Los Angeles’s Pan-African Film Festival is currently in effect (February 10-17). I have a long-lasting love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, their website (despite improvements this year) remains hard to navigate, is rife with typos, incomplete information and omissions. In other words, it’s inexcusably bad. How about a calendar, folks?
In addition, every year I take issue with the selection of films. The programmers have a very odd definition of “Pan-African.” Last year was the worst, with the focus on the African diaspora coming at the expense of even a single African feature. Thankfully, this year there are several African features but still some questionable choices. It’s nice to see films about Africa’s many-but-usually-ignored non-black people, such as Finemachiyamoché, about Moroccan Jews, and Florida Road, starring members of South Africa’s sizable south Asian population. On the other hand, Forgotten Bird of Paradise, about Papua is, regardless of its possible merits, an embarrassing example of the organizers' colorist, transracialist equation of African-ness with pigmentation rather than actual African ancestry. The inclusion of an Iranian film, The Stoning of Soraya M., is a real head-scratcher. Are they equating Islam with African-ness now? Another odd choice is Darfur, directed by German hack Uwe Boll (BloodRayne 3, House of the Dead, Postal Zombie Massacre and other garbage).
And finally, this year the festival has been re-located from its natural home, the black cultural capital of LA -- Leimert Park -- to the mostly white Westside neighborhood of Culver City.
Nonetheless, for all its short-comings, the Pan-African Film Festival is still always worth checking out. Since New Yorker Films went out of business and as long as Criterion continues their policy of not releasing African films, the festival offers one of the few opportunities for many of these films to be seen.
Aldewolem Trailer
The "Pan-African” shorts are: Amazon Women, Angel Wings Brown, BFF, Brothers Incorporated, Calling My Children, Click, Cuts, Enter the Preacher, Entertainer’s Eulogy, Garrett’s Gift, Good Intentions, The Impressions Live, Johnny B. Homeless, Jerusalem, The Journey of Henry Box Brown, Letters from Home, Nose Candy, Omar Saved from Cheating, Operation Small Axe, Paper Mouse, Pastor Stuart, Performance, Popous and the Kids He Loves to Hate, The Phone Call, Raglin Tales, Someone Heard My Cry, That Other Voice, Three Faces of Evelyn, Undisclosed and Watts and Volts.
My American Nurse 2 trailer
From a Whisper trailer
As for the African documentaries, there are a healthy number. Most of the following documentaries aren’t African productions but do deal with African subject matter:
As stated earlier, a year after a Pan-African Film Festival without a single African feature, this year there are thankfully a healthy number of African features. Thanks to an over-reliance on Nigeria and South Africa and a complete absence from Africa’s artistic powerhouses Egypt, Mali and Senegal, most of the films look like populist commercial fare rather than high art. They are Aldewolem (Ethiopia), Cindy’s Note (Nigeria), Coeur de lion (Burkina Faso), Finemachiyamoché (Morocco), From a Whisper (Kenya), Gugu & Andile (South Africa), Mah Saah-Sah (Cameroon), My American Nurse 2 (Nigeria), Nothing But the Truth (South Africa), The Okra Principle (Nigeria), Red Mistake (Ethiopia), Soul Diaspora (Nigeria), Soul Sisters (Nigeria) and A Sting in a Tale (Ghana).
The Okra Principle trailer
