AFRICAN FILM NIGHT

ROOM 416

More information about these movies can be found at: http://www.freewebs.com/africanfilmnight/

TOUKI BOUKI/THE JOURNEY OF THE HYENA (1973, Senegal, 86 min.),

directed by Djibril Diop Mambety. In Wolof with English subtitles.

"Paris, Paris, Paris!" sings Josephine Baker on a scratchy recording that we hear a number of times on Touki Bouki's soundtrack. "You're a kind of Paradise on Earth!"

How many young Africans have dreamed of leaving their backwater shantytowns to make their fortunes in the City of Lights? We could substitute "London" for Paris, or "New York," "Miami," or "L.A."; each would work equally well. These cities have served as magnets for generations of hungry dreamers willing to do almost anything to gain access to a mythical land of opportunity, of modernity.

Touki Bouki tells a familiar, universal story--a pair of lovers who will do just about anything to escape the slums of Dakar. Mory, the young man, has come to Dakar searching for a better life than he had as a village shepherd. He cruises around Dakar on his noisy motorcyle whose handlebars are adorned with a zebu's skull and horns and whose seat bears what looks like a traditional fetish of some sort. Dakar is obviously a disappointment to him, and he concludes that his journey needs to be taken further; he will need to leave the continent entirely, cross over the sea to Europe.

Mory seduces Anta, a young university student, with his schemes to raise money to book passage to France. At first, things don't go too smoothly. Together they try to steal the gate-money at a wrestling contest, only to discover that they have stolen a fetish by mistake. Mory finally resorts to hustling and robbing a gay man named Charlie. Dressed in Charlie's fancy clothes and riding in his car (which looks like a mobile American flag), Mory makes his way in a surreal ticker-tape parade down the streets of Dakar, with Anta beside him, to the docks and the boat that will take them to Paris. Yet something continues to hold him back, to prevent his escape.

Djibril Diop Mambety made Touki Bouki, based on his own story and script, with a budget of $30,000 (obtained in part from the Senegalese government) and a group of nonprofessional actors. It was edited in Rome and Paris and won a number of awards in Europe, including the Special Jury's Award at the Moscow Film Festival and was chosen as part of the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

Stylistically, Touki Bouki has an avant-garde quality that links it to other films of the early Seventies (it makes me think of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baaadasss Song). In any case, it is unlike most of the films we've seen from Africa. Rather than use a simple, straightforward chronological narrative, it includes scenes that are deliberately disturbing and confusing (e.g., animals being slaughtered, a wild child who lives in a baobab tree) and leaves it to us to make sense of them. Its editing style is frequently experimental in style: it will cut between two apparently unrelated events and allow us to interpret the connection, or it will repeat the same shots or edit a scene out of sequence. Touki Bouki also uses its soundtrack to disrupt the illusion of realism, distancing us from the story and causing us to ponder its meaning even as we watch it.

The film's title--Journey of the Hyena--points to Mory as a marginal scavenger, both ludicrous and destructive. It is up to the audience to decide just what kind of journey Mory has undertaken, and where it will wind up.

Francoise Pfaff provides the following penetrating commentary on Touki Bouki:

Although it does not follow the clear linear progression of African storytelling, Touki Bouki includes thematic elements commonly found in African tales. Mory is the trickster type frequently described in the oral tradition, which portrays as well a number of protagonists leaving their village to venture in an unknown land. Like a folk hero, Mory has to overcome obstacles and triumph over adversity. In so doing, he performs a rite of passage from tradition to modernity, and from adolescence to adulthood. His odyssey is an initiatory rite resulting in new knowledge. . . . Here Touki Bouki grows into both a morality and a dilemma tale. The moral of Mory's story suggests that exile is but another form of alienation. Mory's destiny is left to the viewer's imagination, and as such Mambety's plot calls to mind the open-endedness of African dilemma tales. As in African oral stories, and despite the director's opposition to outward message films, Touki Bouki espouses a didactic function: Mory's quest for a dream is indeed a self-searching journey. (Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers, 1988)

