Zaho Zay

Needs review

A young woman works as a guard in a hopelessly overcrowded Malagasy prison. In her imagination, her absent father — who killed his own brother before she was born — becomes a mythical wandering figure. When a new prisoner arrives claiming to know him, fantasy and reality begin to converge. Co-directed by Maéva Ranaïvojaona and Georg Tiller, with a script by Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Zaho Zay is a hybrid essay-documentary that weaves prison footage, folk myth, and lyric imagery into a meditation on abandonment, justice, and the structures of poverty and violence. The title — it's me in Malagasy — echoes the call inmates make during morning assembly. It broadcast on Arte in 2023.

Director

Maéva Ranaïvojaona

Places

Antananarivo

Themes

Memory & Forgetting, Spirituality & Tradition, Silence & Absence

Historical context

2017–2019

Cinema policy, institutions and new screens

Filmada's earlier chronology records the adoption of a national policy for cinema and animated images in 2017, cooperation between OMACI and the Rencontres du Film Court, and the opening of Plaza, Cinépax and CanalOlympia screens. It also records the 2019 repeal of the policy and suppression of OMACI. This institutional sequence requires careful legal and documentary sourcing.

Sources and provenance

IMDb tt12363494; Arte broadcast 7 August 2023 confirmed. Co-director Georg Tiller (Austrian). Script by Jean-Luc Raharimanana confirmed. 78 min, RED 8K.

This record still needs direct, structured citations.