Carthage Dispatch.

The trees in the majestic Avenue Bourguiba in Tunis are filled with hundreds of chattering birds, gathering as in the Hitchcock film. Below in the cafes, people are chattering. There is a dissolve and we see the people as birds. The cafes are full. It is late October and it is warm. The theaters are also full, sometimes with chattering people, but always attentive and enthusiastic. It is the 22nd year of the Carthage Film Festival, held every second year since 1966. As befits a country once ruled by Dido, the tragic Queen of Carthage, this year, for the first time, the director of the festival is a woman, the Tunisian producer Dora Bouchoucha.

If her goal was to offer the Tunisian public and international visitors a panorama of Arab and African cinema, then she succeeded triumphantly. The festival also offered a cure for Anglo and Euro Centricitis. (One warning for those planning to go in 2010: French is essential because many of the films had no English subtitles.) The official competition consisted of 18 films from countries as widespread as South Africa, Algeria , Egypt, Cap Verde, Ethiopia, Jordan, Lebanon, Mali, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia. In addition, there were homages to Youssef Chahine and Ousmane Sembene, both of whom died fairly recently; an impressive Turkish and Algerian retrospective; and a section of documentaries entitled Palestine: Against Forgetting.

Apart from the main juries, one of which included the French star Emmanuelle Béart, there was a jury of children in their early teens, earnestly discussing the films, taking copious notes and excitedly running around in my hotel. They gave their prize to the Algerian film Masquerades, a first feature directed by Lyes Salem. This was not surprising as it was one of the rare comedies among rather too many solemn movies.

The winner of the Golden Tanit (Tanit is a Phoenician lunar goddess, the patron goddess of Carthage) was veteran Haile Gerima's Teza, already shown in competition in Venice, where it won the Special Jury Prize. Long, stately and somewhat academic, it tackles some thorny political issues through the eyes of its protagonist, a doctor who returns home to Ethiopia after years of exile in Germany. The return home is a constant theme in many African films, used as a means of gaining a perspective on the country.

This was attempted by Faro, Queen of the Water, directed by Salif Traore, which views the superstitious rituals and ancient prejudices in Mali from the more advanced viewpoint of a returnee. The Palestinian film, Annemarie Jacir's The Salt of the Sea [site], starts off strikingly before becoming too schematic, with a woman returning from the USA to occupied Palestine to reclaim her grandparents' property confiscated by the Israelis, and being humiliated by the Israeli authorities.

The film claims to be the first fiction feature directed by a Palestinian woman. Another first was Cap Verde, Mon Amour, being the first feature made in Cape Verde. (I confess that I had to look up where it was. For those as ignorant as me, it is a group of islands, formerly Portuguese, off the West coast of Africa.) Made on a shoestring by Ana Ramos Lisboa, it showed some promise though it got bogged down in melodrama and its simplistic social message, something which infects many films of the continent. However, didacticism in films is understandable in countries struggling to feed and educate their people.

A film which escaped these traps was the ingratiating Algerian movie, Amor Hakkar's The Yellow House [site]. With gentle humor and subtle melancholy, it tells of a poor farmer's journey in his Lambretta Wagon (reminiscent of The Straight Story) to fetch the corpse of his soldier son killed in a road accident, and his attempts to cheer up his wife. With The Yellow House and Tariq Teguia's remarkable Inland (Gabbla), the FIPRESCI winner at Venice, Algeria is once again in the front line of Arab and African cinema.

- Ronald Bergan

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2008 1:57 AM