OUT OF AFRICA no, not THAT movie...

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OUT OF AFRICA

What does it mean when white americans pronounce evil on africans? and why is it happening so much these days?
by Jacquie Jones

"They are truly evil, evil people. They'll sit there and smile at you and shake your hand, but you can see it in their eyes, you can see it ... it's like seeing the devil.” Brian Siedle in The Devil Came on Horseback.

A couple of months ago, I attended the tenth installment of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. I was excited to be going finally since, for years, I’d heard about it from filmmakers who say it is absolutely the best venue to have their films seen by serious consumers of non-fiction fare and television programmers as well as critics who might actually
write about their earnest, often political works. When I arrived to find out that this year’s festival had a special sidebar of “African stories,” I couldn’t believe my luck as contemporary African life and culture is an area of particular interest to me and one that I feel needs a lot more exploration in American venues.

So, you can imagine how disappointed I was to discover that not a single one of these films was what I would consider an “African film” – not a single one was producer or directed by an African filmmaker or had very many Africans if any on their production teams, for that matter. And when the whole group of
these producers at Full Frame were questioned about this issue of authorship, they began to talk spontaneously in one voice, it seemed to me, about the “giving” campaigns they had each set up to help the communities that their films exposed.

What?

I would certainly never suggest that documentary filmmakers shouldn’t get paid. As one myself, I know the often thankless work that’s involved in wrestling stories out of unwilling interview subjects and of sacrificing your own security, on many levels, in service to a story that you believe passionately ought
to be told. But the people in your film give too, almost always in more profound ways than you ever will as a director. And, I don’t care what the film is about, if you’re getting paid and they aren’t, then you aren’t doing them any favor. Don’t kid yourself.

In fact, with the exception of one of these films, they were all films by white filmmakers that explored one African problem or another: diseases, the various civil wars and their attendant fallout, the excesses of an African monarch. One film was about genital mutilation; another was about black AIDS orphans
adopted by white South Africans. This pathetic list goes on and on … unfortunately.

So, why now?

Take the issue of African refugee-ism about which there has been a veritable onslaught of films in recent years, including Rain in a Dry Land and Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars (two out of only 14 titles on PBS’s P.O.V. series this summer), the award-winning Lost Boys of Sudan, Roger Weisberg and Tod
Lending's Roosevelt's America, and several others. Yet, during the same period of time, “the global refugee population has fallen by one third and now stands at the lowest level since 1980,” according to the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR). And the areas of most concern for the UNHCR, after Afghanistan, are the former Soviet states, not Africa.

I have to admit that some of these refugee films are pretty good. I particularly liked Refugee All Stars. But where are the films about primitive looking people in Eastern Europe displaced to a neighboring, hostile land or awaiting salvation by some well-meaning American church group? That’s what I want to
know.

But, OK, that was one film festival. I moved on.

But then came the Cannes Film Festival, which, for the past ten years, has failed to admit a single film from the African continent directed by a black filmmaker to its prestigious, juried competition. Nothing good enough in a decade?

Films about Africa are a different story, it seems.

In Hollywood, the Constant Gardner, Tsotsi and this year’s Blood Diamond, two Oscar winners and a nominee, all fiction by white directors that give us more emotional grist for the mill, feature poor, underdeveloped Africans caught in complicated mazes of global intrigue and greed, far beyond their simple ability to comprehend it all.

So despite all of the evidence I’d seen to the contrary on my couple of dozen trips to Africa, I was starting to think that maybe all of these well-intentioned, human rights-loving white filmmakers were just more willing than I am to see the twisted and harsh realities that abound in Africa these days.

But then I read about this year’s Festival of Pan African Cinema in
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Somehow, they managed to find nearly 200 films good enough to show to audiences of international film buyers and ordinary movie lovers. At
FESPACO, “virtually all the films come from directors holding African passports,” according to an article in the Toronto Star.

The top prize at FESPACO went to a film about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. So, it’s not as if the African directors are just turning a blind eye to what’s really going on. But African life does not equal African pain.

In just the past ten years, the Nigerian film industry has become the third largest movie economy in the world, generating close to $300 million dollars a year in revenue, telling African stories to African people. Some of them, to be sure, are about war and torture and rape and disease. But more of them are about families and careers that seem to be going off track in one way or
another. They are about dreams people had as children and how they did or did not come true. They are about failed romances. Sin and salvation. They are about life. But you will not find these films in any mainstream film festival in the United States. What you will find, however, are not one but two films about
these films made by white American filmmakers, both of whom live in New England.

Now, when an area of the world so far off the ordinary white American’s radar screen suddenly starts to dominate the most rarified and self-professed “liberal” enclaves of popular culture – the film festival – we’ve got to wonder what’s really going on here.

I was sitting next to a very highly regarded black filmmaker at the “African panel” at Full Frame and just as the questions from the audience started to heat up, he leaned over and said, “You just wait, any minute now, somebody’s going to say, ‘Africans are people, too,’ as though that explains everything.”

It didn’t even take a minute.

Do we really still need to be told that?

(Jacquie Jones is a filmmaker and executive director of the National Black
Programming Consortium)

© 2007 Johnson Publishing Company, Inc.