​ABOUT

THIS PROJECT

 

The March of Hollowmen is a short archival meditation on African soldiers who marched into the World Wars and were quietly omitted from their own history. Nyembezi, the director, returns to old war footage, looking for the spaces where her great-grandfather and his comrades were last seen, her voice moving from a schoolgirl classroom memory to a griot-like address, punctuated by a few untranslated raw vernacular feelings. Rather than explain this missing part of African and world history, this short but thematically dense film invites viewers to read against the grain of official history, to look again at who appears and who disappears in the images we inherit and, above all else, to feel the enchantment of war, then and now.