Father Geek here with Dr, SOTHA's 14th regular Friday Africa-AICN column, good stuff here geeks, check it out... then pester your local video store manager to order these films for you to see. Printout all the Africa columns and give them to these managers, as well as to your local arthouse cinema owners and festival promoters. Let's raise awareness of these flicks a notch, or two.
Good day reader. DR. SOTHA here for more enlightment, rebirth and death,
welcome to AfricaAicn. This is a first, but I have to be honest, one of my
lauded techniques did not work this week. And thus the successful
application of a feline tounge into a person's mouth has dropped to a record
statistical low of 97%. It's not so much that it didn't work, it's just that
said patient is unhappy with the ramifications this has on his marriage.
Don't know what that's about.
It's a difficult time for me, so please send any encouraging thoughts to
My Capetown Offices.
Nurse Lotte, that's very kind of you, and yes it will go a long way to
restoring my confidence…
SOUTH AFRICA
It's a difficult time for me, so please send any encouraging thoughts to
My Capetown Offices.
Nurse Lotte, that's very kind of you, and yes it will go a long way to
restoring my confidence…
SOUTH AFRICA
SOUTH AFRICA
* Leopold Ashton is using his time and contacts in the journalism industry to make a satire about the nuts and bolts of it (translated "the sex and lies" - DR. SOTHA). It shows the relationship within a fictional magazine between the chief editor and one of its junior editors - and the scathing attacks and humiliating situations he is forced to endure, as he pays his dues, and transforms into one of the corporate monsters he once loathed. (Swimming with Sharks anyone? - DR. SOTHA) Summit Entertainment is financing. Leopold his hoping to get some star cameos to add fuel to the fire.
* The forthcoming Southern African Film Festival (SAFF 2000) will mark the 10-year anniversary of the Southern Africa's premier film showcase. Over the past decade, SAFF has proved to be the nurturing mother of African cinema in the southern region. SAFF takes place from 22 to 28 September in Harare, 29 September-5 October 2000 in Bulawayo. The Festival's competition is open to films from East and Southern Africa only. Entrants in the Feature Films category include: Saikati 2 (Kenya), Maangamizi (Tanzania), A Reasonable Man and Inside Out (both from South Africa), and Yellow Card (Zimbabwe). There will be workshops on funding, ie looking into the establishment of film funding structures in search of long term solutions. Delegates will be invited to discuss student films and as well as share experiences on their works with film students.
* The Perfect Storm (George Clooney / Mark Wahlberg) has retained its position at the top of the South African box office for the second week running. It's followed by the new release, The Skulls (new yeah right - DR. SOTHA), and Gone in 60 Seconds (which eerily mirrors Robert Duvall's involvement - DR. SOTHA). The other two films in the top five are Me, Myself & Irene and Return To Me ( between this and Playing God…Mr Duchovny you are best advised to sign on for more X-Files episodes. - DR. SOTHA). Mission Impossible 2 is at the number six spot while Gladiator has finally bowed out of the top 10 for the first time since its release on 19 May.
* Clear Media Company in conjunction with Cinga Productions and supported by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST) will host a Television Series Drama Workshop from 25 to 29 September 2000. The workshop is aimed at script readers, script editors, commissioning editors and producers in the field of Television Series Drama. The workshop leaders are David Simon (a writer and producer of the multi-Emmy Award winning series, Homicide, Life on the Street) and David Mills (Los Angelese-based screenwriter who has written for NYPD Blue, ER, Picket Fences and Homicide - he is a three-time Emmy Award nominee). The workshop will focus on drama series structure, research, creating subtext, economy in writing (Spelling Entertainment anyone?), minimising dialogue and maximising subtext and action. It will be held at the SABC K1 Auditorium from 09h00. For bookings please contact Refiloe at Clear on Tel: 011 880 2567 or Fax 011 880 6771 or email refiloe@clearcompany.com.
NORTH AFRICA
* Filmmaker Emanuel Raquel (Spouting) is working on a film noir to be shot in her native Senegal, with sets being built in France and Luxembourg. It tells the story of a mysterious stranger who prowls the streets of Marseille at night, leaving riddles at the scene of the crime, indirectly helping the local authorities solve the treachery. The authorities agree that his vigilante antics must be stopped, and instead of going on with the business of halting crime the town puts all their energy into finding this enigma. The tentative title is "Cryptogram".
