Well its the end of the week and time again for Dr. SOTHA's Friday morning column, Africa-AICN. Harry and I are swamped with BUTT-NUMB-A-THON biz and have just now at 11:30pm returned to Geek Headquarters after having left at 7am. We've been meeting with out of town guests, stuffing bags full of goodies for our fest attendees, dealing with British Television, etc and more etc... and it starts all over again at daybreak in the morning. Oh well, we asked for it, didn't we? Here's the good Doc and this week's report...
DR.SOTHA returns for Africa-AICN #27. Hi there daddy-o's, time to sink your
teeth into another African peppered anaesthetic to alleviate the pain, the
misery, the loneliness, the career.
E-mail me at Africaaicn@hotmail.com for inside information on routine hernia
disc operations and Charlize Theron's thriroid glands.
Nurse, if I were you I'd lose the hat and add the gown.
SOUTH AFRICA
E-mail me at Africaaicn@hotmail.com for inside information on routine hernia
disc operations and Charlize Theron's thriroid glands.
Nurse, if I were you I'd lose the hat and add the gown.
SOUTH AFRICA
SOUTH AFRICA
* An adaptation is in the works on the controversial South African novel "TRIOMF". It stirred waves in the country after painting a nightmarishly brilliant portrait of a white-trash family unhinged by the fast-approaching first democratic elections in 1994. What follows is a grim assault on the senses, that sees the Benade's move from a content neglected minority to a bloody and brutal broken family, provoked by Uncle Treppie into reevaluating the deep-dark shadows of a 21 year old secret. French based filmmaker Michael Raeburn is adapting the novel, and will direct it sometime next year.
* South African filmmaker Jonathan Liebesman's short, "Genesis and Catastrophe" won the best student short film at the Austin Film Festival last month. It is now eligible for an Oscar nomination in the short film category. Short film portal Ifilm.com is doing a campaign for it. The short was screened for a couple of days in Los Angeles last week and is being screened at the AMC theaters in Times Square every night from Dec1 - Dec7.
* Michael Oblowitz (This dream then the fireworks which starred Gina Gershon) is set to direct BARRY - The true story of JAMES MIRANDA BARRY who masqueraded as a man in the 19th Century, in order to pursue a career in medicine and beat the system against sexual discrimination. The majority of the story takes place in a 19th Century Cape Colony following Barry's explicit relationship with Lord Sommerset, breaking taboos of gender and sex. Focus Films is producing the film, that will be part shot in South Africa, Cape Town.
* Ster-Kinekor Pictures has announced that the South African film about the San people of the Kalahari, "The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story", is the second most successful documentary feature ever to be released on the local cinema circuit. It was released (single print) at the Cinema Nouveau Rosebank (Johannesburg) in October this year. For more info see www.screenafrica.com
* "Charlie's Angels", the film remake of the popular 70's television series of the same name, has gone straight to the top of the South African box office. In its first week of release, the film, which stars Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu, has made R4 035 293. It is followed by another new release (also a remake), "Shaft", starring the ultra-cool Samuel L Jackson. "Coyote Ugly", "The Replacements" and "The Kid" remain in the top five. (It's a pity we don't get any big budget Hollywood films breaking into the top ten - DR. SOTHA)
NORTH AFRICA
* Guinea filmmaker Gaitini Feroux is readying "RIPPLE RAY" about a real-life reclusive man with clairvoyant powers living on the East coast of Africa. He is one of eight superhuman prophets who drift across the plains of earth unnoticed. Feroux has based the story on research and interviews with people who have met the main character and have witnessed his genius of prognostication. It will probe strange paranormal occurrences that seem to forming a strange pattern all the way up the East Coast of Africa. XOXO Films are producing.
* It's time for Rigobert Song to take over:
Rigobert Song here, with a film I hope will find you in life called "La petite vendeuse de Soleil" (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun) Excuse me if I indulge myself in a longer than normal review. If you find it you will see why.
