An award-winning Beninese filmmaker and recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Prince Claus Award, Idrissou Mora-Kpai has, for the past 25 years, been committed to producing work that is not only artistically compelling but also socially relevant, telling the stories of people underrepresented in mainstream productions. His filmography includes early narrative shorts such as Fugace (1996) and Fake Soldiers (1999), pioneers in showcasing 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 numerous prestigious festivals, such as Berlin, Rotterdam, Vienna, Milano, Busan, Marseille, and Sheffield. His works have garnered many international accolades, including the Best Documentary Award, TV5 award; 20th Namur International Festival of French-speaking Film Festival, Namur, Belgium; Best Documentary Award, 15th African, Asian, and Latin American Film Festival, Milan, Italy.
He has served as a visiting artist at Cornell University, a visiting professor at Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently teaches Film Production at Ithaca College.
During his time at The Africa Institute, Mora-Kpai plans to work on two projects. He wants to pursue his work on a feature-length documentary “Border Life,” a creative documentary on Seme, the bustling border town between Nigeria and Benin, a place deeply intertwined with the lives of peddlers, smugglers, and travelers, thereby revealing a window into the localization of global economic exchanges. He also wants to work on the revision of his script for “Corporal Ganda,” a feature drama that tells the story of African colonial soldiers during the Indochina war. He is excited to use this opportunity to expand his professional network and search for potential collaborators and funding sources in the region.
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