Father Geek here welcoming back Dr. SOTHA and his staff as they return from the holidays with their 30th edition of our regular Friday morning Africa-AICN Report...

DR.SOTHA back for the 30th Edition of Africa-AICN. How was your New Year?
Not too docile I hope, mine was spent in the clutches of a former Turkish
nurse, who I suspect is now a dominatrix (just a hunch, I think the
cigarette burns gave it away)Once again it seems the South African film
industry has gone to sleep with some heavy pain killers at the beginning of
this year. Not much to report on there, but as always there's good stuff
with Rigobert and the African American section.

Nurse, that's my needle you've got in your hand.

SOUTH AFRICA

* BUSY BEAVER is a film currently shooting in Johannesburg about a femme
fatale called 'Beaver' who gets involved in the underground drug smuggling
industry. She lures the kingpin of the import operation, a big burly
Nigerian, and plays him against 'Buta Ncwancwa' - the kingpin mafioso who
operates on the coast of Durban. The film was written by Jeremy Padwick and
he will also direct. Shine Films is producing (How can I be sure this isn't
a porn film? - DR. SOTHA)

* I'LL HAVE MOCHA is a love story about 2 people, a black man and a white
woman falling in love in a post Apartheid South Africa. It follows their
tortuous journey to get accepted by both their families, and trying to work
out culture clashes between the both of them. It is on the fast track at
Sebina Prods. Execs are looking for a big name American actress to play the
white woman role with such names as Embeth Davidtz, Fairuza Balk and Robin
Tunney being bandied about. (Why don't they just hire a South African
actress to play the 'South African' white woman? - DR. SOTHA)

NORTH AFRICA

* Time to hand over the reigns to Rigobert Song.

Welcome back to my review for the week - 2001 can you believe it. With
today's film I thought I'd get a little reminiscent and delve into some
riddles unsolved about Africa in the 21st Century.

Rostov-Luanda

Rostov-Luanda could at first glance appear to be a travelogue. If so, it is
a travelogue in search of the past which discovers the present instead.
Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako records his journey across
war-torn Angola to find an old friend but really to recapture his own hopes
for Africa. He explains that Angolan independence in 1975 represented to him
a new beginning for Africa. Like so many young Africans, he went to the
Soviet Union in the 1980s for political and technical training and met an
Angolan, Baribanga, whose confidence in his country's future embodied
Sissako's own hopes for the continent. But the intervening years of civil
war between Angolan factions each backed by a superpower and all the other
catastrophes plaguing Africa have devastated the optimism of Sissako's
generation. Rostov-Luanda is thus a significant response to the
disillusionment found in many recent African films, including Afrique, je te
plumerai, Udju Azul di Yonta and Tableau Ferraille. Rostov Luanda is also a
film built around an absence. The elusiveness of its ostensible subject in a
familiar post-modern trope turns attention back on the filmmaker and his
response - or lack of response - to his immediate surroundings, to the
unpremeditated.. Thus in Rostov Luanda the "subject" continually drifts from
the search for Baribanga to Sissoko's encounter with the reality of Angola
today.

Sissako begins his search for Africa by returning to his birthplace, Kiffa,
a small town in the desert interior of Mauritania. His cousin can't
understand why as soon as he comes home he must move on to Angola but
Sissako explains "Man is born to travel, to suffer, to meet people, to learn
customs; I go to Angola to live my adventure." The villagers can only
interpret his mission in terms of a traditional song about the first Moorish
knight to undertake the Islamic hejira to Mecca, a journey also intended to
transform the pilgrim.

Armed with a tattered picture of Baribanga and himself at school in Rostov,
Sissako arrives in a Luanda still recovering from thirty years of wars. The
Angolan core of this documentary is framed by an interview with a resigned
but engaging young professional woman. Her pessimism, in a sense, serves as
a "shadow" or counterpoint to Baribanga's earlier optimism. She explains
that in Angola the poor Portuguese colonists integrated more with Africans
than the French or British because they recognized in each other a defeated
people. She feels that Africa is utterly hopeless, pointing to Zaire and
Rwanda. She confesses that unlike Baribanga she was never really political,
participating in the MPLA merely to be with her more militant friends. But,
she wryly observes, when the country began to disintegrate the militants
left, and it was she who remained.

