NYAFF Dispatch.

An African film festival, like the one in progress at Lincoln Center in New York, forces us to look back on at least 15 years of movies in Africa. In the early 1990s, Sub-Saharan Africa (especially the Francophone countries of West Africa) seemed to be on one of the new frontiers of cinema, along with Iran and China. Burkina-Faso was a crossroads for new talent from all over the continent, and within that one country there seemed to be new directors appearing all the time. When was the last time that an African film played in a theater in the US? Even festival screenings are relatively rare these days. All the more reason to pay some attention to the African Film Festival in New York.

It's a mixed bag, partly because what we're seeing is being made inexpensively, mostly for television, and in situations where filmmakers and journalists take a risk every time they try to witness anything political on camera. What we're seeing is mostly testimony, valuable testimony because we're unlikely to see it anywhere else, even though Africa is now the cause of the week. (When did you last see footage from Darfur?)

The Forgotten Man by Osvalde Lewat-Hallade looks at the fate of Leppe, who entered a prison in Cameroon at the age of 25 for forging documents, and is finally released, on camera, 33 years later. Leppe is a gentle soul who has endured the sufferings of Job, plus the isolation that comes with a family's refusal to visit him. What's more a part of film history than the story of a man unjustly punished? We don't learn much more about how Leppe survived his years in a prison that we can assume is much worse than what we see, and what we see is not fun. At one point, Leppe tells us that, after escaping and being recaptured, he was beaten and chained to two other prisoners, with whom he had to go everywhere - everywhere - for several months. The sweetness of his personality is all the more remarkable. He's a skilled carver, and he leads prayers and songs at mass. In fact, it is through the intercession of the local Catholic bishop that Leppe's case got any attention at all in the bureaucratic inertia that takes Kafka to a new geographical location. The rapid disposition of a case that had been around for more than 30 years makes you wonder. It shows you what a camera can do.

It's easy to feel superior, looking at miscarriages of justice in a country that locks someone up for decades for a minor crime. But what about forging intelligence reports about Iraq buying uranium in Niger and reciting them, before Congress, to anyone watching television? No one's been punished for that.

This isn't the first film about the justice system in Cameroon. Sisters in Law, co-directed by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi, a film that did play in theaters a year ago, showed how two ethical judges in the small town of Kumba can crack through walls of corruption and official disdain and make a tremendous difference in people's lives. With both The Forgotten Man and Sisters in Law, you have the impression that, in watching these rare cases of justice finally being done, you're not seeing the larger and far more common picture of wrongs committed with impunity. There are plenty of films waiting to be made about those untold stories.

In A Love During the War, also by Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, a couple is separated for six years as war divides the Congo. Didier is stuck in the eastern part of the country, and is absent as his children grow with his wife Aziza. Yet the real story here is the work that Aziza, a radio journalist, is doing with women who have been raped. The numbers seem incalculable, and neither age nor youth protects them. The stories of rape and mutilation told by survivors and the doctors who examined them bring a specificity to the shocking statistics, and the film brings a face and real emotions to lines of testimony in the newspaper. Didier and Aziza's marriage has a future. It's brighter than the life ahead for the many thousands of women who are raising the children of their rapists. The same testimony could easily come from Sudan or Sierra Leone.

In another look at the subject of unpunished crimes, the documentary Death of Two Sons [site] by Micah Schaffer examines the killing of Amadou Diallo, 22, the Guinean street peddler who was shot more than 40 times by the NYPD Street Crime Unit. Officers testified that they thought he was reaching for a gun inside his jacket. It turned out to be his wallet. Maybe he wanted to show the cops some identification. He's not there to tell us now. A jury ended up acquitting the officers. (There's a sleazy film angle to this story. Right after the shooting took place and the city was in shock, Howard Safir, Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, jetted with his wife out to the Oscars, where he was caught on the red carpet glad-handing with the rich and beautiful. Now that's compassion.)

Later that year, on his way to the town where Diallo's family lived, a Peace Corps volunteer named Jesse Thyne was killed in a car crash. The film looks at the two lives, particularly the experience of a young American in Diallo's village, where he was welcomed and remembered with tenderness by Diallo's family. The Diallo story is the other side of crime reduction in NY during the Giuliani years, a time when thousands of Africans settled in New York, most of them invisible to the media and to filmmakers. Exhumed in this documentary, the story remains a symbol of those years. Sadly, it's been eclipsed by another African tragedy in New York, the death of five children from Mali in a tragic fire in the Bronx. Now there's another documentary.

For more on the festival, follow acquarello's journal.

The Film Panel Notetaker attended a discussion among African filmmakers and scholars on Monday evening.

Posted by dwhudson at April 11, 2007 4:44 AM