Fiba 09/10 - 17th New York African Diaspora Film Festival

"Decolonising means seeing the world with one's own eyes, thinking about it from ones's own point of view. The centre of the world is everywhere. The world is what you see from wherever you are." Milton Santos.

The 17th New York African Diaspora Film Festival runs from Nov 27 to Dec 15 and shows around 110 films in different venues across Manhattan from Anthology Archive to Columbia University. Its unique mission is to showcase rarely screened films by and about the people of the African diaspora. This is 'cultural cinema' selected primarily for theme and subject, a rare exception in the film festival circuit.

For some years the NYADFF had the good fortune to be located in Harlem; NY's first African American cop had just retired and had taken over the cinema a few doors from the renowned Apollo Theatre and made it available to the festival. Sadly this is no longer the case and audiences have to travel downtown to Anthology on the Lower East Side or selected venues including Columbia University in Morningside Heights. Though overlooking Harlem, the latter struggles to reach local as well as downtown communities.

Its director Reinaldo Barroso-Spech would love to find suitable theatres in the heart of New York's African-American community. Bringing an audience to Anthology on the Lower East Side remains an ongoing challenge. 'Perhaps if I had topless dancing girls and a samba band I would entice bigger crowds' he wryly jokes. Even Anthology's own 'art-house crowd' rarely venture in to the festival yet there are many excellent reasons for film lovers of all shapes and sizes to do just that!

DAY ONE kicked off with three films by and about women, the highlight of which was an eponymously titled portrait, Wangari Maathai: For Our Land, (Kenya 2009). Wangari is an eco-activist from Kenya who has suffered imprisonment and brutality resulting from her campaign against the land grabs that began with the British occupation and continues today. An inspiring and passionate figure, she fights overseas developers who grease the palms of government officials with egotistical and destructive planning schemes in forests and on city parks.

It was accompanied by a delightful and creative experimental short that captures the hair salon culture in Ghana, titled Me Boni Bra (and also part of the Anthology arts programme of new film-makers); this was followed by a documentary short from a young film student, Women in the Shadow, a distressing and intimate account of a women's prison in Burkino Faso, through the words of inmates and warders.

The festival in 2009 includes 'film-maker in residence' Egyptian director, Khaled El Hagar and day one featured the NY premiere of his new movie Stolen Kisses which caused enormous controversy in his birth country of Egypt. Its intention is clear; a feel-good, commercial, romantic drama depicting the life and tribulations of a young group of Egyptian middle class friends (with the one exception who supports her needy family and her studies through prostitution, to tragic consequence). Personal dreams and ambition are pitted against high levels of unemployment and suffocating parental control. Within the limits of its aesthetic, its social context and message present a serious critique of poverty and paternalism that oppresses the young, especially women.

South Africa features highly in the festival. Jerusalema is introduced by the festival director as the African version of American Gangster. It's set after the fall of Apartheid and pays particular attention to the present day plight of the Rainbow Nation. The story follows two young township friends as they attempt to go straight. Unable to afford prohibitive college fees they turn to petty trading and crime and the hero rises to fame as a lead player in the white-collar housing rackets of J'oburg. The film begins well as a vivid and often amusing fast paced picture of the new South Africa through the eyes of two young survivors - just! As the story unfolds, this fast paced Hollywood style adventure film shows all the flaws of the form; sexism, contrived plotting and violence on a grand scale. Despite this it's well received and the audience warm to a film that demonstrates a sense of racial 'difference' or cultural identity and an awareness of some of the important social issues of today.

Jerusalema's message of disillusion and thwarted ambition for post - apartheid is developed with a particular focus on a middle class family in 21 Century South Africa in the festival opener, Nothing but the Truth. Its written and directed by renowned theatre actor and director, John Kani. Very much a film version of a resonant stage production, this complex character study is set in the aftermath of the liberation struggle. People now begin to question their previous roles under apartheid and confront the space allotted to them in the new South Africa.

It follows the story of a father, played by John Kani, living with his daughter (played by the enchanting actress and festival guest celebrity, Miss Motsabi Tyele). The father is still grieving the loss of his son in the struggle and the abscence of his late, departed wife. When he collects his late brother, who has died in exile in the UK, a hero of the struggle) he confronts not only his own thwarted ambtion but also the failings of others. Drama is introduced by the arrival of the fashionable, if somewhat gauche daughter of his brother. She must also discover the truth about her father. Both this film and Jerusalema suggest that South Africa has only just begun to confront the wrongs of the past and has yet to deal with the ongoing entrenched social priviledge of a minority. Performances were often strong but lapsed into the theatrical rather than the cinematic.

Day two included documentary portraits, the first was called Wole Soyinka: child of the forest. It was a powerful reminder of the extraordinary writing of this massive, Nigerian literary figure who fused both English literature with the wider Yoruba theatrical tradition. It included an account of his experience in post war England and of his later opposition to successive government leaders, including his forceful takeover of a radio station to oppose Sani Abacha, who untimely death possibly saved Soyinka from imprisonment or execution.

