Toronto With A Dash Of Diop

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Laura U. Marks

Toronto International Film Festival

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

September 9-18, 1999

It is best to arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) with a careful road map that includes room for diversion. My map this year took me to the Planet Africa program with detours into documentary, experimental work and a few tailgate picnics of international cinema.

Planet Africa was programmed again this year by British curator and writer June Givanni, and one of her revelations was that hardy and mutant blossoms are rising from the scorched earth of apartheid. The South African series "SA Short and Curlies," financed primarily by Film Four (UK) and the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation, showed the exciting directions in which film and television are moving in the Mandela era. Three selections from the series depicted a brutal and brutalized nation, in styles utterly devoid of sentiment. All share searing performances and startling cinematography. If this flowering of uncompromised vision is permitted to continue, South Africa will have a world-class cinema. Interestingly, two of the films dealt with the violence that haunts white South Africans. In Lucky Day (1999) by Brian Tilley, a black day laborer is hired by a white farmer for what turns out to be a grisly job: to absolve the latter of the crime of murdering his child by witnessing his suicide. Tactful editin g makes Lucky Day not sensationalist but deeply eerie. Husk (1998) by Jeremy Handler shows the unique inertia of violence. In a desolate country village, a young woman's father is so drunk and useless that she must use her own wit, and her pet viper, to corner and kill a slimy debt collector. Intercut with this nasty transaction is a scene of her father at a bar, flipping coins into a bottle. The most stomach-churning of these three powerful shorts, Portrait of a Young Man Drowning (1999) by Teboho Mahlatsi, takes place in a South African township scarred by intercommunal violence. The young man of the title is a vicious killer, but, even though the members of the township fear his violent nature, they use it to their advantage by attempting to make him kill an accused rapist, running him out of town when he refuses. The unnerving cinematography by Dewald Aukema conveys the killer's anguish through surreal images, such as the image of him dipping his clean hands into a basin only to bloody the water.

Givanni spoke with me about the changing conditions for African diaspora filmmakers. In Britain, on top of general funding cuts, minority filmmakers no longer receive special government funding, making it more difficult for black filmmakers to produce and find distributors for their films. Distributors deem these films' above-the-line costs too high and therefore do not promote them except as a "labor of love." The solution to the distribution problem, Givanni speculated, is a time-consuming but carefully tailored promotional program. Givanni's choices this year struck a careful balance between innovation and audience appeal, including African American independents, mainstream African American films that manipulated conventions (such as Dwayne Johnson-Cohran's Love and Action in Chicago [1999], a screwball romantic comedy), a single British film and those African films that stood out at FESPACO earlier this year. Also included in the festival was Third World Cop (1999), Jamaica's interesting nod toward the m ainstream: a sort of Caribbean Shaft in which a cop named Capone uses suspect methods to deal with organized crime in Kingston and is a magnet to the ladies.

For countries that have been damaged either by tyranny or democracy, the question of justice and the right to serve it is a bitter one. Vigilante justice was a theme of a number of third world films at this year's festival. Cameroon's Jean-Marie Teno, director of Afrique, je te plumerai (1993), presented Chef! (Chief!, 1999), a documentary essay on the power of chiefs at all levels. It begins in violence as the filmmaker confronts a mob trying to kill a boy for stealing a couple of chickens on the day of a ceremony commemorating local tribal chiefs. It extends to a discussion of wife abuse sanctioned by civil law, illustrated by an amusing/appalling wedding ceremony in which the festivities are briefly supended while the officiant reads off the husband's rights over his wife. "If every husband is a chief, then Cameroon is a nation of seven million chiefs," the filmmaker observes. The activist tone of Chef!, which also documents the abuse of prisoners, offers hope for a system less enmeshed in corruption, but Teno's chilling linkage of injustice at family, village and state levels is the film's most volatile aspect.

The jewel of the festival for this writer was the final film by Senegal's Djibril Diop Mambety, who died in 1998 at the age of 44. La petite vendeuse de soleil (The little girl who sold the sun, 1999), second in Mambety's projected trio "Histoires des petits gens" (Histories of little people), was completed after his death by his brother Wasis Diop. It concerns Sili, a little girl who is crippled but nevertheless has the gumption to compete with the tough boys who sell newspapers on the streets of Dakar. The boys beat her up and steal her Sun newspapers, but Sili brandishes a crutch and cries, "We will continue!" with a radiant smile that gave me chronic goosebumps. Wasis Diop, a musician, worked closely with his brother on all of his films, and his hybrid and percussive soundtrack drives La petite vendeuse de soleil. Packed with keen and loving observations of the "little people" of Dakar, the film is a final gift from a filmmaker who will be sorely missed.