Afriques: Comment ça va avec la douleur?

Raymond Depardon named his documentary after a greeting that, he says, is now common in Africa: "How are you doing with the pain?" He filmed for three years in diverse regions: the post-apartheid slums of Soweto, the drought-ravaged farms north of Johannesburg, the war-torn rubble of Angola, prisons, AIDS clinics, the bush and the desert. Result: a three-hour work that is equal parts heartstopping beauty and horrific destitution.

Depardon imbues scenes of peasant life with a sensual, Arcadian quality; elsewhere he's brusque and businesslike, as when he captures children scratching in the dirt for grains of corn spilled by a government truck. The journalistic-style commentary can be naive: he recounts the statistics of HIV infection (women's risk is twice men's, all over Africa) without mentioning female genital mutilation, and he touches only briefly on the military corruption and thievery that sabotage international food-relief efforts. But when he allows the images to speak, there are times when the very soul of humanity is laid bare, almost unwatchable, in the eyes of children who have known poverty, hunger, illness, and little else. At the Harvard Film Archive, February 24, 27, and 28.

-- Peg Aloi