London Film Festival Goes African
Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 8:24AM 2010 London Film Festival
Marianne Gray - The Spectator Arts Blog
When the Kenyan film The First Grader is screened this week it will be just one of a dozen films from Africa at this year’s festival.
Moving on from colonial influences and civil wars, this rich mix of contemporary films from Africa increasingly tell different sorts of stories from Africa, like the feel-good Africa United about five kids on a 3000 mile journey from Kigali, Rwanda, to the 2010 World Cup, and the powerful Life, Above All, a haunting and contemporary film about life in a South African village.
Already being billed as the “African Slumdog”, Africa United, is a road movie about three young Rwandans who catch a bus to Kigali for a trial with a FIFA football scout. But it’s the wrong bus and they end up in the Congo, without papers or money and a possible future in the child army.
The film version of Allan Stratton’s bestselling novel Chanda Secret’s, now entitled Life, Above All, also reflects a new Africa as it is now. Told through the eyes of 12 year old Chanda, the frank storyline takes in AIDs, infant death, teenage prostitution and traditional beliefs and suspicions.
They are both tough, vivid stories of the cultural and social difficulties facing a new generation of young Africans.
The First Grader, by contrast, is the poignant story of an 84-year-old village elder and former Mau-Mau fighter who uses a government initiative on free primary schooling for all to get the education he never had. His late desire to learn to read and write is prompted by a letter from the government, and he goes to the local school but now faces age discrimination.
Other African films include, from Zimbabwe, a documentary called Shungu : The Resilience of People, about the lives of four people, both opposition and government supporters, trying to keep their lives together in the political turmoil, and Imani, from Uganda, which follows three parallel stories in the course of a single day in Kampala.
From Nigeria comes Relentless, not a straight-to-VCD Nollywood-style quick-fix ‘microwave’ film (push the button, wait three seconds and the film is done), but one about a Nigerian peacekeeping soldier in Sierra Leone. From Senegal is a road movie from Dakar to Saint Louis, Saint Louis Blues, and from Chad is A Screaming Man, about a former swimming champion pressurised to volunteer for the civil war effort who commits a terrible act of betrayal.
From two of the Magreb’s most solid filmmaking countries, Egypt and Algeria, comes Microphone about the secret world of Alexandria’s underground music scene and Algeria director Rachid Bouchareb’s thriller Outside the Law, a follow-up to his film that changed French government policy Days of Glory (2006).
And finally, about an African band but from France, there is Benda Bilili!, a truly extraordinary documentary that follows the progress of this band of severely disabled Congolese men and children as they take their music from Kinshasa on a tour in Europe.
