The African Diaspora Film Festival, making its Chicago debut after more than a decade in New York City, runs Friday through Thursday, June 20 through 26, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $7, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114. Films marked with an * are highly recommended.
The Paradise of the Fallen Angels
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A marvel for eye and ear, this superior animated feature by French filmmaker Michel Ocelot adapts a West African folktale about an inquisitive, fearless boy who breaks a beautiful sorceress’s spell over his village. In Ocelot’s hands the tale stresses the virtues of patience, determination, and independent thinking, though it’s subtly propelled by themes that range from the tribal to the universal. The vividly colorful animation is not only riveting but highly attuned to African culture, drawing inspiration from ancient Egyptian art and African sculpture, as well as the work of Gustave Moreau and Henri Rousseau. In French with subtitles. 79 min. (TS) (3:00)
Tattoo Bar
Born in Burkina Faso but now living in Paris, director Dani Kouyate is the son of a griot, a traditional African musician and storyteller, and his 2001 feature uses a seventh-century myth to comment on the power struggles, bogus moral authority, and perpetuation of lies that still plague many African nations. An emperor, hoping to reaffirm his mandate from the people, decides to sacrifice a virgin to the python god, but the unlucky virgin goes into hiding while her soldier sweetheart rushes back from the fort to rescue her. Kouyate is rather lackadaisical in laying out his subplots (a general puts the affairs of the state above his family, court counselors conspire to suppress a madman who speaks the truth); however, in the final third the elemental power of his storytelling takes over, pulling together a spellbinding tapestry of motives and dilemmas. In Bambara with subtitles. 96 min. (TS) (9:00)
Call me Eurocentric, but the story told by this 2002 Senegalese video is so Dickensian it could have been serialized in a Victorian newspaper. Based on journalistic exposes of abusive Koranic schools, it follows the trials of a young boy in Dakar (Doudou Guillaume Faye) entrusted by his parents to a Fagin-like teacher (Bassirou Diakhate) who sends his pupils out into the street to beg and beats them if they return without his daily tribute of 200 francs. The boy is befriended by a kindly street merchant, but after he hits the jackpot with a well-placed bet on the American Grand Prix his slimy teacher comes looking for him, eager to claim the cash. The direction and camerawork are rudimentary at best, but the details of street life seem authentic, and I was hooked by the bipolar tale of an innocent caught between pure and corrupt adults. In Wolof and French with subtitles. 85 min. (JJ) (3:00)
MONDAY, JUNE 23
