Continental drift

Home is where the art is at the 15th New York African Film Festival.

“The net of what constitutes African cinema is huge.” So says Mahen Bonetti, founder and director of the New York African Film Festival, which this year celebrates its 15th anniversary, beginning April 9 at the Walter Reade Theater and wrapping up at the French Institute Alliance Française and BAM in late May.

The current lineup, which includes the films of nations ranging from Rwanda and Burkina Faso to Belgium and Turkey, supports her claim—and underscores the impetus for the original festival in 1993. Back then, Bonetti explains by phone, “the famine in Ethiopia drew worldwide attention [to Africa], mostly from celebrities, and at the same time African-American was becoming an acceptable demarcation. But there was no voice for Africans in the discussion.” The raging success of that and subsequent fests has more than remedied the situation. “More Africans than ever are able to give their perspectives on the African diasporic experience,” Bonetti says with infectious enthusiasm.

Several of this year’s perspectives take the form of traditional documentaries that serve as historical primers, buoyed by intimate, firsthand recollections. Jihan El Tahir’s sprawling, inspiring Cuba: An African Odyssey offers a scrappy explication of Cuba’s support of African independence movements during the Cold War, while Gül Büyükbese Muyan’s revelatory Baa Baa Black Girl explores the Ottoman Empire’s slave trade from the point of view of Mustafa Olpak, a dark-skinned Istanbul marble cutter (the film’s title is an epithet from his childhood) whose African grandfather was a domestic slave. Yanks Diane Seligsohn and Richard Rein take a more academic tack with “The African Slave Trades: Across the Indian Ocean,” the brief inaugural installment of a series of docs narrated by Nobel Prize–winning poet, playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka (who’ll discuss the film after its Saturday 12 screening). Soyinka’s independent research on the subject dovetailed with that of the filmmakers, who approached him to participate in their project. “By one of those remarkable coincidences,” the author says in a telephone interview, “I was involved with this unspoken aspect of the African diaspora, so to speak.”

On the fiction front, Charles Burnett’s Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation is an earnest, doggedly straightforward biopic of that country’s first president, Samuel Nujoma (effectively played as an adult by Carl Lumbly); while fiercely humane, it lacks Burnett’s customary raw grace. Indeed, Congolese Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda’s stark and complex Juju Factory, which combines documentary footage with a fiction narrative about a writer (Dieudonné Kabongo) struggling with the representation of Brussels’ ethnically diverse Matonge district, is arguably more Burnettesque in its demanding mixture of the intractably personal and the political.

Other entries reflect the degree to which African film has grown in the last decade and a half. “What’s changed is the production [methods],” Bonetti says. “People are no longer turning up their noses at digital video. So the Nigerians”—whose wildly successful film industry, affectionately or derisively known as Nollywood, is based on quick-and-dirty DV filmmaking—“were ahead of their time,” she chuckles. Soyinka is less guarded on the change: “There was a period in the late ’60s when there was a very artistic approach to African films,” he says. “Very well crafted, very well thought-out, very low-budget. Lately, there’s been a preponderance of exports under the horrendous name Nollywood—which I find despicable—[that are] economically interesting, but artistically abysmal.” (The U.S. doc Welcome to Nollywood breaks this West African phenomenon down, but the festival remains curiously devoid of genuine examples with which to make up your own mind.)

Perhaps the most convincing case for a burgeoning African pop cinema is Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s lavishly stylized sci-fi farce Les Saignantes, which evokes Ousmane Sembene (a tribute to whom will close out the the French Institute’s portion of the fest, next month) by way of Olivier Assayas and Shinya Tsukamoto. Set in 2025, this thriller follows two high-priced prostitutes (the wonderful Adèle Ado and Dorylia Calmel) on a body-dump mission that morphs into a spree of fetishistic sexuality and radical politics, played out with a garish comic-book palette.

Clearly, Bonetti’s summation of the NYAFF is apt: “It’s passion that drives it still.”

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