Campus Queen

Tunde Kelani's most recent video, “Campus Queen is a free-form African School Daze wherein club rivalries assume national significance and students, when not staging full-scale song-and-dance extravaganzas, engage in realpolitik capers that come off as anything but academic....(The film) combines several genres-thriller, musical, teen flick, political satire-which somehow coexist in chaotic harmony. Numerous stage-set musical production numbers are interspersed throughout, neither firmly placed within the narrative nor abstractly set against it. They provide indirect commentary via verse and synchronized body movements that appear to owe stylistic debts equally to Yoruba tribal theater, classic Greek choruses, and rap....Meanwhile, back at the plot, two rival college clubs, the Heavy Weights and the Silver Line Movement, vie for power....In (Campus Queen's) climate of ethical relativity, it's often quite hard to tell the bad guys from the good” (Ronnie Scheib, Variety).

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