Africa Day, commemorated on May 25, has been marked with the most discordant of notes this year in South Africa: beatings and killings of African immigrants and the burning and looting of their property.
On South Africa’s cinema screens, however, the richness and diversity of the continent will be celebrated in a festival that includes works from Senegal (once led by Leopold Sedar Senghor, one of the founders of the negritude movement that celebrated blackness), Ghana (once led by Kwame Nkrumah, the father of pan-Africanism) and Ethiopia (whose capital Addis Ababa was the birthplace of the Organisation of African Unity).
Now in its third year, Africa on Screen is championed by Red Flag, a public relations and marketing agency, and sponsored by Belgian funding agency Africalia, SABC Africa and Amarula liqueur.
Since its inception the films have shown at Cinema Nouveau in Johannesburg, but this year the festival’s reach will extend to Cape Town, the East Rand and, most significantly, the new Maponya Mall in Soweto.
Lara Preston, spokesperson of Red Flag, says: ‘We want to grow the market for African movies — many of them never shown locally — to a new audience.” She says the growth strategy includes free screenings at MuseuMAfricA in Newtown.
This year’s festival will screen 24 movies and the breadth, scope and genre of the films are as diverse as the continent itself. There is Tengers, an animation directed by Michael Rix, about a young writer who buys a scratch card and wins R20 000 with strange consequences. Then there is the beautifully shot Return to Goree, a documentary from Senegal that features singer Youssou N’dour and is about the slaves’ transatlantic journey to the new world and the jazz rhythms that came about when they created music with the master’s trumpet.
Zimbabwe is a movie by Darrell Roodt about a girl named Zimbabwe who comes to work in South Africa as a domestic worker. At once triumphant and sad, Zimbabwe is a symbol of a nation that promised so much and disappointed so many. Zanzibar Soccer Queens, a film from Tanzania, is a moving story in which women use football to redefine their lives and earn the respect of domineering men.
Added to the mix are works about music (Africa Unite, On the Heels of Bembeya Jazz), documentaries (Darling: The Pieter Dirk Uys Story, Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man) and features already seen on circuit (Confessions of a Gambler).
Preston says Red Flag intends to hold screenings outside South Africa in future.
Ogova Ondego, who runs an arts and culture website in Kenya and organises screenings at the Goethe Institute in Nairobi, says: ‘Hopefully the screenings in the future will result in a closer understanding of the rest of the continent and increased collaboration among Africans.”
Preston says screenings at MuseuMAfricA will be followed by workshops open to the public. For instance, screenings of Zimbabwe and Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon will be followed by a workshop on xenophobia and migration.
About time too, especially in this uncertain time when African immigrants and locals need to build cultural bridges.
The festival runs at Cinema Nouveau in Cavendish Square, Cape Town, in Rosebank, Johannesburg, and at Ster Kinekor Junctions in Soweto’s Maponya Mall and Kempton Park’s Festival Mall. Visit www.redflag.co.za