Father Geek here with Dr. SOTHA and an inspired Rigobert Song, and their weekly report for our regular Africa-AICN Column...

DR.SOTHA back from obscurity once again. I have been absent for 2 weeks, but this time I have good reason. Simply put, I have been harvesting sun dried tomatoes in my backyard behind the labs. This process requires me to not leave the tomato seeds unattended for more than 36 seconds in their first 14 days. Nurse Hollis and Paige Marshal have been repaying their debt back to me by performing lurid carnival acts in the lab’s reception. There has been a notable rise in business. Back to the sun-dried tomatoes; it is a project aimed at curing once and for all dangerous acidic levels in people over the age of 96. Critical acclaim and worldwide adulation is sure to follow. But I’m just in it for those adorable pensioners.

Email us at africaaicn@hotmail.com and put in a bid for the first batch of sun-dried tomatoes.

SOUTH AFRICA

* Monday 23 September marks the first day of filming on Proteus, a feature film directed by John Greyson and Jack Lewis and produced by Steven Markovitz, Platon Trakoshis and Anita Lee. Proteus is set to change the way we view history. Historian and filmmaker Jack Lewis was fascinated by a court record in the Cape Archives, dated 18 August 1735, giving judgment in the case of two Robben Island prisoners. Dutch sailor Rijkhaart Jacobsz and Khoe convict Class Blank received extreme sentences for what the court called ‘the abominable and unnatural crime of Sodomy’. Proteus is an official South Africa/Canada co-production, with financing from South Africa’s National Film & Video Foundation, Telefilm Canada and several Canadian broadcasters. Based on a true story, it is a period film that raises issues still of enormous relevance today! . Proteus provokes audiences to rethink South African history. It examines cross-cultural and racial taboos and points to the homophobia that still exists today in the gap between our tolerant Constitution and the prejudice inherent in human attitudes. It is also a love story, exploring the deep bond that formed between two men in their decade-long relationship. The title plays on the shape-shifting god of the sea in Homer’s Odyssey, and also on South Africa’s national symbol, the protea.

Much of the story takes place in the recreated prison garden, where the prisoners met, and where Scottish botanist Virgil Niven was occupied in naming and cultivating South African protea species for the European market. Proteus will be filmed over 18 days on locations that include the actual places where the story took place: the Cape Castle, Cape Point, Table Bay and Robben Island. The film shows off the Cape of the 1700s and reveals the early history of the island, n! early 250 years before the Rivonia treason trial. It also introduces intriguing anachronistic elements that refer forward to Robben Island’s famous time as a prison for political dissidents.

The film features five languages- English, Afrikaans, Dutch, Nama and Latin. THE TEAM: John Greyson (co-writer/director) is an award-winning Toronto filmmaker whose features include Zero Patience (1993), Lilies (1996 – Genie Award for Best Film), and The Law of Enclosures (2000, with Sarah Polley and Diane Ladd). Jack Lewis (co-writer/director) is a Cape Town filmmaker whose productions on South African and Cape history include The Devil Breaks My Heart, Sando to Samantha, Apostles of Civilised Vice, and the TV series Beat It! Steven Markovitz and Platon Trakoshis (co-producers, Big World Cinema) have produced award-winning documentaries and fiction, including Husk (Cannes ’99), Raya (US release, 2002), and It’s My Life (IDFA 2001). They facilitated Entropy for Tribeca Productions (starring Bono and Stephen Dorff). Anita Lee (co-producer) is a Toronto producer whose recent feature The Art of Woo (written and directed by Helen Lee) has been wowing audiences at festivals in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul.

* Local filmmaker Anant Singh received the Lifetime Founder Member Award of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund from former President, Nelson Mandela last weekend. The award recognises Singh as one of the founding members of the President's Club of the Children's Fund and his continued support for the Fund. Others recipients of the Lifetime Founder Member Award are BONESA, Denzel Washington, Teddy Forstmann, HRH Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, Eric Samson, Bill Gates, Telecom Italia, Lord John Sainsbury, Barloworld Ltd and Old Mutual. In bestowing the award to Singh, Mandela said, "The Fund has enough reserves to ensure that it lives beyond today's generation. This unprecedented achievement for a South African indigenous foundation could not have been a reality without the generous support of men and women like yourselves, who responded to my call to help and grow the fund." Singh recently! brought Will Smith to South Africa for the premiere of Ali and organised an auction, the proceeds of which saw the Children's Fund receiving a donation of R1.5 million. His company Videovision Entertainment has assisted the Children's Fund with various activities, including fundraising drives.

