the groups which fought hardest during the freedom struggle, for example, women and peasants, have been left behind in the post-revolutionary period; for them the revolution is still not completed. FLAME provides an important and by no means unambiguous case study of who will control not only the depiction of the African past but also the African present.

"This tremendous film tells a story which is both unfashionable and politically incorrect in its home country...The applause for this film was the loudest at Cannes." - The Guardian (U.K.)