Pierre Haffner writes in Cinemaction-Tricontinental (1982):

Touki Bouki is . . . a film about youth, dreams, love, alienation, justice and fears. . . . . It is an extremely complex motion picture which to this day probably stands as the most fascinating work of Black African cinema. . . . Disconcerting . . . provocative, even insolent and blasphemous yet compassionate and generous, Touki Bouki appears as the most profound incursion into the psyche of a Senegalese youth traumatized by colonization and urban aggressions. (quoted by Pfaff in Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers, 1988)

After a long hiatus from filmmaking, Djibril Diop Mambety has recently completed a new film--titled Hyenas.

Notes by Michael Dembrow

Source: http://spot.pcc.edu/~mdembrow/touki.htm

Sensual period drama follows female slaves' conquest of Brazilian diamond baron. Fans of foreign historical epics, strong female protagonists will find the lush period atmosphere, well-crafted eroticism, offbeat flair enthralling.

Starring:	Zeze Motta, Walmor Chagas... View Full Credits
Director:	Carlos Diegues
Language:	Portuguese
Country:	Brazil

		VHS and DVD 94 minutes, 1995, Burkina Faso Director: Dani Kouyaté in French and Jula with English subtitles An online FACILITATOR GUIDE is available for this title.

Keita creates a unique world where the West Africa of the 13th Century Sundjata Epic and the West Africa of today co-exist and interpenetrate. Director Dani Kouyaté frames his dramatization of the epic within the story of Mabo Keïta, contemporary boy from Burkina Faso, learning the history of his family. During the film, Mabo and his distant ancestor, Sundjata, engage in parallel quests to understand their destinies, to "know the meaning of their names." In so doing, Keita makes the case for an "Afrocentric" education, where African tradition, not an imported Western curricula is the necessary starting point for African development.

Both ancient and modern storylines are initiated by the mysterious appearance of a hunter, a passerby representing destiny who intervenes at strategic moments to propel Sundjata and Mabo on their journeys. The hunter both foretells the birth of Sundjata to the Mandé court and, eight centuries later, rouses Djéliba (or Great Griot) Kouyaté to go to the city and initiate young Mabo into the secrets of his origin. The Kouyatés have always served as the Keïtas' griots, bards (jeli) belonging to a discrete Mandé caste or endogamous occupational group, who alone perform certain types of poetry and divination.

The griot's arrival creates tension in the Keita household especially between Mabo and his mother and his school-teacher, who stand for a Westernized lifestyle ignorant of African tradition. Mabo becomes so caught up in the griot's story that he stops studying for exams, day-dreams in class and eventually skips school to tell the story to other boys.

The film pointedly contrasts the moral depth of the griot's teachings with the sterile, culturally irrelevant facts which constitute Mabo's "Eurocentric" education. For example, the griot first comes upon Mabo while he is studying the Western "creation myth," Darwin's theory of evolution, of a universe ruled only by chance and the "survival of the fittest." In contrast, Mandé myth holds that human history is suffused with purpose and that every person has a particular destiny within it. By listening to The Sundjata Epic present-day Mandé listeners like Mabo can perceive the working out of destiny in history and see their own lives as part of a continuing narrative flow.

The Sundjata Epic, which Mabo hears recounts the life of Sundjata Keota (sometimes spelled Sundiata or Son-Jara Keyta,) the man responsible for turning his nation into the great Malian trading empire. Set in the early 13th century, the epic provides the wide-spread Mandé people a legend explaining their common origin and subsequent division into castes or clan families. An oral recitation of the complete poem with musical accompaniment can last close to sixty hours. But, this film, like most performances, recounts only a part of the epic, here the events surrounding the birth, boyhood and exile of Sundjata. (This corresponds to lines 356 to 1647 in the standard translation, Johnson, John William. The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.)

Sundjata's quest, like Mabo's, requires the successful reconciliation or integration of two types of power represented by his paternal and maternal lineages. His father, Maghan Kon Fatta Konati a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, has brought barika or law and progress to human society. In contrast, Sundjata's mother, Sogolon, and his grandmother, the Buffalo Woman of Do, rely on pre-Islamic occult powers or nyama. Their potentially disruptive effect on human civilization is symbolized by their habit of turning into ferocious animal "doubles."