The cinema world's sense of loss at the untimely death of Djibril Diop Mambety in July, 1998 was alleviated by rumors that he had left behind a masterpiece. Now that La petite vendeuse de Soleil has confirmed those hopes, it is even harder to accept that this is the last we will hear from the most passionate voice in all of African cinema.
La petite vendeuse de Soleil, was originally conceived as the second part, after Le Franc, of an unfinished trilogy of dramatic shorts entitled Tales of Little People. It finds Mambety working in a simpler, almost fable-like style in contrast to the more operatic "Afro-pessimism" of his1992 masterpiece Hyenas. In this last film, Mambety moves beyond merely documenting Africa's centuries' old victimization towards envisioning the continent's recovery. Without sentimentalizing the ubiquitous poverty and corruption, he saturates each frame with vibrant sunlight and a memorable score by his younger brother, Wasis Diop. In this moving epilogue to his life's work, Mambety affirms his belief that film can do more than represent the world; it can actually participate in re-imagining and remaking it. As he said: "Making a film is more important than conceiving it since it shows the children that dreams can be made a reality."
Mambety begins his last film with a prologue which could be seen as recapitulating the preceding forty years of African filmmaking in just a few minutes. A woman is accused of theft, humiliated and arrested in front of the entire market. She protests that she is a princess not a shoplifter but the crowd can see her only in her present fallen state; they jeer rather than support her in a scene disturbingly reminiscent of the collective cannibalism at the end of Hyenas.
La petite vendeuse de Soleil begins not so much by introducing its individual characters but with a mini-documentary on Dakar going to work at dawn. This becomes a study of the very unequal means people have to make their way through an increasing globalized economy: La petite vendeuse on her crutches, a legless boy in his wheelchair, horse carts, bicycles, jitneys, Mercedes all heading to the market. Mambety's ultimate symbol of this contrast is a man methodically splitting a pile of rocks with a hammer while jumbo jets take off over his shoulder. In fact, Mambety intended to call the third, never completed part of his "Tales of Little People", La tailleuse des pierres" (The Woman Who Chipped Stones) and Flora M'bugu Schelling made this mind-numbing task the sole content of her remarkable documentary, "These Hands" - which I have previously reviewed on the site before.
Mambety had a genius for constructing allegories for comparatively complex economic issues out of everyday human dramas. In Hyenas, Africa sells its soul to international lenders in exchange for credit for cheap consumer goods, while in Le Franc Africa finds itself a loser in the lottery of world currency markets when the CFA is devalued. In La petite vendeuse de Soleil Dakar's bustling central market becomes a metaphor for the unchallenged free market orthodoxy embraced by most governments and international financial institutions today. Mambety doesn't romanticize the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of the teenage bullies who terrorize la petite vendeuse, even though he describes this film as a "hymn to the courage of street children." The hoodlums may even suggest the aneamic bands of teenagers ravaging and terrorizing countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Somalia.
Mambety finds a force which can transform the dominance of the marketplace in the unlikely shape of Sili Laam, la petite vendeuse, a 12 year old paraplegic who begs for alms with her blind grandmother in the market. Her name suggests that she is from the leather workers' social class, one of the most reviled in Senegal, so she is an outcast on multiple grounds. Sili Laam's strength is her purity and resilience, her refusal to accept the demeaning roles society assumes it can place on her and others. Rather than be intimidated by the teenage boys, for example, she decides to become the first female newspaper vendor herself since, "Girls can do anything boys can do." When she is unjustly stopped by a cop, she improbably marches him back to the police station, accuses him of shaking her down and successfully demands the release of the woman arrested in the first scene. Thus Sili Laam is the latest in a long line of Mambety's heroic rebels - from Badou Boy to Mory to Marigo, but she is less self-destructive because she has a broader social vision than any of the others.
Since Sili Laam refuses to see the world simply as it is but also sees it as it should be, her presence seems capable of transforming events. For example, the last headline of Soleil we see "Africa Leaves the Franc Zone," is, for example, prophetic, that is, it describes a future event which has not yet happened. Africa in fact remains inextricably tied to a world financial system where it competes on very unequal terms. Mambety presumably advocates a more self-reliant development strategy based on nurturing the economic potential of Africa's most oppressed as represented by La petite vendeuse - the poor, the young, the female.
