A Magical Protection.

Ousmane Sembene was really the first African director to achieve any international prominence. Starting his creative career as a writer, a novelist, he moved into filmmaking with his first feature hitting in 1966. His films won acclaim and attention around the world, seeing him serve prominently on festival juries and picking up prizes right through until his last film in 2004 before his death in 2007.


Moolaadé follows his themes of films with a political and social urgency. One not afraid to speak out, in his final offering to the cinematic universe he tackles the controversial subject of female circumcision, something that seems to be on and off getting much attention in the western world over the last decade. In Sembene's film (which picked up a couple of prizes at Cannes and the NSFC Award for Best Foreign Language Film) we look at how a village possibly on the verge of a cultural shift away from the practice moves through the vilification and exclusion of those opposed, and where the support comes from.

Like so many Sembene films, the protagonist, the strong one, is a woman. Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) is a mother who a number of years before the events in the film refused to have her daughter circumcised, knowing the risk that she may die or that childbirth might become a tortuous procedure for her (more tortuous than I can only imagine it is already...) Six girls are set to be circumcised, but they escape. Two drown themselves in a well rather than submit themselves to what could happen, while the other four run to Collé to seek refuge. She provides this for them in the form of Moolaadé, or magical protection, a rope strung across her property that no one dares to cross. This unleashes a string of problems within the village, with people variously for or against her, some of them women, some of them men. The elders feel that she is bringing shame, and they encourage her husband, who is initially against involvement, to beat her publicly to try and force her to revoke the protection, but when she is close to collapse, having held her ground, a merchant who has previously been friendly with her steps in to stop the spectacle. The repercussions for him are deadly, but the greater good this achieves for the village is obvious.


It is a very different experience watching a film like this shot by a native of the area, starring natives of the area. Unlike, say, Hotel Rwanda, where ostensibly foreigners pitch in with their views on what is going on, Sembene looks at this through the eyes of someone in tune with the traditions and the village politics involved. The correctness or barbarity of the practice is not clearly defined - yes, it is more than likely horrifically wrong, but there is a tradition here, no matter where that tradition came from or how long it has been practiced. There is a level of entrenchment here that has to be recognised and dealt with before the ceremony can be entirely excised. Sembene moves through narrative with his own view quite plainly out on show (with the sympathetic characters being those against the circumcision, and the people in charge of the ceremony portrayed in menacing anonymity) but without ever closing off the alternate angles and viewpoints dictating the arguments for.


And his method of making the film is much more... well, real. The film feels a lot closer to truth, probably due to the much simpler production methods presumably dictated by the resources available to a film of this type and his own understanding of the society he is portraying. Their day to day activities aren't romanticised or even emphasised, simply shown as a backdrop to the dominant narrative, necessities within the film.


Moolaadé emerges from all of this more as an interesting insight, however, than a fascinating motion picture. The entire way along it feels a little emotionally distant, it doesn't quite puncture through to the feeling that one might have expected from something with such a passionate discourse surrounding it. It somehow felt light. It didn't quite make it all the way through to the dramatic potential of the material. I'm sure this in many ways had to do with the relative inexperience of much of the cast and the constrictions of local, truthful filmmaking with the region, but I feel like it could have cut through a little closer to the bone.


That being said, it is a bold statement, definitely valuable even as a launching point for further discussion of the subject both cinematically and generally. And as far as an example of how films can be made in Africa by Africans, there are far worse possibilities. The film definitely warrants closer inspection of Sembene's back catalogue. 3.5 stars.

We're Here As Peace Keepers, Not As Peace Makers.

I remember, barely, when the unrest in Rwanda was going on back in 1994. I can barely remember the first Gulf War, I was, what, six when that all started going down, so the Rwandan genocide is the first major political and military incident of global importance that touched my consciousness. I was horrified reading what was happening there, seeing images on the news, as much as I didn't understand the historical context or even how these atrocities fit in within the greater sphere of war crimes through history.


So it was with some excitement that I finally approached Hotel Rwanda, it being a film about a period that I could, to some degree, relate to through my own memory, diluted as it is by time and countless other wars and massacres that have filled the intervening years.

Paul (Don Cheadle) is the hotel manager of the Sabena Hôtel des Milles Collines, a Dutch owned hotel in Rwanda. He is a Hutu, married to a Tutsi, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo.) As the Hutu rebellion rises, Paul finds himself in an unlikely position - he is decidedly apolitical, not seeing a racial difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis, or at least not caring about it. As Hotel Manager at this prestigious hotel (which is currently housing the UN) he has many influential friends politically and militarily who afford him respect, partly, I'm sure, due to his ability to supply them with fine scotch and cigars. So as the uprising grows more forceful, and with him being left in charge of the hotel as all foreign nationals flee, the hotel becomes a refuge for Tutsis seeking an escape from the marauding militia.


Amazingly, that paragraph fairly neatly sums up the entire theme of the film. It is a very simple concept, but the individual events that play out within that narrative framework provide a hell of a lot of dramatic tension and keep the story moving inexorably towards what may well be a hideous and bloody finale. Let's not forget that this genocide was epic, a serious and scarily effective policy of ethnic cleansing. Somewhere in the vicinity of a million people were killed over the course of this exercise if my memory serves correct - that's a vast number in quite a short space of time.


It is an important and a powerful film. Cheadle initially looks to struggle with the gravity associated with his role, doing his best to look serious and play the powerful dramatic lead, but settles in to make Paul his own by the end. It's a good performance, if not one for the history books. Okonedo is in control the whole time but spends too much of the film bordering on hysterical, right from the get-go. Nick Nolte as the UN Colonel helping Paul and his refugees out wherever he could was excellent in his brash professionalism, letting his emotions spill over only once or twice and with a perfect pitch. It was Jaoquin Phoenix's foreign journalist, however, who really got me. A very small role, as he departs the hotel his underplayed anger and forceful delivery of the line 'Oh, God, I'm so ashamed' brought tears instantly to my eyes and brings goosebumps back to my arms even now. It is the ultimate in white guilt - where the fuck were we? How could we have let that happen, knowing what was going on moment by moment, especially early on?


All in all, the themes and the steady performances kept the film up to a decent level. Visually, Hotel Rwanda looked quite flat. There was nothing interesting at all in the photography by Robert Fraisse. But the script was good, co-written by director Terry George, who also let the film run itself along, not really interfering to give the story centre stage.

So, not a brilliant film technically, but a strong one emotionally. 4 stars.