Sundjata himself, hexed at birth by his mother's co-wife, must crawl across the earth, scorned as a "reptile." A Mandé proverb explains: "The great tree must first push its roots deep into the earth." When the climactic moment arrives for Sundjata to walk erect like a man, he tries to lift himself up with a seven-forged iron rod, symbolizing man-made technology. Even this cracks beneath his strength, so the hunter reappears and instructs Sogolon to fetch a supple branch of the sun sun tree which has the nyama to hold Sundjata's weight. Thus, the hero must harness natural and supernatural powers to fulfill his heroic destiny.

In the film's final scene, the griot disappears, and for the first time Mabo directly confronts the hunter; after hearing the epic, he is finally in touch with his destiny. At this point, the stories of the two Keotas intersect; history and legend, event and destiny have been brought into alignment. Indeed, in making this film, Dani Kouyaté (who shares the name of the griot) succeeds in fulfilling the "meaning of his name." He has used a quintessentially 20th century invention, motion pictures, to insure that The Sundjata Epic is passed on as an inspiring force in the lives of young Africans everywhere.

		VHS only 107 minutes, 1990, Mali Director: Cheick Oumar Sissoko in Bambara with English subtitles

In Finzan, Cheick Oumar Sissoko has skillfully crafted a film which raises one of the most important issues of African rural life, the status of women, in a style accessible to every villager. Finzan tells the story of two women's rebellion. Nanyuma, a young widow defies her brother-in-law, the village fool, when he asserts his traditional right to "inherit" her. Fili, a young woman sent from the city by her conservative father, is brutally "circumcised" by village women, scandalized by her refusal to submit to this ancient ritual. Sissoko weaves these two stories together into a painfully realistic picture of village society, tragically unable to free itself from the past.

Source: http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0033&s=Finzan

		VHS and DVD 62 minutes, 1991, France / Guinea Director: David Achkar in French with English subtitles

Allah Tantou is the first African film to confront the immense personal and political costs of the widespread human rights abuses on the continent. It follows filmmaker David Achkar's search for his father, his father's search for himself inside a Guinean prison and Africa's search for a new beginning amid the disillusionment of the post-independence era. One of the most courageous and controversial films of recent years, Allah Tantou speaks in an unabashedly personal voice not often heard in African cinema.

The life of Marof Achkar, David's father, can be seen as emblematic of much recent African history. In 1958, his countryman, Sekou Touri, declared Guinea the first independent French African colony and became a hero of Pan-Africanism. Marof Achkar, a leading figure in the Ballets Africains, served as U.N. ambassador for the new government. In 1968, Achkar was suddenly recalled, charged with treason and vanished into the notorious Camp Boiro prison. His family was exiled and, only after Touri's death in 1984, did they learn of Achkar's execution in 1971.

David Achkar writes, "I knew my father was a hero, but I wanted to know what that meant." The Marof Achkar we first encounter in home movies and newsreels is a charismatic, confident performer on the world stage. The Marof Achkar glimpsed later through letters and a remarkable prison diary is a man bereft of position, identity and family; he is now simply "Number 54." But in prison, he undergoes an almost religious conversion. "It's strange," he wrote, "I've never felt so humble, insignificant and yet it is the deepest reason of my happiness: I believe it's the grace of God."

In a cinematic tradition which has privileged the calm collective voice of the griot, Allah Tantou speaks with the fragmented, uncertain rhythms of the individual conscience. Achkar juxtaposes diverse, sometimes contradictory texts - documentary, newsreel, dramatizations, photos, journals - to deny us a single, authoritative narrative space. Allah Tantou argues through its example that vigorous debate, candor and self-criticism are the pre-conditions for Africa's political and spiritual renewal.

