Okwui Enewzor Fellow
An award-winning Beninese filmmaker and recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Prince Claus Award, Idrissou Mora-Kpai has spent more than twenty-five years producing work that is both artistically compelling and socially relevant. His films tell the stories of people underrepresented in mainstream productions. His filmography includes early narrative shorts such as Fugace (1996) and Fake Soldiers (1999), which were pioneering portrayals of Black German life, as well as documentary features including Si-Gueriki, The Queen Mother (2002), Arlit, The Second Paris (2005), Indochina: Traces of a Mother (2011), and America Street (2019).
Mora-Kpai’s films have been screened worldwide at prominent festivals in Berlin, Rotterdam, Vienna, Milan, Busan, Marseille, and Sheffield. His international accolades include the Best Documentary Award and TV5 Award at the 20th Namur International Festival of French-Speaking Film in Belgium, as well as the Best Documentary Award at the 15th African, Asian, and Latin American Film Festival in Milan, Italy.
He has served as a visiting artist at Cornell University and as a visiting professor at Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh. At the time of his fellowship, he taught film production at Ithaca College.
As a 2023 Okwui Enwezor Fellow at The Africa Institute (GSU), Mora-Kpai worked on two projects. He continued developing Border Life, a feature-length creative documentary about Seme, the bustling border town between Nigeria and Benin. Deeply intertwined with the lives of peddlers, smugglers, and travelers, the town offers a window into the localization of global economic exchange.
Mora-Kpai also worked on revising his script for Corporal Ganda, a feature drama about African colonial soldiers during the Indochina War. The fellowship provided an opportunity to expand his professional network and identify potential collaborators and funding sources in the region.
