Watching Raul Peck’s film, Moloch Tropical, in Ouagadougou last week, it was hard not to think of Muammar Gaddafi.
Peck’s film, set in a Haiti of the mind, is about the final 24 hours of a dictator’s dying regime. Within the walls of his luxury fortress, the despot rants and raves at those rebelling against him, at the press who have dared to report on the uprising and pretty much everything else. He intones the national motto to himself while on the loo and makes incoherent television pleas to his people, assuring them that he loves them.
A lot else is going on, too, in this glossy satire. A brainless American rap star is flown in to perform for the president’s anniversary — shades of 50 Cent primping for the Gaddafis. The tough female deputy president uses promises of advancement to persuade a handsome young musician into a quick fuck — shades of — well, who knows?
Peck (who has previously made both a documentary and an excellent feature film about the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba) could clearly marshal a decent amount of money for Moloch Tropical — it looks great.
Minuscule budget
Such advantages were obviously lacking in many other movies at Fespaco, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival held biennially in the capital of Burkina Faso, but many filmmakers had clearly overcome the odds to make their movies, even if they were going to appear somewhat rudimentary.
The young Namibian filmmaker, Joel Haikali, whose first feature, My Father’s Son, also showed at Fespaco, made the best of what must have been a minuscule budget. Digitally shot, often in natural light, and mostly in a small village, the film tells the story of a man returning to his rural native home after an absence of 21 years living in Windhoek. Why is he returning after so long?
Haikali’s film gets rather confusing towards the end, when an extended dream sequence attempts to resolve the plot issues set in motion, but it is at least a sterling example of getting your film made on very limited resources. ‘Never again,” Haikali told me, bemoaning a very difficult production — and hopefully he will have more financial and other leeway in future, because he is certainly a committed and inventive filmmaker.
A budget close to zero
My Father’s Son represents precisely what is meant when South Africans insist that we have to ‘tell our own stories”. It is cheap but skilful and original. It also contains a fair amount of irony and humour, which was generally in short supply, it seemed, in the films shown at Fespaco this year.
Still, a budget close to zero is no guarantee of against-the-odds inspiration. Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s film, I Want a Wedding Dress, for example, is a lesson in dreariness. It’s the tale of a young woman who desperately wants a nice dress for her wedding but her fiancé can’t afford it, so she succumbs to the advances of a 4×4-driving rich man. He makes her all sorts of promises but ends up dumping her violently — and then she discovers she has contracted HIV.
Dangarembga is known as a writer who fearlessly tackles women’s issues, but the film needed way more than an insistence on just how bad it can get for a young woman in Zim. It needed some more plot, some variation in tone and something more dramatic than reaction shots that seemed to last for 10 minutes at a time.
One felt that perhaps a documentary, not a drama, would have done the job better. But then the documentaries at Fespaco weren’t necessarily terribly encouraging either. A judge in the documentary category was heard to moan that the overall standard was so low it was going to be hard to award a prize at all (though in the end it went to the Kenyan film, Monica Wanga Wamwere: The Unbroken Spirit).
Undoubtedly worthy but excruciatingly dull
Certainly I was put off going to any more documentaries by the first two I saw, films that were undoubtedly worthy but also excruciatingly dull. The first concerned the Rwandan genocide and the second tracked an African refugee family struggling against officialdom to stay in Germany. Too much reality, perhaps. Then again, South African Ramadan Suleiman’s Zwelidumile, about the late exile artist Dumile Feni, was declared delightful by those who saw it, and should surely have done better in the final rankings.
There is undoubtedly a burning need to confront African realities. I was reminded of this not just by events in Libya but also by young citizens of Burkina Faso, who gatecrashed the festival venues partly to sell CDs, jewellery, sculptures and musical instruments, but also simply to make contact with people from other countries. They were eager to talk about their lives in Burkina Faso, their attempts to make a living, their aspirations — most of which seemed to pivot on getting to another country.
One young man I spoke to at some length knew South Africa through three terms: Nelson Mandela, Bafana Bafana and Lucky Dube. A reggae fan and occasional musician, he knew all about Dube having been ‘assassinated”, and accepted my description of South Africa as often very dangerous. (Ouaga, by comparison, is almost eerily safe, even late at night.)
He nodded solemnly when I said unemployment was very high in my homeland, but he still wanted to go and try to make his fortune in the land of Lucky Dube.
At one screening, I mentioned to a young filmmaker from Ghana that I had just seen The Nine Muses, an almost abstract, non-narrative cinematic essay by British-Ghanaian writer-director John Akomfrah. Yes, said the young Ghanaian, it’s interesting and it’s all very well to make that kind of film in Europe, but we in Africa need to use filmmaking to confront the myriad issues the continent faces.
You want issues?
Showing at that screening was South African Jahmil XT Qubeka’s film, A Small Town Called Descent, and as the credits rolled I turned to the young Ghanaian and said: ‘You want issues? How was that for issues?”
The issues overflowed from this extremely forceful movie. Corruption, violence, rape, xenophobia, under-age sex, alcoholism, poverty — Qubeka’s film tackles them all, and in a hectic, in-your-face manner that will leave no viewer unaffected, even if many find it hard to watch. A Small Town Called Descent was entirely independently produced, which is to say that the National Film and Video Foundation was unlikely to have given it a cent. Thanks to Anant Singh’s Videovision, however, it will be coming soon to South African screens.
It was surprising, too, that Qubeka’s film didn’t get any prizes. Perhaps I’m being a bit nationalistic here but I did find it the most viscerally powerful film of those I saw — and I include somewhat less ‘serious” genre pieces, if a promiscuous mix of horror, comedy and romance is a genre. If so, it was incarnated in the Nigerian indie pic, The Figurine, about a baleful goddess resurrected in the present day, and the voodoo delirium of the Haitian film, Les Amours d’un Zombi. (The latter, which is a lot of fun, got a prize in the ‘diaspora” category.) Perhaps here, too, is a fruitful way to tell our stories, using pop culture to spark an imaginative engagement with African and diasporic realities.
And there does seem to be a middle way, as it were, between the stern adumbration of pressing issues and the intellectual detachment of an Akomfrah. Directed by Joao Ribiero, The Last Flight of the Flamingo is an adaptation of Mozambican Mia Couto’s novel, and it deals with that society in a magical-realist way that makes social problems clear but also displaces them into a realm of the imagination in a way that is both touching and funny.
Rich storytelling traditions
In the small village of Tizangara, a series of mysterious explosions hit the United Nations soldiers stationed thereabouts — all that’s left of each of them is a severed penis and the blue helmet that is their most notable accessory. An Italian UN officer arrives to investigate, and finds in Tizangara not just a cast of weird and wonderful characters but also all the twisted, contradictory versions of their views of events.
I’m not sure quite where The Last Flight of the Flamingo ends up, narratively and thematically speaking — something to do with a country that appears to have been vaporised. But it does show, as in fact does a pop genre-bender such as Les Amours d’un Zombi, that whatever the issues African and diasporic filmmakers feel they must deal with, it can be done in a way that also draws on rich storytelling traditions and brings into entertaining play the powers of the imagination.
Shaun de Waal travelled to Ouagadougou as a guest of the Goethe-Institut and its Moving Africa programme. Go to http://blog.goethe.de/moving-africa/ for moreundoubtedly worthy but also excruciatingly dull