A new series of short films is focusing world attention on African film. Andrew Worsdale previews, Janet Smith speaks to the South African director
So Be It, the Senegalese short film that won the Silver Lion at Venice a fortnight ago, is just one part of a series of African movies creating a stir at film festivals around the world. The six-part series, Africa Dreaming, has played in part or whole at Rotterdam, Fespaco in Ouagadougou, Edinburgh, Galway, Washington and Philadelphia and will travel to a further 20 festivals around the globe throughout the coming year.
The South African premiere of the series will be at the Johannesburg Biennale on October 10 and it will flight on SABCTV in November.
The array of films is a massive co- production, the first of its kind, that draws on talents from across the continent Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The jigsaw of international funding came from the SABC, the Hubert Bals Fund in Holland, cable channel La Sept/Arte (France), YLE TV2 (Finland), HIVOS and NCDO (NGOs in Holland), Canal France International, the French governments film-making support system CNCs Fonds Sud, the French Ministry of Co-Operation and the South African facility group The Video Lab.
The deals and contracts were co-ordinated by series producer Jeremy Nathan, through his company Catalyst films. But the first money on the table was from the SABC, in 1994, as a result of interest and encouragement from Madala Mphahlele, who was general manager of CCV at the time.
We mooted the idea of possible co- productions across the continent, he explains, and through networking at various festivals and markets we managed to put it all together. I believe the initiative shows a deep commitment to local production across Africa, and begins a new reality for film- and television-makers across the continent.
The films are diverse and theres a distinctive difference between films from the North and those from the South. Nathan says, I think Southern African film-makers are far more critical of our own images. The North and West Africans are steeped in cinema because of French colonialism while the southerners get far more influence from television, All the same, wherever the films have been screened Italy, the United Kingdom or the United States theres no agreement over who likes what. For example, the Dutch loved the Namibian movie while the French liked the Tunisian one.
Mphahlele agrees: The one thing that struck me was the total difference in approaches. I dont think our television audiences or programme-makers have developed a strong sense of aesthetics.
But Mphahlele believes that television can work as a confidence- building medium for aspirant film-makers. Its a form of moderate encouragement that will give them the gumption to make a big film … weve tried to create the mind-set that can lead to local movies that visualise ourselves as part of the continent.
Each of the films runs to 26 minutes and although the central concept is that theyre all love stories, none of them takes a corny or conventional look at romance. Each one shares a subtle examination of the nature of love, longing and life-bonding.
So Be It, the Senegalese picture, is the most conventionally African picture of the series. The story follows a woman (powerfully played by Felicit Wouassi) who tries to get her lover to leave the medical centre where they work, after a mysterious albino boy starts hanging around, whom shes convinced is possessed by evil spirits. Director Joseph Gaye Ramaka frames the action in single shots; the pace is assuredly slow and a real sense of sinister foreboding pervades the frame.
In one spectacular shot a little girl and the boy are talking in the courtyard while a herd of what must be over 100 cattle streams past in the background the sense of epic made palpable. because the camera is dead still.
The Homecoming, set in Namibia and directed by Richard Pakleppa, is slow and arid, like the landscape. The plot concerns a woman who returns to her village after working for a white family, to discover that her sister has been sleeping with her husband and is expecting his child. Pakleppa, whose background includes trade union work, activist theatre and video production, imbues the worthy subject-matter with a gravitas borne out by the beautiful locations. Although beautifully filmed, it is slow-moving and rather like a doom-laden soap opera.
South African Palesa Nkosis Mamlambo, is a ravishing, painterly film swathed in shades of red and ochre-brushed yellow. Its the story of a street kid who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute and ends up stabbing her pimp.
Made with the scope and vision of a feature film, its at times naively simple, with the characters strangely innocent, despite their sordid circumstances. Using special effects to evoke a sense of magic, it plays like a Joburg Romeo and Juliet, and the mere fact that it features an Oriental woman in the lead role makes it a unique take on life in Gauteng.
Equally aesthetically sharp is the Tunisian Sabriya, which recently won an award from the French Ministry of Co-operation. Director Abderrahmane Sissako shows all the cinematic trademarks of a young Pasolini as he charts the almost homoerotic friendship between two friends and a mysterious young woman.
A subtle distillation of male chauvinistic Arabic culture coming into contact with modern sexual mores at one point the man alights from a train in the middle of the desert dressed in traditional clothes and the woman, who also gets off the train, asks him to light her cigarette.
As she walks away he tells her that her skirt is torn, when in fact its merely a fashionable slit at the back a telling pointer to the conflicts in contemporary society. Flashing between the past and present, its an elegiac meditation about dreams, desire, fraternal bonding and female allure.
Though not as visually arresting as Mamlambo and Sabriya, The Gaze of the Stars, by Joao Ribeiro from Mozambique, is enigmatic because of its screenplay. Based on a short story by the profound author Mia Couto, its the story of a romantic dalliance that never really existed and the problems of domestic abuse within a community.
Although the interiors are a bit stagy, the film exploits Maputos markets and streets to place it firmly within a dynamic African context. When the central character, a young boy, accidentally spills a pail of water, the results splash into the lens.
The strength of the film, unlike so many by young cineastes, is the yarn. Typical of Couto, it merges romantic magic realism and fable, so despite performances that at times appear stilted, the simple tale is what makes it work as television at its chronically involving best.
Similarly intriguing is Zimbabwean Farai Sevenzos The Last Picture, a film that is resolutely concerned with the image and yet manages to marry aesthetics and narrative in a compelling way. The film charts the obsession of a young photographer who falls in love with an old mans wife after taking a photograph of her. The movies take on romance is that we can desire but we cant necessarily dine at the table. The closing image has the cameraman taking a photo of the woman, her husband and their new-born child.
Some who have seen the films say that, like all short-film initiatives, they smack of self-consciousness. But, to the seriess credit, the films are vastly different yet all taste unmistakeably African.
SABC2 plans to screen the Africa Dreaming series in November or December. Dates and times to be announced