* I sense the unmistakable presence of one Rigobert Song…"Doctors instincts no doubt, hello all this is Rigobert Song with two more films to firmly set your blinkers on, the first one titled "Rostov-Luanda" which at first glance appears to be a travelogue. If so, it is a travelogue in search of the past which discovers the present instead. Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako records his journey across war-torn Angola to find an old friend but really to recapture his own hopes for Africa. He explains that Angolan independence in 1975 represented to him a new beginning for Africa. Like so many young Africans, he went to the Soviet Union in the 1980s for political and technical training and met an Angolan, Baribanga, whose confidence in his country's future embodied Sissako's own hopes for the continent. But the intervening years of civil war between Angolan factions each backed by a superpower and all the other catastrophes plaguing Africa have devastated the optimism of Sissako's generation. Rostov-Luanda is thus a significant response to the disillusionment found in many African films, including "Afrique, je te plumerai", "Udju Azul di Yonta" and "Tableau Ferraille". Rostov Luanda is also a film built around an absence.. Thus in Rostov Luanda the "subject" continually drifts from the search for Baribanga to Sissoko's encounter with the reality of Angola today. Sissako begins his search for Africa by returning to his birthplace, Kiffa, a small town in the desert interior of Mauritania. His cousin can't understand why as soon as he comes home he must move on to Angola but Sissako explains "Man is born to travel, to suffer, to meet people, to learn customs; I go to Angola to live my adventure." The villagers can only interpret his mission in terms of a traditional song about the first Moorish knight to undertake the Islamic hejira to Mecca, a journey also intended to transform the pilgrim. Armed with a tattered picture of Baribanga and himself at school in Rostov, Sissako arrives in a Luanda still recovering from thirty years of wars. The Angolan core of this documentary is framed by an interview with a resigned but engaging young professional woman. Her pessimism, in a sense, serves as a "shadow" or counterpoint to Baribanga's earlier optimism. She explains that in Angola the poor Portuguese colonists integrated more with Africans than the French or British because they recognized in each other a defeated people. She feels that Africa is utterly hopeless, pointing to Zaire and Rwanda. She confesses that unlike Baribanga she was never really political, participating in the MPLA merely to be with her more militant friends. But, she wryly observes, when the country began to disintegrate the militants left, and it was she who remained.
An older man, who also studied in the Soviet Union, suggests that Baribanga has probably become lost in the immensity of Angola; for him life seems like a process of becoming lost, losing ideologies, losing one's way. He is the first of a series of Angolan grassroots philosophers who seem to be working out personal philosophies to take the place of the certainties destroyed by the war. Everywhere Sissako looks he finds evidence of dislocation. He meets two orphans, by definition disconnected from their origins. Nandinho lost his parents in the war and joined the multitudes of children living on the streets. Sissako's driver Eurice, was adopted by a European who left him his house and car when he returned to Portugal. The realities of Angola being what they are, he has had to content himself with driving a taxi across a landscape littered with painful memories. The old black and white photograph Sissako has clung to throughout the film has been eclipsed by the vivid colors of the country in front of his camera. He has found an Africa at ground zero, bereft of ideologies and illusions, much of its past destroyed by the catastrophes of colonialism or civil war, but possessed of an irrepressibly resilient spirit, the hopeful Africa of Baribanga but in an unexpected form. In the film's last scene, Sissako finally meets his old friend but we are afforded only a glimpse of him. Baribanga and perhaps Sissako himself, have endured a painful odyssey through various post-colonial utopias and nightmares, only to return to a home which resembles neither their memories or their dreams. Home, Africa, has ironically been redefined as a place we build each day. Sometimes its films like these that helpl us reshape and redefine our existence within our cultural roots. This is available throughout Europe on video, and certain parts of North America. Find it.
