Black Harvest International Film and Video Festival
A personal documentary (1996) by Macky Alston about his family’s history as slave owners in North Carolina. (6:00)
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Moussa Sene Absa’s French-Senegalese film comments on the problems of a developing Africa. Daam, an idealistic politician from the town of Tableau Ferraille (whose name means “junk scene”), ascends to power and tangles with a local construction firm, President & Company. The personal and the political become ensnarled as President wins a bridge contract by bribing one of Daam’s two wives for confidential information and Daam then faces corruption charges. The film itself is a nuanced tableau of the conflicts faced by contemporary Africans, but the camera rarely does more than center the action on the screen. On the same program, Avril Russell’s short Revolver, a quirky but chaotic view of the diverse characters who call a nighttime radio DJ in Britain. (FC) (7:45)
This 1996 Zimbabwean film, directed by Tsitsi Dangarembga and sponsored by several development agencies, is weighed down by its good intentions. Three rural children are orphaned when their parents die of AIDS; after an uncle and the neighbors abandon them (signaling the breakdown of traditional social structures) the daughter is forced into prostitution, and the older son seeks his fortune on the streets of Harare. Though it effectively portrays the boy’s life in the street gangs of the capital and the girl’s entrapment by an older man, the film is a mess, a pastiche of visual styles and preachy songs that rather ridiculously delineate the social issues. On its own, however, the sound track offers an interesting selection of contemporary Zimbabwe music. On the same program, two shorts: Rachel Liebert and Barbara Parker’s Undertaker and Omonike Akinyemi’s Medusa Talks. (FC) (4:00)
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10
