Coloring the blank screen
By Ed Rampell
The 18th annual Pan African Film and Arts Festival, which takes place yearly during Black History Month, is one of Los Angeles’ cultural jewels. Arguably America’s top black movie event, PAFF is a leading U.S. showcase for independent, studio, student, foreign (especially from Africa), political and progressive pictures. Many movies have their U.S. debuts at this venue, and over the years some have found distribution deals.
From Feb. 10-17 PAFF screened 125-plus features, shorts, documentaries and videos from the neighborhood to Mother Africa to the black Diaspora. PAFF also included entertainment industry-oriented panel discussions, an arts exhibit and awards ceremony.
This well-attended black-themed cultural extravaganza is the vision of founder Ayuko Babu, a former Black Panther Party member. Appropriately enough, 41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers, which is as exciting as any Hollywood shoot-’em-up, won PAFF’s Audience Favorite Award Documentary. The award was presented by the actor, CCH Pounder, who, fittingly, plays the wife of the indigenous inhabitants’ chief in the anti-colonial sci-fi blockbuster, Avatar. 41st & Central is directed by Gregory Everett, son of ex-Panther Jeffrey Everett, who is among the doc’s interviewees providing eyewitness accounts, along with Panther icons Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins and longtime political prisoner, Geronimo Pratt (AKA Geronimo Ji Jaga). The two hour-plus film is a riveting saga of the creation of the Panthers in Oakland and the black power organization’s spread to Southern California. The doc recounts the socialist-oriented Panthers’ clash with the so-called “pork chop” cultural nationalists of Ron Karenga’s US Organization, which apparently led to the 1968 shootings of Carter and Huggins at UCLA.
The film’s title refers to the climactic shoot-out between LAPD and Panthers at their L.A. HQ at 41st and Central. One of the survivors of the tense confrontation declares onscreen that during this violent five or so hour standoff he never felt freer, as he was a black man deciding who would and would not enter the Panther office, which was aerial bombed during the armed clash. While 41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers is indeed a story about heroic resistance, it’s also a cautionary tale about reckless bravado and an implicit critique of the Panthers’ philosophy of what Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton dubbed “revolutionary suicide.” In revolution the goal is to kill your enemy, not get killed. In any case, after PAFF’s screening the onscreen events – plus the plight of African Americans today – was discussed by a historic panel that included ex-Panthers, a US Organization representative and current City Councilperson Bernard Parks.
This year PAFF’s Opening Night Gala was the civil rights drama, Blood Done Sign My Name, about 1970s community organizers, such as Dr. Ben Chavis (Nate Parker) who became the NAACP’s executive director and participated in a post-screening panel.
Other powerful nonfiction films screened at PAFF included Freedom Riders, which details the dramatic campaign to desegregate the Deep South largely by committed young black and white students who violated apartheid-like racial segregation laws by riding Greyhound and Trailways buses below the Mason-Dixon line in 1961. Stirring, heart rending archival and news footage is combined with contemporary interviews with freedom riders, such as John Lewis, who went from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman to Congressperson. The most important lesson Freedom Riders teaches is how a small yet devoted cadre of freedom fighters can change and reset the government and public’s agendas to focus on otherwise overlooked issues.
Additional docs from that struggle included Good Fight: James Farmer, Remembers the Civil Rights Movement and Soundtrack for a Revolution, about the role songs such as “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome” played in the people’s crusade to end Jim Crow. GO-BAMA Between Hope and Dreams is Afro-German filmmaker A. Rahman Satti’s account of Obama’s presidential campaign in America and Germany.
Part of its internationalist vision, PAFF has a history of showing South Pacific films, such as this year’s Forgotten Bird of Paradise, a short documentary about the struggle of the West Papuan people, who are Melanesians, against their Indonesian colonizers. Caribbean pictures are screened too, including many Cuban films over PAFF’s 18 years. Haiti: The Sleeping Giant covers that troubled island’s history all the way from slavery to the anti-French uprisings to the recent earthquake. Proceeds from the PAFF’s screening ticket sales were donated to the Haitian recovery effort. On the other side of the world, another former French colony was featured in Clay Claiborne’s Vietnam: American Holocaust, narrated by noted activist and actor, Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now).
While Hollywood has made features about genocide in Africa, Rwanda: Beyond the Deadly Pit is directed by Gilbert Ndahayo, a survivor of that mass murder, who confronts, on-camera, his parents’ killers, in a very personal nonfiction work.
Probably the most controversial film screened this year at PAFF was the Australian documentary, Stolen, which, according to co-director Daniel Fallshaw, started out as a documentary about the plight of people in refugee camps as a result of the West Sahara liberation movement against Morocco led by the Polisario. But, he said, in the process of filming, Fallshaw and co-director Violeta Ayala purportedly stumbled upon something quite unsettling: the existence of slavery in these resettlement centers, with some blacks owned by Arabs in the camps. (Perhaps, as Regis Debray put it, “Revolution In the Revolution” is needed?)
Among PAFF’s fiction films this year was Hurricane Season, which like the Nelson Mandela drama, Invictus, and The Blind Side, is a black-themed crowd pleaser based on a true story about how sports can inspire. Forest Whitaker is a natural portraying real life coach, Al Collins, in post-Katrina New Orleans, whose “never say die” spirit rallies his basketball team and his ravaged city -- similar to the Saints victory in 2010’s Super Bowl.
As usual, PAFF presented a number of African features. Daniel Kamwa’s Mah Saah-Sah is an entertaining look at sexual customs and political corruption in Cameroon that also wryly illustrates how Africa’s cinema is influenced by Hollywood. Kamwa’s pic actually ends up becoming a clever African reworking of the 1967 Dustin Hoffman classic, The Graduate.
Similarly, Minky Schlesinger’s Gugu & Andile is the best remake of Romeo and Juliet since West Side Story, transporting Shakespeare’s romance from Verona to South Africa. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the anti-apartheid struggle, with racist whites whipping up tribalism in a divide and conquer campaign, Gugu & Andile’s grand finale is twice as tragic as Shakespeare’s.
The Kenyan movie, From A Whisper, is a sensitive drama about the impact the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi had on Africans. Wanuri Kahiu’s film won PAFF’s Best Feature Narrative Award and closed the festival with an encore screening.