* The World Summit on Sustainable Development has come and gone. What will have gone forever is also the worthless hot air from some speakers. One can only hope that the future will see action on the more important issues that did emerge during the Summit. The Jozi Summit Film Festival, one of the cultural aspects of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, also engaged audiences in debates and panel discussions surrounding African films. In two panel discussions held at Nu Metro Village Walk and Newtown Precinct, panel members spoke about what has become a de rigueur topic of all conferences/ workshops/ forums organised for African filmmakers. That is, the topic of film's contribution to sustainable development on the continent and the need for Africans to be empowered to tell their own stories. Panelists included the South African producers of educational television programmes Soul City, and Lovelife, representatives of development agencies, the SABC, the Film Resource Unit (FRU), the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), and independent filmmakers - from southern Africa as well as abroad. The NFVF spoke about its mission of creating an environment that develops and promotes the South African film industry. FRU dealt with distribution as an imperative in developing the South African film industry within the larger goals of human development and self-confidence in Africa. Debra Zimmerman of New York-based Women make Movies spoke of comparable experiences, namely the difficulties around funding and distribution in an industry dominated by major broadcasters and the Hollywood machine. Legendary Ethiopian director Prof. Haile Gerima painted a picture of the role of the African filmmaker. "Filmmakers are warriors and history makers". He said there is a need to restore Africa's history and relate Africa's stories to Africans. We wonder how many more times these issues will be presented before we finally see something concrete happening.

* Glass Door in co-operation with Sithengi, the Southern African International Film & TV Market will showcase various styles of animation, as shorts before main features to be screened during a special all-day animation conference to be held at Sithengi 2002. If you would like exposure for your animation projects, entry forms and more information can be accessed from Their Site in Zaire , or Kathi Jones on 083 251 2073. Deadline for entries is 13 September.

* Hollywood stars Charlize Theron and Courtney Love developed a mutual hatred on the set of forthcoming thriller Trapped. Co-star Kevin Bacon says leading lady Theron couldn't stand the rock widow turned actress - and the Hole frontwoman felt the same way. He says, "I don't know what the hell happened, but there was a problem - that's all I'll say."

NORTH AFRICA

* Guess who’s back…back again: Rigobert Song...

Hello readers – Well I’ve been away for a while because Nigeria is in political turmoil at the moment and our economy looks set to collapse. I may be moving to Ivory Coast in a few weeks, so it’s been an enormously stressful couple of weeks. But there’s no better cure for depression than watching a great African film, and "Taafe Fanga" is one of them. Remember to email me at My Computer equipted Landrover with your perspectives on African film.

TAAFE FANGA

Produced & Directed by Adama Drabo -- Mali, 1997, 95 minutes
In Kaado and Bambara with English subtitles

Director Adama Drabo has devised a gender-bending farce set among the 18th Century Dogon to make some serious points about the status of women in Africa today. This proleptic tale about a comic revolution in which women's and men's roles are reversed was, in part, inspired by the actual role women played in Mali's 1991 revolution. Drabo surprisingly found the germ for his domestic comedy from a program on Dogon mythology he heard over Malian radio. He then wrote a script which provides a stunning illustration of Marcel Griaule's observation that, "In the Dogon system of myth, social life must reflect the working of the universe, and conversely, the world order depends on the proper ordering of society." (Griaule, Marcel and Germaine Dieterlen 1954 "The Dogon", in African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples, edited by Daryll Forde, P. 83.)

Therefore Taafe Fanga's story of sexual politics in a Dogon village necessarily involves the interpenetration of cosmogeny, history and the still unfolding present. The Dogon believe that all difference in the universe began with the splitting of the primal fonio seed into an ever-expanding spiral of space-time which can only be held together by a careful balancing or "twinning" of opposing energies. In Taafe Fanga, this tension reappears in the parallel stories of four women who challenge male supremacy among the Dogon's legendary elf-like andumbulu spirit ancestors; their semi-historical human descendants, the indigenous, cave-dwelling Tellem; the Dogon who invaded and massacred the Tellem in the 17th century (leaving them a place only in folklore;) and finally their present-day listeners to this tale.

Myth, storytelling and now film link past and future, as symbolized in the opening scene by the arrival of a traditionally robed griot at a contemporary urban compound. He flips off a television program (some fatuous Hollywood musical) and decides to tell a Dogon tale about the "battle between the sexes," when a proud woman pushes aside an arrogant young man to sit in the "men's section" of the courtyard.

