Thunderbolt: Magun

From the burgeoning video industry of Nigeria comes a film that combines melodrama and issues of ethnicity, gender, culture and identity in post-colonial Africa by the country’s veteran filmmaker. Thunderbolt will come as a bolt out of the blue to most Americans, even aficionados of African cinema. The first half of the film is a loose retelling of the Othello story - except the protagonists are not Abyssinian and Venetian but Yoruba and Ibo. In the second half of the film, a distinctly West African emphasis on the supernatural comes to the fore; curses and ritual cleansing take the place of psychological explanations.