E-Mail This Article to a Friend Not so dark dreams The ‘African Film Festival’ at the Museum of Fine Arts BY PETER KEOUGH
	"African Film Festival" At the Museum of Fine Arts.
	Related Links MFA's The African Film Festival

Genocide, famine, disease, exotic landscapes, incessant warfare, ubiquitous danger — to judge from the limited view we get from the media, Africa has all the elements necessary for hit Hollywood movies except a film industry. Hollywood has taken note, if cautiously, of the potential. Tears of the Sun, Troy, Alexander, Hotel Rwanda, and the upcoming Sahara all exploit the African mystique, or stereotype, of primal violence, savagery, the heart of darkness. For most in the West, this is the real Africa.

But as those who’ve seen veteran Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé, which opened the festival (remaining screenings are February 10 at 1 p.m., February 12 at noon, and February 13 at 2:30 p.m.), have discovered, Africa does boast its own national cinemas, and they take a different view of the continent’s identity. Related with masterful simplicity, Sembene’s tale of a woman who resists her village’s practice of ritual circumcision is a humanist triumph that vindicates not only the best aspects of modern progress but those of traditional culture as well. Moolaadé set the tone for the rest of the festival, in films that probe the past for origins, study the present for solutions, and look to the future with dreams.

Rallia, heroine of Algerian director Mehdi Charef’s La fille de Keltoum/Daughter of Keltoum (2001; February 19 at 12:15 p.m. and February 24 at 2:30 p.m., March 5 at 1:30 p.m. and March 11 at 6 p.m.), has dreams. Abandoned as an infant, adopted and raised by a Swiss family, she returns 19 years later to her native Maghreb, whose mountains she had dreamed of as paradise, its people as gods. The reality is different. The landscape awes with its towering bleakness, but it offers only beauty and pain, and the land’s inhumanity is matched by that of its inhabitants.

This paradise of her dreams has broken what remains of Rallia’s family. Her shrunken grandfather sells asparagus by the roadside, her feral, dotty aunt bears water for the village like a pack animal. Her mother, though, works in the city at a luxury hotel. Rallia is determined to find her. Swapping her sporty Western clothes for traditional attire, Rallia invites her aunt to join her as they travel across the desert and into the depths of Algerian society to learn the secret of her origins. Varying parts The Sheltering Sky, The Wizard of Oz, and Thelma & Louise, this fine film falters at the end into melodrama.

Like Rallia, Hammala in Malian director Assane Kouyaté’s Kabala (2002; February 24 at 8 p.m. and March 5 at 11 a.m.) has mother issues. Just as he’s about to be initiated into manhood, he learns from his father, a respected elder, that his real mother is the local witch. He flees the title village in disgrace as a bastard. His sweetheart, Sokona, and his real mother mourn his exile, which he spends toiling as a miner. Four years later, he hears on the radio that his village is in crisis: the sacred well has backed up, and a cholera epidemic threatens.

So Hammala returns to use his mining knowledge to restore the well, but to a dubious welcome. Like Hamlet, he feigns madness to maneuver his way through the web of intrigue, jealousy, superstition, greed, and conspiracy that entangles him. At the heart of it all is the Claudius-like village witch doctor, emblem of past suppression and an obstacle to progress. Although his narrative is murky at times, lacking the limpid touch of Sembene, Kouyaté aspires to a Shakespearean depth and breadth of character, theme, and tone.

Similar motifs occur in South African director Norman Maake’s Soldiers of the Rock (2003; February 18 at 6 p.m. and February 20 at 12:30 p.m.) as another child seeks reconciliation with a lost parent and another subterranean resource runs dry. A miner dies; his will bequeaths all his insurance money to his son’s education. Out of a sense of guilt, or maybe the need to indulge a pervasive, pseudo-poetic voiceover narration, the son decides to spend a break in classes working at the old man’s mine. There he finds a brotherhood of well-oiled, well-muscled underground warriors resigned to their troglodyte toil but still spirited enough to dance in tribal costumes in their greasy dormitory.

But as the ore runs out, this grind threatens come to an end. Can the miners adjust to the changing times? One of them, a reformed ex-criminal determined to make good, has a dream: if they all pool their resources, they can buy their own mine. He asks the student to help out, and the student must choose between committing himself and returning to the privileged world his father’s death bought for him. These issues work themselves out in quasi-mystical conflicts both above and below ground. As a narrative, they don’t make much sense, but the mood of dread climaxes spectacularly with an excruciating battle and an underground cave-in.

The soldiers on the rock eat dirt for real; the subject of Branwen Okpako’s Dreckfresser/Dirt for Dinner (2000; February 19 at 2:30 p.m.) has no less trouble ingesting it as metaphor. In the 1990s, Sam Meffire was acclaimed in ads and newspaper profiles as the first black policeman in the former East German province of Saxony. A couple of years later, he was serving 10 years in prison for assorted crimes. Okpako interviews Meffire behind bars and speaks to his mother and to friends ranging from an incarcerated pimp to the Minister of the Interior in order to understand what happened. Like those of many of the fictional characters discussed above, Meffire’s troubles go back to a childhood loss and parental mystery. His white, German-born mother relates the intolerance she and her husband, a student from Cameroon, endured not only from the then Communist society at large but from her own family. Before Sam was born, his father died suddenly, perhaps poisoned by fellow students. The case was covered up.

No doubt this tragedy affected Meffire in his subsequent career trajectory. He became an overachiever, joined the police force, gained a Dirty Harry reputation, attained celebrity as a racial symbol, handled the fame badly, sought to fulfill a personal dream of starting his own security company, and finally succumbed to criminality. Why this happened and what it means, however, remain as elusive and obscure as Meffire’s poems, which are recited over angst-filled montages of soulless East German architecture.

The plight of a child lost in the heartless city has inspired directors from D.W. Griffith to Luis Buñuel. The latter’s Los olvidados by way of Hector Babenco’s Pixote inspires Angolan director Maria João Ganga’s Na cidade vazia/Hollow City (2004; February 17 at 4:45 p.m. and February 27 at 4:30 p.m., March 4 at 6 p.m. with the director present). A plane load of refugees from the civil wars lands in Luanda; an orphaned boy slips away from the nun watching over him and into the night. His adventures in the urban desert, like Rallia’s in La fille de Keltoum, provide a microcosm of a society in turmoil. A simple fisherman and a street punk offer conflicting direction, and an ingenious toy the boy has fashioned out of junk might provide the key to his rescue. Harrowing and authentic for the most part, this film, like Keltoum, opts for melodrama in the end.

Like Luanda, the Nigerian town of Jogpo in Tunde Kelani’s Agogo èèwò (2002; February 23 at 6 p.m. and February 26 at 10:30 a.m.) is empty of virtue and filled with corruption. But don’t expect the hero of this artless, irresistible Frank Capra–esque fable just to grin and bear it. Adebosipo is a retired police chief who like Cincinnatus is interrupted as he tends his fields by a party of chiefs who want him to take over as king. The alternative to the throne is a young Hotspur type who augurs trouble and change. Adebosipo, these chiefs believe, can be bribed or deluded as they continue with their program of kickbacks and graft. Reluctant, he nonetheless takes the job, determined to surprise his patrons by working, Jefferson Smith–like, for the good of the people. His secret weapon is the title "taboo gong," which when struck compels those who have taken an oath of office to confess their lies and crimes or else drop dead. One wonders whether the American Dream couldn’t be realized if such a device were available here.