The Last Fishing Boat, the second feature film by Malawian director Shemu Joyah, has just enjoyed its first screening in competition at the recent Kenya International Film Festival on 1 November. It will now move to the Verona African Film Festival which runs from 16 to 25 November in Italy.
This is Joyah’s second feature film and fuses climate change and socio-economic-cultural messages. In The Last Fishing Boat, Lake Malawi’s once abundant fishing stock has dwindled and daily catches are now a thing of the past. This challenge extends to cultural values that are being threatened by the expanding tourist industry.
Joyah’s debut feature film, Season of a Life, won the Verona Jury Award and the Zanzibar International Film Festival Chairman’s Award in 2009. It has also screened at the Cairo and FESPACO festivals and received six AMAA nominations in 2011.
A self-taught filmmaker, Joyah is founder and executive producer at First Dawn Arts based in Blantyre, Malawi. He first studied physics and mathematics at the University of Malawi before furthering with land surveying and mapping sciences in the UK.