Ambara, a village elder, impulsively decides to marry a younger woman because his wife, Timbe, hasn't gathered firewood to heat his bath. Her younger friend, Yayémé, is beaten by her husband, Agro, when the other men accuse him of being "a woman's slave" for bringing home the firewood. An infuriated Yayémé defies his warning about the evil andumbulus and sets off in the dark to forage for brush. There she encounters and overwhelms what she takes to be one of these bush spirits and makes off with its powerful mask.

Yayémé has unwittingly stumbled onto the rare Sigi ritual, and has stolen the mask from a young Tellem woman, Yandju, who in turn has stolen the mask to protest women's exclusion from the ritual. The Dogon believed the Tellem held the Sigi ritual every 60 years to expiate the transgressions of their andumbulu forebearers. This woman who stole the earth's powerful raffia skirt, stained red with its menstrual blood or mud, thus brings death on her husband and all her descendants. In the Sigi ritual, (which women are still strictly forbidden to view) men dressed as women in these red fiber fertility skirts bind the dangerous spiritual energy unleashed by death which threatens to rip apart the normal spiral of life. The ceremony is presided over by the powerful Albarga mask which symbolizes social harmony and the proper balance between the sexes.

Timbe convinces Yayémé that the mask has been sent by Anma, god of justice, in answer to her prayer for revenge against Ambara and all male arrogance. The next day Yayémé, disguised in the mask, demands that the terrorized Dogon men from now on exchange roles with the women. Drabo exploits the full comedic possibilities of this "triumph of the skirts over the shorts" as the men prove predictably clumsy homemakers and are so exhausted by the end of the day they feign sleep to stave off their wives sexual advances. These scenes are met with uproarious responses from African audiences, because traditional gender roles remain largely unchanged.

The women soon recognize that their purpose was not simply to perpetuate gender stereotypes and injustice in reverse or to imbalance the world in the opposite direction. Timbe says: "Men and women are here to complement each other. Let's use our power now to bring equality among us. Let's share everything: work, happiness and misfortune." Later in a pointed reference to contemporary African development, Timbe points out that both sexes will be needed for an irrigation project which can again make the earth fertile: "The purpose of taking power is to make a better world...No nation is built without hard work - but it can't be done by excluding men" - or women.

In Taafe Fanga, Drabo has revised the Sigi myth (which seems originally to have expressed male anxiety over female control of fecundity) into a myth about women's right to resist patriarchy, in the griot's words, "to fight for the right to be different and equal. This film, along with Drabo's 1991 feature Ta Dona provide important examples of how contemporary African artists are freely reappropriating traditional belief systems to illuminate pressing social issues.

"This blend of folklore and social realism, bolstered by spirited acting, doesn't skirt the issues or bang viewers over the head with them...Solidly entertaining."
--Variety

AFRICAN AMERICAN

* A string of new releases failed to clip Barbershop from the top of the box office, as the urban comedy earned an estimated $13.3 million, well ahead of the No. 2 film, The Banger Sisters, which debuted with about $10.3 million. My Big Fat Greek Wedding slipped to third place, but still outdistanced most of the new competition as it earned $10 million in its 23rd week. Two newcomers appeared locked in a virtual tie for fourth place: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, which earned about $7.11 million and The Four Feathers, which took in about $7.10 million. The thriller Trapped, which was not previewed for critics, tanked with an estimated $3.2 million.

* The Rev. Jesse Jackson has lashed out at the current box-office hit Barbershop, which features a character, played by Cedric the Entertainer, who makes disparaging remarks about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Jackson himself. In an interview with USA Today, Jackson said: "The filmmakers crossed the line between what's sacred and serious and what's funny. ... I could dismiss the comments about me, but Dr. King is dead, and Ms. Parks is an invalid. There are some heroes who are sacred to a people, and these comments poisoned an otherwise funny movie. Why put cyanide in the Kool-Aid?" MGM issued a statement saying that the controversial remarks were "one character's opinion. ... Its not an opinion shared by the film itself, the filmmakers or MGM Pictures."

* A promotional spot for Fox Sports Net's The Best Damn Sports Show Period showing former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist, singing a lullaby to a baby is certain to generate controversy -- which was probably why it was produced in the first place, the New York Times observed today (Thursday). "This will break through the clutter, and when you can do that, if it's controversial, it's OK," Dan Kelleher of Cliff Freeman & Partners in New York, who created the spot, told the newspaper. Neal Tiles, executive vice president at the Fox Sports Marketing Group, commented that the spot was intended to create "the mind-set among the younger-male demographic that 'this is the network that speaks to me.'" But Nova Lanktree of Skokie, IL-based Lanktree Sports told the Times, "I'm sure people will talk about it, but it's ! offensive, inappropriate and crosses the line."

DR.SOTHA REVO & OUT!