Africa remix

It's a big year for Africa at the LFF, so why do some directors play it safe when it comes to the continent?

Oct 19 2006

Africa looms large over this year's London Film Festival. There are prominent new films by African filmmakers and major works about Africa by directors from elsewhere. There's Kevin Macdonald's 'The Last King of Scotland' about Idi Amin. There's Phillip Noyce's 'Catch A Fire', about South Africa in the 1980s. From Mali, there's Abderrahmane Sissako's 'Bamako', about the effects of globalisation on Africa today. And from Chad, there's Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's 'Dry Season', a modern allegory turning grand themes of truth and reconciliation into the most local and personal of stories. Even the festival's closing-film, 'Babel' from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, includes Morocco in its sweeping global tour. This mass of activity is also recognised with an LFF seminar event, 'Eye on Africa', where Sissako will join Bonnie Greer and others. The time is ripe to ask what, if anything, these films tell us about cinema and Africa.

The most striking conclusion is that while Macdonald, who is British, and Noyce, who is Australian, have crafted versions of well-known historical stories at a safe distance from the past, Sissako and Haroun have made small, powerful tales about Africa now. They embrace modernity. It's unsurprising that 'Bamako' and 'Dry Season' scream with urgency: they hail from Francophone west African countries whose few films, from directors like Ousmane Sembene ('Moolaadé') and Fanta Regina Nacro ('Night of Truth') follow a serious filmic traditon that embraces social, economic and political reality.

Take Sissako, the 45-year-old filmmaker from Mauritania whose last film, 2002's 'Waiting for Happiness' dealt with the breakdown of tradition and the dangers of economic migration. His 'Bamako' imagines an ad-hoc courtroom set up in the backyard of a house in the Malian capital. Africa is the prosecutor; in the dock are the international financial institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It's more complex, however, than a straightforward baiting of the west: Sissako berates not just global institutions but his government and people too.

'Dry Season', meanwhile, is the work of 45-year-old Haroun, from Chad, whose 'Abouna' had a release here in 2002 and tells of two young boys in N'djamena, the Chad capital, trying to come to terms with their father's disappearance. His latest, 'Dry Season' tells of Atim (Ali Barkai), an orphan sent to the city by his blind grandfather to avenge the death of his father during the civil war. Instead, Atim is employed by successful baker Nassara – his father's killer – who treats him like a son. Quieter than 'Bamako', it's no less convincing as an allegory of truth and reconciliation.

'The Last King of Scotland' and 'Catch a Fire', meanwhile, are good and intelligent films on their own terms. Noyce's energetic 'Catch a Fire' tells of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), a black worker at a north-eastern oil refinery in the early 1980s, who is driven to join the ANC's campaign of violence by the brutality of police chief Nic Vos (Tim Robbins). Meanwhile, 'The Last King of Scotland' plays smart games of fiction with history, marrying invented characters with the facts of Idi Amin's government. But compare these films with the African features and they begin to look tame, bearing little relevance to Africa now beyond the historical context they offer. Maybe we can't expect outsiders to offer smart commentaries, but it's hard not to feel an opportunity has been lost. The death last week of Gillo Pontecorvo, director of 'Battle of Algiers', reminds us that with imagination, courage and intelligence, filmmakers can make distant and current politics their own. Moreover, the success of 'Tsotsi' shows there's a sizeable audience here for popular work that confronts far-off social reality.

It's worth noting that 'The Last King of Scotland' marks the second year in a row that a British film set in eastern Africa has opened the LFF, following 'The Constant Gardener'. Both films reflect our country's historical links with parts of Africa and investigate the motives of Britons looking to 'do good' on the continent: in 'Gardener' a wide-eyed humanitarian (Rachel Weisz) joins her diplomat husband in Kenya; in 'Last King', a Scottish medical graduate (James McAvoy) spins a globe to decide where his wanderlust should take him.

'I get so angry when I see a white face in a film about Africa,' a fellow film critic recently grumbled. He was talking about lead characters – white heroes thrown into a sea of African troubles, such as John Hurt and Hugh Dancy in Michael Caton-Jones' 'Shooting Dogs', this year's movie about the genocide in Rwanda. It's less a question of colour than why filmmakers so often decide to inject a European (and so 'white') angle into African stories. Perhaps it's the inevitable prism through which non-African filmmakers will always view the region, taking into account the commercial pressures and motivations that drive the industry. But it's a shame that historical accounts and tales of Europeans abroad dominate English-language views of a continent which cries out for attention.

That said, 'Last King' is a subtler affair than this might suggest. Unlike the heroes of 'Shooting Dogs', its lead is a naive doctor who fails to see beyond Amin's charisma. The character of Nicholas Garrigan holds a mirror to the West's initial reaction to Idi Amin, and reflects the attitude of too many filmmakers to Africa: stunning landscapes, great people, astonishing history, but ultimately a place that's too tough and complicated to really get to grips with.

'The Last King of Scotland' screens on Oct 18 and 21, 'Catch A Fire' on Oct 31 and Nov 1, 'Bamako' on Oct 21 and 'Dry Season' on Oct 28 and 30. All films open widely next year. 'Eye on Africa' is at the NFT on Oct 21.

• 
•