Source: http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0005&s=allah

		VHS and 35mm 95 minutes, 1996, Cameroon Producer/Director: Jean-Marie Teno in French with English subtitles

Clando wrestles with a dilemma facing more and more educated Africans: whether to work to change the autocratic regimes at home or seek their fortunes abroad.

Clando is a call to action from one African to his fellow Africans - a heart-felt conversation we are privileged to overhear. Teno writes: "A majority of Africans are waiting, waiting for change to happen, a passivity inherited from 400 years of oppression, where things can only go from bad to worse."

Clando begins in medias res: a chaotic, disorienting, urban present where people are so busy surviving they don't have the time to confront the underlying causes of their desperation. The central character, Sobgui, a former computer programmer, has, for reasons not yet clear, been reduced to driving a "clando" or gypsy cab through Douala's anarchic streets. He is clandestine, not just because his cab is unlicensed, but because he is hiding from his own past. When a radical political group involves him in the revenge slaying of an informer, Sobgui knows it is definitely time to get out of Douala. A wealthy elder from his village provides the chance when he asks Sobgui to go to Germany to buy more cars - and to try to locate his long-lost, prodigal son, Rigoberto.

In a series of flashbacks after he arrives in Germany, we discover that Sobgui allowed a group of pro-democracy students to use his office to duplicate an anti-government flyer. He had, however, been under surveillance and is immediately abducted by the political police and brutally tortured. Sobgui is dumped in a civil jail, which a fellow prisoner sardonically observes must be "heaven" - since the nation beyond its wall is a prison and a hell. One day, without explanation, the political police whisk a terrified Sobgui away, drop him on a busy street corner and tell him not to move until they return. As the hours pass, he realizes that they aren't coming back but that he remains thier prisoner - only now his cell is all of Cameroon.

Director Jean-Marie Teno, however, suggests alternatives to Sobgui's state of powerless isolation. The informal economy in which Sobgui works, "helping his brothers out in the sun to get home," provides basic services unavailable from the government-controlled sector. Both in Douala and Cologne the members of Sobgui's clan have set up tontines, "credit unions," which support their members' entrepreneurial ventures. Even in the jail, captives and captors learn to share what they have.

In Cologne, Sobgui manages to track down his sponsor's son whose fate provides a cautionary tale for Sobgui as well. A once prosperous businessman, Rigoberto has been reduced to a penniless drunk. Sobgui tries to encourage him to return to Cameroon by telling him a parable about a hunter from a drought-stricken village who goes into the forest to find food for his family. After two weeks he has still shot no game and is so ashamed he wanders off into the forest rather than return empty-handed. But the villagers send out a search party and convince him to assume his hereditary role as chief.

Sobgui discovers another reason to return, ironically, through an affair he has with a young German human rights activist, Irène. She is impatient with the Cameroonian emigrant community's complacent waiting for change to happen at home. She tells Sobgui that if you wait to change society, society will change you first. Sobgui realizes that since his imprisonment he has felt immobilized by the "law of series:" you can know how a sequence of actions begins, but never how it will end. Sobgui has, for example, been haunted by a terrifying dream. He and some other prisoners are riding shackled in a police van driven by a psychopath. One of the prisoners has a gun but the dream always ends in indecision: should he shoot the driver, risking death in a crash, or do nothing and suffer a slow death in captivity? "That metaphoric gun," director Teno comments, "is in the hands of every African."

In a sense, Sobgui completes his dream when he tells Irène that he has decided to return to Cameroon. Irène's politics demand no less; it has nothing to do with their personal affection or her nationality. For the first time, he addresses her as "comrade," and she replies, "we have to wait till you've earned that name." Sobgui answers: "I'm tired of waiting."

Read the filmmakers thoughts on the current state of African Cinema in Imagining Alternatives: African Cinema in the New Century by Jean-Marie Teno.

Source: http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0019&s=Clando

		VHS,DVD and 35mm 85 minutes, 1997, Senegal Director: Moussa Sene Absa in French and Wolof with English subtitles

Moussa Sene Absa's most recent film dissects the social chaos engulfing much of Africa through the story of an idealistic young politician's rise and fall.

