PAN AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL 2011: OVERVIEW

Clint Dyer puts the SUS in suspect.

Plenty to fix for 20

By Ed Rampell

I’ve been reviewing the Pan African Film Festival for around a decade and have usually overlooked its various bureaucratic and logistical snafus in my generally positive reports. But despite my years of coverage, this February I was denied a press pass to attend all of the screenings and received a number of mixed signals regarding my covering the film festival. Nevertheless I was admitted to the films I wanted to see during the festival, which ran Feb. 16-23, and invited to some parties and other special events.

However, factoring in the distance I’d have to travel to the Culver Plaza Theatre, the rising cost of gas, the fact that it’s very difficult to sell stories about this highly specialized event and the repeat hassles I kept having with PAFF bureaucracy, I reached the tipping point and went for one day only. 

My reaction was not extraordinary either. One of my editors had stopped going to PAFF altogether long ago because of the bureaucratic headaches and rigmarole so you might wonder why this movie masochist even bothered at all. The reason is simple: This black-themed film fete opens a window onto specialty cinema that is often otherwise unavailable to Angelenos. To be sure, PAFF screens commercial flicks, too, such as the romcom 35 and Ticking co-starring Tamala Jones of TV’s Castle, which kicked off this year’s fest with an opening night screening that was also its L.A. premiere, while the comedy DWB: Dating While Black had its world premiere at the festival and was its closing night film. But where else can you see indies and docs such as Shaft or Sidney Poitier: The Emergence of Black Masculinity in Comic Books or Mountains That Take Wing – Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation?

Another one of those hard to see documentaries was The Black Mozart in Cuba, a sort of cinematic triple whammy: It was made by filmmakers from Guadeloupe, is a biopic about Joseph Boulogne and offers a revealing, positive look at Cuba. According to Steve James’ documentary, the highly accomplished Boulogne was not only a great classical musician, but also a superb fencer, ladies man and participant in the French Revolution. Who knew? James sheds light on a Black Islander little known and remembered outside of Guadeloupe although, as the doc shows, Boulogne is held in high esteem in that other Caribbean isle, revolutionary Cuba. Hopefully, this highly informative and entertaining doc will help restore Boulogne to his rightful place in history; his colorful life is the stuff that Hollywood movies are made of (well, that is, perhaps, if the hero were white.).

Also having its L.A. premiere at PAFF was The Test, an educational documentary about a program to test for and combat AIDs and malaria in a Kenyan village. While this very conventional doc had lots of information, it was an odd choice to be on a double bill with the upbeat The Black Mozart in Cuba, as it dealt with extremely downbeat subject matter.

SUS is a U.K.-film based on Barrie Keefe’s play set on election eve, 1979 -- the day that the empire struck back, when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s Prime Minister. This feature opens cinematically with a montage of the Black Power movement and news footage of the era, but most of the rest of this movie (except for a few flashbacks), written for the screen by the drama’s playwright, is pretty stagey, although well-acted. Nevertheless, SUS is a powerful, harrowing tale based on a true story about a black sus-pect (Clint Dyer) from a Caribbean island who is taken into custody and interrogated in a holding room by two brutal pro-Thatcher racist cops. The movie is a metaphor for the rise of Britain’s “Iron Lady” and her rightwing regime, which empowered police to take off the gloves when dealing with minorities. Director Robert Heath’s gripping picture is another post-9/11 film dealing with the theme of torture, and well worth seeing.

Films such as The Black Mozart in Cuba and SUS are what make PAFF worthwhile and indispensable. However, if festivals are vehicles and films and filmmakers are passengers, the latter are ill served by drivers who don’t know the directions to destinations. Unnecessarily alienating people who have barrels of ink at their disposal is never a wise strategy. But worse than this, thwarting reviewers from covering films does a grave disservice to artists who work so hard to bring their work to the public. Movies and moviemakers deserve better. Hopefully these snafus will be worked out in time for PAFF’s 20th anniversary.