Former Colonies Take Center Stage

The Nigerian actor Orlando Martins was never a household name. Between 1957 and 1965, he played an African chief five times. He also appeared as an “Elder Negro” in an episode of an obscure British TV show; alongside Audrey Hepburn in the 1959 film “The Nun’s Story” as a servant in the Belgian Congo; and, in his penultimate film, as a modern opposition leader named Dr. Gbenga in 1970’s “Kongi’s Harvest,” based on the play by Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka.The resumé of this unknown actor (who died in 1985) reflects in many ways the secondary, often anonymous role Africans have played in the movies — to say nothing of their own modern history — but it also hints at the continent’s opportunity, in the postcolonial era, to finally make a name for itself.That dialectic has always been at the heart of the New York African Film Festival, which launches its 14th annual program today at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center (and includes two screenings of “Kongi’s Harvest”). This year’s festival is unique in that it coincides with the 50th anniversary of the independence of Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to break free of European (in its case, British) rule. As a result, said Richard Peña, the festival’s director of programming, colonial-era documentary footage is being featured more prominently this year than ever before. But Ghana’s place in the spotlight also points to another noteworthy development in this year’s festival: the robust roster of films from outside Francophone West Africa, which has traditionally been considered the continent’s cinema capital.Does this represent a larger shift in African cinema? It’s worth considering. France, although it originally banned its West African colonies from making films, used its coffers to help make that region the birthplace of African cinema in the late 1960s. Senegal produced the first films — works by Ousmane Sembène, who is often considered the father of African cinema, and Djibril Diop Mambéty — to gain international recognition, and its French-speaking neighbors soon followed suit: Mali’s Souleymane Cissé, Cameroon’s Jean-Marie Téno, and the gifted Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, whose critically vaunted “Bamako” was recently released in New York. Ouagadougou, the capital of the Francophone country of Burkina Faso, has hosted the continent’s largest film festival (FESPACO) since 1969. (One of the main squares in town is even called Place des Cinéastes.)Africa’s former British colonies, on the other hand, have struggled to keep up because they “developed their broadcast media more than their film industries,” Mr. Peña explained. But this year’s AFF lineup, in which roughly half the films hail from Anglophone Africa, suggests these countries have finally started to gain ground.One of the more talked-about entries this year is “Max and Mona,” a South African film that earned Best First Film awards for director Teddy Mattera at the 2004 London Film Festival and at FESPACO two years ago. The hopeful film tells the story of a young villager named Max, (Mpho Lovinga) who possesses a special talent for moving mourners to tears. He migrates to Johannesburg to study medicine but ends up working funerals for cash instead. “Max and Mona” has a pleasant loony streak, but Mr. Mattera’s slick directing style, with its impersonal long shots and ostentatious mise-en-scene, seems better suited to TV commercials or a gangster comedy than the morality tale he signed up to tell.The Ghanian film “Testament” delves into the political cynicism that has dominated that country’s politics in the post-colonial era — or at least until 1988, the year it was made. The fact that it was screened at Cannes two decades ago suggests that Ghana’s visibility on the festival circuit isn’t a new phenomenon, even if the director, John Akomfrah, is actually a Briton of Ghanian heritage.Two shorts programs devoted to African women consist mainly of documentaries made in Zimbabwe and Kenya, while “The Narrow Path,” a fictional film by Tunde Kelani about women in tribal conflict, is an unusually accomplished product of Nigeria’s burgeoning filmmaking machine.Nollywood, as the Nigerian industry is sometimes called, is the world’s third largest film industry and an extraordinary example of a developing country taking entertainment into its own hands. Nigeria produces more than 1,000 movies a year, nearly all of which go straight to video. But should American audiences care? The general consensus seems to be no.A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor described Nollywood as a “slapdash industry, where quantity has long trumped quality.” Mr. Peña said he considers the recent proliferation of Nigerian movies an “interesting phenomenon,” but he added that they are hardly on par with the great films of West Africa. Many American viewers, he noted, have left screenings with an even less charitable conclusion: “commercial garbage.”The festival’s embrace of new territory also includes Arabic-speaking North Africa: Mehdi Charef’s “Daughter of Keltoum” is a featurelength film about a young woman raised in Switzerland who returns to Algeria in search of her mother. The film will be shown during the third festival presentation, which runs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from May 25 to May 28. (The second presentation takes place April 20 and 21 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.)The festival still showcases the rich variety of West African feature filmmaking, even if two of that region’s most notable directors are represented in this year’s program by non-fiction entries that go far beyond West African borders. One is Mr. Téno’s “The Colonial Misunderstanding,” a documentary about Germany’s brutish and short colonial adventure in Africa; another is “Rostov-Luanda,” Mr. Sissako’s utterly absorbing 58-minute chronicle of his search for an old friend in Angola. Made in 1997, this seamless blend of memoir and journalism renders that country’s painful memories of its decades-long civil war (which followed the Portuguese withdrawal in 1974) with a simple, disarming poetry. Like Mr. Sissako’s own “Bamako,” it’s about Africa and beyond, and in the end that matters more than its country of origin.Through April 12 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).

Former Colonies Take Center Stage

Former Colonies Take Center Stage

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