Tableau Ferraille offers an intimate view of how modernization, at least as practiced in today's Africa, corrodes traditional communities and retards grassroots development. Like such past Senegalese masterpieces as Ousmane Sembene's Xala and Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyenas, it deplores a corrupt post-colonial elite's exploitation of the promise of African independence.

The films opening shot presents a "tableau" of its larger theme - a beach beside a glittering seal littered with junk. The camera lingers on a barrel - which we learn much later contained radioactive waste illegally dumped by the town's leading citizen. This Tableau Ferraille, the director's home , whose name means appropriately "scrap heap" or "scene of junk." It contrasts markedly to his nostalgic view of his youth in his first feature Ça twiste à Poponguine.

Moussa Sene Absa structures (one is tempted to say choreographs) his film to contrast two possible development paths for Africa: one towards self-reliance and social cohesion, the other towards self-interest and social chaos. In Tableau Ferraille, Daam, a well-intentioned but vacillating European-trained politician, must choose between these two social paradigms clearly exemplified by his two wives. His first wife, Gagnesiri, is a dignified village woman, dedicated to husband, family and community. She may represent Africa with its vast unrealized potential, waiting patiently, perhaps too patiently, for politicians and technocrats like Daam to develop her potential.

Daam and Gagnesiri are, revealingly, incapable of conceiving a child, so Daam's machismo compels him to take a second wife, Kiné, a beautiful, well-connected, western educated woman, eager to marry an ambitious young politician. Unlike Gagnesiri, Kiné chafes under the restrictions of domestic life. She wants to open an art gallery and travel abroad, even chiding Daam for not using his position to acquire wealth like the other government ministers.

Like Kiné, Président and his corrupt cronies in Tableau Ferraille plan to use their connections with Daam to enrich themselves. Président opens a sardine cannery with a government subsidy, builds himself a fancy house, wins lucrative export contracts and fires local workers when they try to unionize. Président represents the new breed of American-style entrepreneurs that free market ideologues see as the great hope for African economic growth.

Daam, played by music superstar Ismaël Lö, is an equivocal character, a conciliator who avoids conflict to be popular with everyone, a kind of Senegalese Bill Clinton. Nearly forty years after independence, Daam's shallow political program is simply "to avoid chaos." and he mistakenly relies on suspect foreign aid and shady businessmen like Président to achieve it. Daam's disastrous domestic and political choices converge when Président bribes the disgruntled Kiné to steal secret documents so he can make the winning bid for a lucrative bridge construction contract. Daam, of course, comes under suspicion of favoritism and his former friends turn on him. Kiné escapes to a waiting Swiss bank account and Président replaces Daam as the political leader of Tableau Ferraille. A broken man, Daam resigns, takes to drink and is driven with his still loyal wife, Gagnesiri, from the village.

On their way out of town in a horsecart loaded with all their possessions, Gagnesiri pauses at the grave of her one friend, Anta, while Daam sleeps on a bench outside. The entire film has actually been a series of flashbacks from this point as Gagnesiri comes to realize there is nothing more she can do for Daam and certainly nothing he can do for her. Here the narrative impulse passes from Daam and the (largely male) elite to Gagnesiri and grassroots Africa. In an unexpectedly feminist ending, the devoted wife leaves her dozing husband, marches majestically to the beach where the film began, commandeers a launch and sails towards the open sea.

Gagnesiri is accompanied by a group of fisherman who have appeared mysteriously throughout the film, separate yet commenting on it like a Greek chorus. Any Senegalese would immediately recognize them from their distinctive "patched" blue robes symbolizing frugality, as Bay Falls. More and more Senegalese (including the director's family) are turning to Islamic sects like the Bay Falls, or better-known Mourides, because their stress on hard work, mutual support and economic self-reliance appears to offer the only viable alternative to a hopelessly corrupt state and an increasingly anomic society. For Gagnesiri, leaving Tableau Ferraille rusting by the sea, the future is left less well defined. What is clear is that from now on she - and by extension grassroots Africa - must make that future for themselves.

Source: http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0093

Quartier Mozart, 1992