Rostov-Luanda

Abderrahmane Sissako. Rostov-Luanda. Mauritania/Angola/France/Germany, 1997. California Newsreel, 149 Ninth St./420, San Francisco, Calif., 94103. Video. 58 minutes. $195.

At this year's FESPACO, the annual Pan-African film and television festival and the continent's biggest cultural event, Heremakono (Mauritania 2002) bested fifteen other films to take the Stallion of Yennenga prize. This prestigious honor, awarded to the best full-length feature film, went to the director Abderrahmane Sissako, a talented Mauritanian filmmaker now firmly established among Africa's cinema elite. Heremakono, like his previous narrative films, expresses the director's self-identification with the poor and suffering, and, most important, his desire to present Africa as seen through African eyes. This concern is also at the center of his first documentary, Rostov-Luanda, a film that forces one to reconsider preconceptions about the continent and its peoples and preempts any tendency to view matters solely in black and white terms, literally and metaphorically speaking.

Rostov-Luanda is a travelogue of sorts, documenting Sissako's attempt to find Baribanga, an Angolan with whom he attended school in the 1980s in the Soviet Union. His hunt, like his film, is slow-moving and disjointed, yet ultimately rewarding. Sissako begins his search with a call to an old teacher, who sends him a photograph of herself with Sissako and his classmates, including Baribanga, and it progresses from Mauritania to Angola, ending finally in Germany. Sissako first returns to the site of his childhood, Kiffa, in Mauritania, where his relatives do not understand his purpose. Nevertheless, he is off to Angola to, in his words, "live my adventure." Once in Luanda, his search begins in earnest. What follows is a series of interviews, with the old photograph providing the thread for this documentary quest: "Do you recognize this man?" he asks each person he encounters. The first is an apparently successful Angolan woman, who recounts that the Portuguese colonists, like the Angolans, were a "defeated people," and hence were more easily assimilated into the Angolan population than the English and French in neighboring colonial states. Years of strife in the country and on the continent have left her pessimistic, and she holds out little hope for Africa. Interviews with this woman bookend the Angola section of the film, yet ironically she is far more pessimistic than are the poor Angolans who people most of Sissako's adventure.

Along the way the filmmaker meets a large cast of characters: a middle-aged taxi driver; an orphan who wishes he could have been a formula-one race car driver; a street kid who spent time in an orphanage but is now happily enrolled in school; an elderly couple-the husband from Cape Verde and his white wife-who have survived the internal strife of the years since Angola's independence and feel fortunate to be alive; the members of a large and relatively poor white family who are happy to look at Sissako's photograph simply as a relief from the isolation of their existence; a woman who has fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming a teacher and is happy to be in a profession that can do so much good; a fisherman whose life was largely untouched by the violence; and an old woman who muses about how people look at her and think, "poor old woman, poor old woman crippled by the war," until she spring ups and walks and dances, much to their surprise. On his last day in Luanda, Sissako meets with another of his former classmates and learns that his old friend is now living in Berlin. In the end we are allowed only a quick glimpse of Baribanga, from a distance, as Sissako finally accomplishes his goal.

The interviews that make up most of the film appear random, and the viewer, in attempting to make sense of the proceedings, is left piecing together apparently disconnected bits of information. Except for the last interview, there is neither explanation nor apparent reason for Sissako's selection of interviewees. What is constant throughout is the authorial presence; with more than a passing nod to the cinema vérité of Jean Rouch, Sissako removes the barrier between filmmaker and subject. In Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Rouch queried Parisian citizens about their thoughts and feelings at the end of the Algerian war, asking them simply, "Are you happy?" In this film Sissako inquires whether his subjects know Baribanga, but at the same time he also elicits their feelings and thoughts on an independent, albeit strife-ridden, Angola. Sissako's use of the technique is perhaps predictable: Rouch is an important figure in the development of cinema in Africa, having trained pioneers in technique and technology throughout West Africa and the Lusophone countries, as well as helping to establish film production facilities.

The film slowly reveals itself to be more than simply a travelogue or a record of the director's search for a friend. In fact, Sissako's mission is far grander: he wants to see what has become of the country and people that once fueled his revolutionary fervor and dreams of a brighter, postcolonial future for Africa. The dignity of the human spirit and its expression in the hopes of Angola's poor is at the center of Sissako's efforts, and he reveals the travails of the people to be far more complex than simply a conflict between the colonized and their colonial past. For instance, the film shows a very different side of white society in Africa than American audiences, certainly, have been accustomed to-no wealthy landowners or diamond mine tycoons here. The subjects of the film are joined in both their impoverishment and their hope, regardless of color, national origin, or past history. And in their hope, human dignity is redeemed.