FAME Week Africa Students Film Showcase 2025: Corey Ashton and Kariska Kotze’s “Fata Morgana” Dazzles With Surrealist Motif

The title “Fata Morgana” describes a form of mirage, an optical illusion that occurs at sea or on land, in which several inverted and upright images seem to be stacked on top of each other in a distorted fashion. It may happen with any form of distantly seen object, such as boats and islands, often altering the form to an absolutely unrecognizable state. Corey Ashton and Kariska Kotze’s short film embodies this phenomenon with every frame, action, and dialogue. Fata Morgana follows the lives of two sisters, Willow and Evelyn, who live away from the society on their family farm. As Willow gains admission into the university and leaves her sister, their immaculate, nature-fuelled existence is threatened. Their being apart from each other provokes feelings of betrayal, longing, nostalgia and abandonment. A thought-provoking fantasy film, Fata Morgana feeds the audience’s imagination with cleverly manipulated images, natural landscape, a narration laden with deeper messages, and brief, heartfelt dialogues, fulfilling both artistic and thematic ambitions in the process.

The narrator of the film is Willow, through whose eyes the sibling relationship is explored. “Water can be strong or still. It can bring you home or take you away. I couldn’t understand why, but it scared me,” the narrator says at the opening of the film, leaning into the ecosystem for a reflection on her existence. Here, water is used in a metaphoric sense as a bridge between two contrasting possibilities. It hints at the use of water for both beneficent and malignant purposes. But the narrator’s personalization of her relations with water speaks to the uncertainty and fickleness that accompany human relationships. Just as water has the potential to give life and cause destruction, friendships and bonds are not necessarily everlastingly sustained: great friends can turn worst enemies, and siblings who grew up under the same roof may drift apart and become strangers as adults. The symbolic, spiritual effects of water have also been widely captured in contemporary African cinema, such as in diasporic filmmaker Nnamdi Kanaga’s Water Girl, where the natural gift plays a central role in the destiny of a girl, and C. J. Obasi’s Mami Wata where a river deity is entrusted with the protection and security of its worshippers.

The surrealist quest of Fata Morgana is powered by its visuals and editing. A scene of Evelyn dressed like a fairy in the woods goes alongside the narrator’s description of their childhood imaginings. In a dining scene where Evelyn protests against Willow’s imminent departure, the camera moves back and forth swiftly, almost unnoticeably, between an exterior setting and the interior one, blending two cuts into each other and playing with our minds by blurring the lines between reality and imagination. Ultimately, over its 11-minute running time, the film chronicles the physical and psychological chasm that may arise from a breakdown in human relationships, capturing the transience of human engagements against the innocence of the natural, unspoiled environment.