* Next film on the agenda is "La vie sur terre" (Life on Earth). It is one of the most searching and at the same time poetic meditations on Africa at the beginning of a new millennium to have appeared in any medium from the same mind as the film above: Abderrahmane Sissako. He films daily life in Sokolo, his father's village in Mali near the southeastern corner of Mauritania. He then overlaid these vignettes with readings from Aimé Césaire, locating them within the poet's critique of the relationship between metropole and periphery. Behind all of this, he weaves the melancholy tones of the great Malian tenor, Salif Keita. He brings the same ironic self-awareness to this film that he demonstrated in Rostov-Luanda. Sissako (or his alter ego Draaman) appears everywhere in the film riding through the town's maze of mud brick streets on his bicycle - although he does not seem at all deliberate about where he's going, looping back onto himself. The film's dominant visual motif is leisurely, even mournful shots of anonymous people making their way slowly across the boundless savanna or through the dusty streets. Sissako here is reminding us that for much of the world's population "life on earth" is still conducted on foot, by donkey cart or bicycle. Life in Sokolo is a far cry from the 21st century trumpeted in the West where the Information Superhighway moves everything in nanoseconds. This is the terrestrial reality which too often is ignored in virtual reality. Letters and remittances from Europe constitute the town's economic life blood. Evidence of global pop culture permeates the town. Sokolo's desperate attempts to maintain contact with the rest of the world are focused and frustrated at the local post office, the busiest place in town and site of its sole telephone. Symbolically, when Sissako/ Dramaan finally receives a call from Paris, the postmaster must hobble across town on crutches to fetch him. "Reaching people is always a matter of luck," the postmaster comments - but he may also be speaking for the filmmaker about the likelihood of successful cross-cultural communication. Nana, a beautiful young woman has waited all day to get a call through to her boyfriend Bai in a nearby town. (Sissako "discovered" her character when she accidentally bicycled into a shot and then incorporated her into his improvised script.) Exasperated, she gives up on telecommunications, simply gets on her bike and disappears in the film's final shot into the distance in pursuit of her own destiny. Sissako through this film has added Sokolo's voice, however distant and distorted by static, to a continuing conversation about what the 21st century will become. When the Village Voice calls it "Luminous, poetic, reflective and pointed." You know you're onto something special.Enough of my scattershot thoughts and critique for another week. Email me by Clicking Here and we can talk African film.
AFRICAN AMERICAN
* Eight of the top twelve movies of the summer featured African Americans in prominent starring and/or co-starring roles -- that's the good news. The bad news is that many are saying that this summer's releases for the most part were not only dull, but mostly a retread of what we've already seen so many times before. Some of the hits including "Scary Movie" and "Big Momma's House" have been criticized for their "been there, done that" quality. "Scary Movie" got dogged for taking too many elements from the scary films it was trying to spoof (What Bullshit - DR. SOTHA), while "Big Momma" got thumbs down for being a bad throwback to "Mrs. Doubtfire" (I can live with that - DR. SOTHA) and "The Nutty Professor." Other films like "X-Men" (WHAT??) and "M:I-2" have been criticized for their thin and confusing storylines. Many are asking what happened to the inventive movies -- whether you loved 'em or hated 'em -- such as "There's Something About Mary," "The Sixth Sense" and "The Blair Witch Project?" And if that's not enough criticism, the first summer of the century marks the first time in four years that the box-office totals did not exceed the previous summer's totals (Boo-hoo!) At any rate, here's an estimate of the top 12 summer movies through Labor Day as compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
1. "M:I-2" (Thandie Newton) - $213 million
2. "Gladiator" (Djimon Hounsou) - $183 million
3. "The Perfect Storm" - $178 million
4. "X-Men" (Halle Berry) - $153 million
5. "Scary Movie" (directed By Keenen Ivory Wayans; starred Sean and Marlon Wayans)- $150 million
6. "What Lies Beneath" - $137.5 million
7. "Dinosaur" (Animated; featured voices of Alfre Woodard, Ossie Davis and Samuel E. Wright) - $134 million
8. "Big Momma's House" (Martin Lawrence, Nia Long) - $116 million
9. "The Klumps" (Eddie Murphy, Janet Jackson) - $115 million
10. "The Patriot" - $111 million
11. "Chicken Run" - $104 million
12. "Gone In 60 Seconds' (Delroy Lindo) - $99 million
AFRICAN COAXIAL
* After a series of successful gigs in London last year, The Springbok Nude Girls are back for a two day festival of South African music at London's Shepherds Bush Empire on 8 and 9 September 2000. The band will be performing all the hits from their latest album, Surpass the Powers, which won the SAMA award for best rock album of the year and is being released in several European countries. They will also be performing other hits from previous albums like Bubblegum on my Boots, Genie and I Love You. Other acts appearing at the festival will be Sugardrive, Just Jinger, Karma and Nagual. SA comedian Barry Hilton will be providing some light relief
* The SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) has launched its new-look 24-hour satellite channels, SABC Africa News, and the broad-spectrum entertainment channel, Africa 2 Africa (A2A), onto C-Band. The two channels will be broadcast - they are already on Ku-Band - to Southern, Central, East and West Africa on the DStv Service of MultiChoice. SABC acting Group Chief Executive, Cecilia Khuzwayo said the re-launch of the channels aims to "depict Africa in a modern but positive manner, bringing news stories and entertainment about Africa by Africans".
Q & A time for my favourite / only reader Tempe Terra. You were close last week, but I'm afraid Desmond Tutu is not South Africa's leading critic. That would be Barry "I'm over the hill" Ronge. Fear not my good friend, for your free prize (Nurse Lotte) will be carried over next week. Here we go .."Who directed the classic South American film "Black Orpheus?"
