#HIFF movies, last day of the festival, movie 1/2.
Movies based on historical events are always a soft spot for me. "The Woman King" felt an interesting one being based in Africa, in the slave trade times, and with the story being around an all-female elite kings guard. The story takes part in the kingdom of Dahomey, at the time a tributary to the Oyo Empire. Both the Dahomey and the Oyo states participate in the slave trade, selling captured foreign citizens to the European and American slave traders, gaining in return modern weapons to wage more war against their neighbours. A vicious circle, and we all know how it all ended, pretty much all of Africa under European colonial rule.
The lead of the film is general Nanisca, a tough as nails warrior leading the Agojie soldiers, an elite kings guard unit of female warriors. The role is played well and the story is well written. This is a very serious film with very few laughs and lots of rather brutal fight scenes.
Spoilers follow!
It was nice to read that a lot of the details in the film are in fact quite accurate. The kingdom of Dahomey existed, and still does, though it's called Benin these days. The king Ghezo, portrayed early in the film as kind of weak but later showing strong character, was also a real character. Unlike in the film, he didn't abolish slave trade after the defeat of the Oyo Empire. In the film the Dahomey end up raiding the port used for slave trading by Europeans, and chase them to their ships. In reality, the Dahomey kingdom ended the practice of selling their own citizens as slaves to the Europeans under king Ghezo, but did not limit slave trade of Africans captured in raids. They also used slaves themselves for work labor and had some human sacrifice rituals where slaves were used. The ending speech of the king promising no more slave trade was empowering, but also completely false in historical accuracy.
General Nanisca is also a fictional character, though the Agojie female warriors were a central part of the Dahomey kingdom, as per the film.
All in all a very interesting film, highly recommend for anyone interested in history based films. Now I want to immediately go home and play Europa Universalis IV, and see what I can do with the Dahomey kingdom myself.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RDaPV_rJ1Y
Wikipedia (for historical facts): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_King#Historical_accuracy
There are no comments yet.