In the film's final sequence, the other news vendors steal Sili Laam's crutches. Babou Seck, an older boy who has protected her throughout and represents a cooperative alternative to marketplace competition, asks what they can do now. Sili Laam responds unhesitatingly: "We continue." When he lifts her onto his back and carries her down a crowded arcade of the market; the other vendors scatter before them; the raucous sound of the marketplace fades away until all we hear is his persistent footsteps into the future accompanied by Wasis Diop's homage to African freedom fighters.
This is an Africa seen not solely in terms of its monumental problems but also taking account of the resourcefulness of its people. As in the opening shot in the marketplace, the audience is constantly positioned where it must choose whose stance to endorse - that of the cynical, spectator market vendors or the visionary, activist La Petite Vendeuse. In his last interview Mambety said: "I have focused on the notion of freedom - which includes the freedom not to know, which in turn implies confidence in your ability to construct images from the bottom of your heart." It's a breathtaking swan song from the Godfather of African cinema, one that I cannot recommend enough. Let me also say that I think it's a travesty that he was never recognized by the American Academy for his remarkable contribution to the world of cinema. Please e-mail me at rigobertsong@hotmail.com and we can talk about African film.
AFRICAN AMERICAN
* Taken from the Hollywood Reporter: Chris Rock is in negotiations to topline the Walt Disney Co.'s "Black Sheep" for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The project is targeted for a March start date. A director has not yet come aboard the project that will reunite Bruckheimer and Rock, who made his feature acting debut in 1987 playing a parking valet in "Beverly Hills Cop II," which Bruckheimer produced with his late partner, Don Simpson. Written by Jason Richman, "Sheep" is about a streetwise black man (Rock) whose identical twin brother, a Harvard-educated secret agent, is killed by the enemy. Rock's character is called in by the CIA to finish his brother's job.
* Mykelti Williamson is set to get stuck into the role of DON KING in the forthcoming Muhammed Ali biopic, "ALI". Williamson, who played Bubba in Forrest Gump (1994), is in final negotiations to star with another Hollywood heavyweight, Will Smith, in the cinematic biography. Jamie Foxx and Mario Van Peebles have already won the roles of Drew Bundini Brown and Malcolm X while the parts of George Foreman and Joe Frazier are still uncast. (I have to say I didn't see this bout of casting coming, it might work? - DR. SOTHA)
* A pair of ouvre musicals, a 1970s update on Shakespeare's "Macbeth," several intimate family dramas, TWO BLACK STORIES and four films developed in the Sundance Filmmakers Labs are among the 16 films entered in the dramatic competition for the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary competition slate, which also numbers 16, ranges from the tragic tale of abandoned children on the streets of Bucharest, Romania, to two films about key 20th century black figures, MARCUS GARVEY and Dr. RALPH BUNCHE. Sundance, the most important showcase for American independent films, will take place Jan. 18-28 in Park City, Utah. Festival co-director Geoffrey Gilmore noted that these 32 competition films were winnowed down from a list of submitted films that numbered 854 in the dramatic category and 390 in the documentary competition. The 16 films (and their directors) chosen for the dramatic competition include: "30 Years to Life" (Vanessa Middleton); "American Astronaut" (Cory McAbee); "The Believer" (Henry Bean); "The Business of Strangers" (Patrick Stettner); "The Deep End" (Scott McGehee & David Siegel); "Donnie Darko" (Richard Kelly); "Green Dragon" (Timothy Linh Bui); "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (John Cameron Mitchell); "L.I.E.", (Michael Cuesta); "In The Bedroom" (Todd Field); "Lift" (DeMane Davis & Khari Streeter); "Macarthur Park" (Billy Wirth); "Memento" (Christopher Nolan); "Scotland, PA" (Billy Morrissette); "The Sleepy Time Gal" (Christopher Munch); "Some Body" (Henry Barrial).
