We often hear the term "Father of African Cinema" associated with the great Senegalese author and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Indeed he is today recognised as an outstanding post-war African filmmaker, his work studied and taught universally- no genuine film academic or cinema historian can boast of never having come across his oeuvre during the course of their own research. Of course this is entirely due to the paucity of Africans that have worked in cinema and thus Sembène stands today as almost the sole historical black Sub-Saharan African progenitor and therefore representative of the global medium of cinema, who now, a hundred years after his birth, is to be honoured with a much deserved and necessary retrospective, courtesy of the British Film Institute (BFI Southbank) in London, one of Europe's leading film institutions.

Chie Hayakawa’s impressive debut feature film presents a captivating dystopia about the calculation of elderly citizens’ right to a dignified life, the impunity of those who decide who is granted that right, and the elusive meaning of humanity, in near-future post-extinction capitalist societies. In a cruel, calculating and survival-of-the-fittest, deficit-ridden individualistic society, senior citizens are considered to be the least productive and most burdensome group to the economy and society.