Festival Features Independent Black Films

The fourth Pan African Film Festival, the nation’s largest festival of independent black films from around the world, will present more than 50 features, documentaries and shorts Tuesday through Feb. 18 at the Magic Johnson Theatres in Baldwin Hills’ Crenshaw Plaza.

As usual, there is much to choose from, much that is outstanding and much that takes the audience into a wide range of cultures. A few films have had limited previous exposure, and most will have repeated screenings. Many of those available for preview were impressive.

“The Cry From the Heart” (Tuesday at 8:30 p.m.) is a gentle charmer from Burkina Faso’s Idrissa Ouedraogo, one of Africa’s most acclaimed filmmakers. It concerns a little boy (Said Diarra) uprooted from his idyllic village when his father sends for him and his mother to come live in a French town, where the father is beginning to prosper as an auto mechanic.

The boy has terrifying visions of being pursued by a hyena until he’s befriended by one of his father’s employees, a somewhat individualistic loner (veteran French actor Richard Bohringer). Although slight in comparison to Ouedraogo’s earlier “Yaaba” (Thursday at 9 p.m.) and “Tilai” (Thursday following “A Lucy”) it is nonetheless appealing.

Both the 1989 “Yaaba” (“Grandmother”) and “Tilai” (“The Law”) present us with a fresh vision of African tribal life. Ouedraogo combines a simplicity of style with a sensibility of the utmost sophistication to reveal how people we’ve been conditioned to regard as “primitive” actually cope with their lives much as we do. With his acute sense of the visual, he can make his landscapes as expressive as those of Antonioni.

The quietly compassionate “Yaaba” tells of a young boy who makes friends with an old woman regarded as a witch in their native village, while “Tilai” unfolds with the stateliness and inevitability of Greek tragedy--but with lots more humor. A young man returns to his native village after a two-year absence to discover that his father has taken his beautiful fiancee as a second wife against her wishes. Soon the two are meeting secretly.

Ouedraogo makes the point that while old laws may be absurdly draconian, we become easily bound to new ones no less cruel and ignorant.

Badha-Rajen Jagnathan’s “A Lucy” (Thursday at 3 p.m.) is a droll, witty, nine-minute short from Mauritius in which three Masai herdsmen heed the spirit of Lucy, who lived 3 million years ago, and rescue her bones from a Paris museum. Dani Kouyate’s leisurely “Keita” (Friday at 7 p.m.) pulls us into the world of the African epic as an elderly griot tells a young boy the origin of his family name, explaining that Sundiata Keita was the 13th century founder of the mighty Mandingo empire.

So caught up is the boy in the tale, which takes days to tell--and which we see in flashbacks--that his schoolwork begins to suffer, suggesting a tug between a materialist present--the boy’s family is well-off--and a spiritual past.

The clash between past and present, the old and the new--a persistent theme in Pan-African cinema--takes a sharper, more comic turn in Pengau Nengo’s “Tinpis Run” (Sunday at 2:45 p.m.), the first 35-mm narrative feature ever made in Papua New Guinea.

It concerns the chief of a country tribe (Leo Konga) who becomes a taxi driver only to have to return to his village to deal with tribal warfare; one minute he’s driving a car, the next he’s leading his men, war-painted and leaf-skirted, into battle with spears and bows and arrows. But is this skirmish over territory really necessary? Both sides begin to wonder. . . .

By far the strongest film previewed was Adzine Melliti Fazai’s autobiographical “Le Magique” (Sunday at 4:45 p.m.). The stunning tale of survival, alternately harsh and tender, features a young Tunisian boy, Deanie (Ahmed Chebil), as one of five brothers who is left behind to fend for himself in his rural village while the rest of his desperately poor family are forced to emigrate to France in order to survive; the plan is that this 10-year-old is to serve as caretaker of his home until it’s sold by a relative.

The vulnerable yet resilient boy’s life is transformed when he hikes to Tunis and discovers the magic of movies.