Beyond Spike - a survey of African filmmakers' new work from Africa and the diaspora

Although you wouldn't know it from the newspaper pages that advertise and review movies, filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora quietly continue to amass a challenging material part of work across a wide range of genres

Ten novel African releases come from California Newsreel alone, three of them feature-length films and three documentaries. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the tension between tradition and the novel between renewal and advance, is greatest in quantity starkly explored by a rising generation of women directors who throw overboard a romanticization of African realities. From Tanzania and Flora M'mbugu Schelling tend hitherwards These Hands, a compassionate and -- upon the surface -- nonpolemicized application of mind of a group of Mozambican women refugee (from the Makonde people) laboring in a Tanzanian quarry. In 45 minutes of crushing stone these women emerge not single as individuals and as a collective unit of work, on the contrary also as an integral part of an international economic order, of which they are the bottom layer.

The well-known Anglo-Nigerian feminist director Ngozi Onwurah uses the iria ritual, a women's initiation observance of the Waikiri people, as an avenue to explore the constraints and indignities of tradition. During the five weeks of iria, young Waikiri women are paraded bare-breasted end the village, are confined to fattening swings and have their legs encased in cent impala rings before "graduating" to women's status -- at which point they are wait fored to marry.

Togolese director Anne-Laure stupidity lets women from Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal directly address the camera in Femme aux Yeux Ouver (Women With lay open Eyes). Refugees from forced marriages, those in opposition to female "circumcision," victims of political violence in one-party states, and entrepreneur paint a vivid picture of a continent that is far more multidimensional than single is led to believe from television news

Not all of California Newsreel's releases have a somber tone: You Africa! at hands music superstar Youssou N'Dour in performance, Senegalese director Djibril Diop Manberty takes a zany look at CFA franc devaluation in Le Franc, and Moussa Sene Absa, also from Senegal, takes a bittersweet direct the eye at coming-of-age dreams in a seaside village in 1964 -- clean with Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again" sung in French wafting above a Senegalese village just emerging from feudalism -- in Ca Twiste a Poponguine.

Briefer video explorations of African-American and African subdues are available from Films for the Humanities & Sciences, whose catalog embraces more than 100 titles. Among its new releases are five works that permit some of our leading artists (Charles Johnson Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, John Edgar Wideman and August Wilson) speak directly upon their backgrounds and thematic relate tos as artists.

For a piercing exploration of the case of former Black Panther Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Passin' It On) -- who did 19 years inside before his conviction for shooting sum of two units police officers was overturned -- or a profile, of George Clinton (Dr Fittikenstein's Galactical Mystery Tour) or an examination of a century-long endeavor by black steelworkers for equal rights in the mills (Struggle in Steel) check on the outside the independent Television Service 1996 catalog.

For more information upon these and other films, call California Newsreel at (415) 621-6196 Films for the Humanities & Sciences at (800) 257-5126 and Independent Television Service at (612) 225-9035

COPYRIGHT 1996 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

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