'My Father's Kora' Premieres at Locarno Open Doors
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- "My Father's Kora" premieres Aug. 9 at Locarno Film Festival's Open Doors section, which has focused on 42 African countries since 2025; the film follows Souleymane Everston Adowo Freudenreich, an Afro-German trans man, as he travels to Dakar to repair his father's broken kora — a metaphor for his search for identity within a traditional Muslim culture.
- Aymar Esse describes the film as "not an activist film in the strict sense" but "a quiet reflection on what can be repaired, and what remains uncertain," urging viewers to "see the other without rushing to define them" and "recognize a human being before a category."
- The production was made through Esse's SunRise Films with co-producers Aline Bonvin Film Video and 274 Studio (Switzerland) and Seera Films (Germany), developed within Steps' Generation Africa program with financial support from the Swiss Cooperation Office in Benin.
- The film will get its German premiere at the Afrika Film Festival Köln in September.
- Esse characterizes Senegal as "a very conservative country" where "the legal and social climate has become even harsher toward LGBTQ people," cautioning that the warmth shown in the film should be read as "the fragile light of a singular family story," not the rule.
- The ballroom scene — a safe space for the LGBTQ community — prompted Esse to ask, "What is a safe space, really? Who creates it? Who protects it?"; he said he discovered ballroom culture while making the film and came away struck by how "people can speak to one another there… in a space that becomes almost a language of its own."
- Esse maps each kora part to meaning: the skin speaks to the body, the strings suggest a connection to Senegal, and the neck "feels to me like the backbone."
Why it matters: Esse's Locarno premiere positions a Benin-Switzerland-Germany co-production built through African talent-development infrastructure (Steps' Generation Africa) on the Open Doors stage, which has covered 42 African countries since 2025 — giving a poetic, deliberately non-activist queer narrative a continental festival circuit at a moment when Senegal's legal and social climate toward LGBTQ people has grown harsher.