Katanga Business, directed by Thierry Michel in 2009 is a US premiere and tells the rivetting if desperate story of the recent history of Congo's mining province, Katanga. The film reflects on the disastrous reign of Sese Soko Mobutu (puppet of the US after their sponsored assasination of democratically elected Patrice Lumumba resulting from territorial ambition during the cold-war). After Mobutu ran the indsutry into the ground, international investment has once again returned to the mining industries and the film documents its people's desperate struggle to assert any investment from the vast wealth of its mineral resources, yesterday and today. Lead protagonist is Moïse Katumbi Chapwe and the camera follows the frenzy of the first democratically elected governor as he tries to resolve the interests of investors with the needs of the impoverished miners. Of particular note in this story are the presence of Chinese business developers who are instructed to invest not just in profits but also infrastructure such as housing, roads, schools and hospitals, a strategy that is new in the colonial experience of Africa.

Two further documentaries profile notable figures in the struggle against colonisation. The first is Franz Fanon; His life, his struggle, his work. Martinique born writer and doctor , Fanon became caught up in the WW2 struggle against German fascism but soon became disillusioned with the racism within the French military. His influence extended from the profound impact on the Left Bank philosophers with his published works such as Black Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth to the active struggle to support Algerian independence. On his early death from leukaemia at the age of 38 he was buried among the martyrs of the independence in Algeria. The second portrait Amilcar Cabral and offers a succinct and admiring overview of this remarkable figure, an agronomist, Marxist thinker, politician and freedom-fighter who fought Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands. He was assassinated in 1973 just months before the country declared uni-lateral independence from Portuguese rule.

A festival highlight is the US Premiere of documentary, The Sixteen of Basse Pointe, directed by Camille Mauduech and released in 2009, a gripping 'whodunnit' that rips the lid of post-colonial existence of Martinique; in the words of the director, this place was a melting pot just waiting to explode. It contains first hand testimonial interviews from participants (many of whom will not be around for long), in a murder case that shook post-war French society. It's a big screen production, shot on 35mm film and incorporates interview and footage of Martinique as well as archive fand vintage still photography.

It begins in 1948 when a plantation manager is killed and the whole force of French colonialism is brought to bear on a group of union activists, despite the evidence, and they are swept off to France to await the charge of murder. The incident gathered the forces of post-war left including the Marseille Dockers Union, who opposed what was perceived as an incident that strongly indicated the continuing legacy of slavery.

Accompanying this is a delicately observed portrait of people and place and follows an affectionate couple of Martinique market traders as they go about their day. This short film demonstrates that Camille is as comfortable with fiction as she is with documentary. Full Moon at Volga Beach is introduced as a love story and its also a pean to the beauty of the island and the people that are 'Martinique'!

SPECIAL DOCUMENTARY DOUBLE FEATURE: Two extraordinary Brazilian documentaries screened at this years NYADFF. The first, The Global World Seen from Over Here (2006) is a profile of the late Milton Santos (1925-2001), an African-Brazilian thinker of enormous relevance in the 21st Century. Interviews and public statements from Santos are interspersed with a range of media including music, fast cutting stills, cartoon humour and documentary footage and express his vital world view. Professor and author of over 40 books in Spanish, Santos is the son of teachers and the grandchild of enslaved Africans. He throws out challenging provocations of vital importance that have arisen from his work as a social geographer. 'One way of viewing the development of the planet', he tells us, 'is by observing the ammount of light omitted at night. A satellite photo indicates a sharp contrast between the north and the south of the earth. Resources may exist in the south but they are used to light the lives of those in the north!'

Director Silvio Tendler, (Brazil, 2006) combines Santos' words with a variety of imagery and documentary footage to explore his polemic about the present day form of colonisation - globalisation. He considers the avoidance of any discussion of the concept of 'civilisation' and attributes this to a media that are ultimately, in the service of the corporations. All is not lost though and Santos finds hope in direct opposition via mass protest and the subversion of media propaganda via new techonologies. This film will secure wider attention for this intellectual giant until now unknown in the English speaking world. One wonders why this could be but then again . . . .

It's accompaied by a US Premiere of Utopia and Barbarism, the most recent work from director, Silvio Tendler, (Brazil, 2009). Meticulously selected archive footage combine with contemporary interviews from survivors of the world's barbarity. It could be an unbearable two hours but for Tendler's humanity and clearly evidenced love of cinema as he weaves the ingredients into a powerful and touching film essay. Italian, Soviet, and Argentine cinema is referenced extensively as are notable figures such as writer/director Fernando Solanos and author Susan Sontag.

Utopia and Barbarism tracks the struggle against fascism, from its momentary post-war enlightenment in the 60's through the reversion to fascism in the juntas in Brazil, Argentina and wider Americas, sponsored by the commie-fearing USA. The appalling human rights abuses it describes are all too resonant in the use of rendition and torture today, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But Tendler shows how barbarism co-exists with the search for utopia. A climax to the film depicts a woman settler who translates and recites in Hebrew the work of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in opposition to the apartheid and barbarity of the Zionist state of Israel.

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FILMBANK 2009-10

Year of the Ox