| CINTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL REVIEWS |
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presents
"Planet Africa" at the |
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The PLANET AFRICA programme has had its third season at the Toronto International Film Festival. Programmer Cameron Bailey states "It's a big planet. Worldwide, African cinema keeps growing. We grow with it. Each year Planet Africa includes new directors and new nations." Features that looked back, but with a futural point of view included Taffe Fanga by Mali's Adama Drabo, Mossane by Senegal's Safi Faye, and Gaston J-M Kabore's Buud Yam which continues the story begun years ago in his Wend Kuuni.
The programme also screened short films Breeze by Barbara Sanon, Nelson George's street rap To Be a Black Man, and Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's Sabriya. A film neither long nor short was Zairian satirist Balufu Bakupa-Kayinda's 40-minute 1996 Le Damier. In interview Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda said that he was in Zaire in June when Mobutu's system came into power. Balufu Bakupa-Kayinda was forced to stay out of Zaire. He then went to Belgium, however, due to Belgium's relation to Mobutu, Balufu was subsequently ejected from Belgium in 1985. He went to Paris where he now lives and continues to make films. Balufu is adamant that what is needed in his country is not merely change, but revolution. His perception is that after the endless seiges of colonialism and dictatorship, the people find themselves without a sense of self-love, without self-esteem. Le Damier was shot in Libreville, the capital city of Gabon. The President-For-Life, bored, orders his Chief of Guards to find a worthy challenger for him at his favourite game, checkers. Balufu describes the game as a "narcissistic war game." The profoundly amusing turn in the film comes from the country's best player, brought in to play the President. He is a pot-smoking rebel from the slums. Once he relaxes (after all, the President is quite willing to supply the player with dope, whereas food would be a different matter, i.e. somehow the President's fault for failing to supply his people with food), he treats the President not only to defeat, but accompanied by a barrage of insults. Balufu explains that in Africa it is what you SAY that counts, not what you write. In Africa there is no Bible, no Koran. This is why the President-For-Life, despite his elevated position, is sensitive to the insults hurled at him by the player off the streets. Balufu says that rather as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in the palace there is the hallucination of power. The President, the dictator, in the palace, in the cave, is the prisoner of an illusion. The slum rebel in some grand musical sense, leads the President out of the cave, but not really. Balufu's next film will be about the president of Gabon, the wedding of his daughter, Rolls Royces, etc. The man is a dictator, but he is also a father. Balufu concludes the interview by saying that he and Spike Lee are quite different, that they were born in the same year, '57, but "we are different." For a sampling of other films featured in the Planet Africa programme, click on a film below.
click
here for more on BUUD YAM!
to read the full review, click here!
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Copyright 1998
Cinternational |
You
are invited to send your responses to any of the African films named
above, as well as Through The Door of No Return by Shirikiana
Aina, Martin Luther King: Days of Hope by John Akomfrah,
Destiny by Youssef Chahine, Christopher Scott Cherot's Have
Plenty, Honey and Ashes by Nadia Fares, Ramadan Sulemant's
Fools, and Dancehall QueenC by Don Letts and Rick
Elgood to Planet Africa programmer Cameron Bailey, or to 
