Public Film Screening

On Friday 7 November ICTP will host a free public screening of the award-winning documentary “Brief Tender Light,” in the presence of film director Arthur Musah. The film follows the journey of four African MIT students striving to become agents of change for their home countries.

The screening will start at 4 p.m. in ICTP’s Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo building, and will be followed by a Q&A session with the film director.

The event is free and everyone is welcome. Registration is required at this link.

About Brief Tender Light

Like many students who leave their home countries to pursue their academic dreams across the world, Musah left his home in Ghana as a teenager and moved to the U.S. to attend MIT. Years later, wondering what had happened to his and his fellow students’ ambitions of returning home and making a difference in their countries of origin, he decided to follow four African students as they embarked on their education at MIT. Philip, Fidelis, Billy, and Sante come respectively from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Tanzania with different ambitions, but a common goal to become agents of positive change back home. Over an intimate, decade-long journey spanning two continents, students and filmmaker alike are forced to decide how much of America to absorb, how much of Africa to hold on to, and how to reconcile teenage ideals with the truths they discover about the world and themselves.

About Artur Musah

Arthur Musah was born in Ukraine and raised in Ghana, where he attended the Presbyterian Boys‘ Secondary School in Legon, Accra. Having graduated from MIT as an engineer in 2004, he returned as a filmmaker to create Brief Tender Light out of a need to explore the transformative experience of studying abroad, which among other things allowed him to come out as a gay man.