Twenty-six-year-old Jean-Pierre Bekolo's startlingly original film recalls other breakthrough "youth" films like Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It or Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise. Quartier Mozart recounts the not very sentimental education of a schoolgirl, "Queen of the 'Hood," who enters a young man's body with the help of a sorceress so she can understand the real sexual politics of her Yaounde neighborhood. Trained in television and music video, Bekolo reveals a sensibility which effortlessly combines MTV with African folklore into an unabashedly commercial cultural pastiche. Bekolo has challenged other African directors dependent on foreign funding: "I've tried to make a popular film where people can see themselves and be amused. African cinema won't have a future if it does not reach an African public."