The Sacred Woods: A coming-of-age ritual in Ivory Coast
From Al Jazeera World.
This award-winning documentary from Ivory Coast follows a group of young men who undergo an ancient coming-of-age ceremony in a remote West African forest.
Their spiritual tutor is struggling to preserve the tradition of the Generation Festival at a time when young local men are increasingly indifferent to these ancestral rituals.
Thanks to his efforts, ancient custom prevails and many young men in their early twenties take part in a gruelling three-week endurance test of physical and mental prowess.
Diggers and Merchants, by filmmaker Nelson Makengo, immerses us in a life of exhausting physical labour and brutal conditions.
In this episode of Studio B Unscripted, Gurinder Chadha and Skin share their experiences of growing up as second-generation immigrants and coming to terms with their identities. They discuss marginalisation, empowerment, and what pushed them to forge new creative paths in the worlds of music and cinema.
In this stunning spoken-word performance for TED, poet and "freedom-forging futurist" Naima Penniman celebrates the wonders of the natural world and humanity's connection to it. "I wonder if the sun debates dawn some mornings," she says.
Konaté Massioudou is a scrapyard trader in Ivory Coast, whose deafness neither defines nor deters him. Konaté Massioudou repairs, rebuilds and sells some of the thousands of household items from Europe that get discarded and dumped every day in Anoumabo, a massive electronic waste scrapyard in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Africa needs new energy sources to fuel its development, but the continent should invest in renewable energy instead of cheap, polluting alternatives like coal, says climate inclusion activist Chibeze Ezekiel. He tells the story of how he worked with local communities in Ghana to halt the construction of the country's first coal power plant -- and encouraged the government to prioritize investments in renewable energy instead.
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