Sissako next looks for Baribanga at Biker's bar, the "bar with 12 doors,"
through which so many in this disrupted land have passed at one time or
another. An older man, who also studied in the Soviet Union, suggests that
Baribanga has probably become lost in the immensity of Angola; for him life
seems like a process of becoming lost, losing ideologies, losing one's way.
He is the first of a series of Angolan grassroots philosophers who seem to
be working out personal philosophies to take the place of the certainties
destroyed by the war. We meet, for example, an old Cape Verdean immigrant
and his Portuguese wife of 50 years, who comments that he has watched many
people leave Angola and soon he will be leaving too since every human is in
the end just a passer-by on earth.

Everywhere Sissako looks he finds evidence of dislocation. He meets two
orphans, by definition disconnected from their origins. Nandinho lost his
parents in the war and joined the multitudes of children living on the
streets; he is now staying with his uncle - but we can't be sure for how
long. Sissako's driver Eurice, was adopted by a European who left him his
house and car when he returned to Portugal in 1975. Although he has always
dreamed of being a Formula One driver, the realities of Angola being what
they are, he has had to content himself with driving a taxi across a
landscape littered with painful memories.

Sissako seems especially interested in why people of mixed race or European
background have remained in Angola - perhaps because he himself has left
Africa for Europe and finds himself a minority there. He meets a mulatto
businessman who left when the Marxist MPLA came to power but returned to
reconstruct the country. A Brazilian who came in the '20s has seen all his
sons leave but cannot abandon the village he is proud to have helped build.
We meet a large extended family of widely varied skin tones who live in a
village so cut off they are amazed that someone from the great world beyond
should want to film them; for them there was never an option to leave.

Finally, Sissako encounters an old woman who seems to symbolize the Angola
he is discovering. She tells us most people assumed she had been paralyzed
in the war because she did not move but one day she heard some music from
her youth and broke into a dance which she performs for us. Although Sissako
had gone to Angola seeking his old friend and his old hopes, he has made new
friends and found a different kind of hope. The old black and white
photograph he has clung to throughout the film has been eclipsed by the
vivid colors of the country in front of his camera. He has found an Africa
at ground zero, bereft of ideologies and illusions, much of its past
destroyed by the catastrophes of colonialism or civil war, but possessed of
an irrepressibly resilient spirit, the hopeful Africa of Baribanga but in an
unexpected form.

On his last day in Angola, Sissako learns that Baribanga, the man he set out
to find, is living not in Angola but in the former East Germany. In the
film's last scene, Sissako finally meets his old friend but we are afforded
only a glimpse of him. Baribanga tells him in Russian that he too will
return to Angola soon and Sissako comments: "I heard him pronounce in the
language we learned together in the name of old illusions, the word 'return'
just like an accomplishment." Baribanga and perhaps Sissako himself, have
endured a painful odyssey through various post-colonial utopias and
nightmares, only to return to a home which resembles neither their memories
or their dreams. Home, Africa, has ironically been redefined as a place we
build each day. Not a place that strikes up detonating images about our
past. I know there seems to be a problem in getting hold of these films on
video, DVD, Laser Disc etc., but I promise you if you make the effort to
find them, you will be rewarded ten fold. Not only are they highly
entertaining, but remarkably insightful. There seems to be this stigma
attached to African films, which really annoys me, because there's so much
talent and wonderful sly observations about the world in general about these
films. Ofcourse it makes it difficult when you're fed Hollywood mainstream
everyday, which is not to say anything derogatory about that establishment,
it just appears as if people are stuck in a comfort zone and won't look past
a narrow minded view of cinema. If you can watch Goddard, Bertolucci,
Bergman, Lang, then surely you can make the leap to Ouissika, Diop, Sissako
etc. E-mail me at rigobertsong@hotmail.com and tell me what's on your mind.

AFRICAN AMERICAN

* Will Smith, along with his partner James Lassiter, are in serious talks
with Universal to develop a remake of "Play Misty For Me," the 1971 drama
that Clint Eastwood, starred in and directed. Initial word has it that while
Smith and Lassiter will produce the project, Smith isn't tied to star in the
film, which is about a man who becomes the obsession of a psychotic woman
with whom he had a one-night stand. The twosome have already hired writers
Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, who brought us "The Hand That Rocks The
Cradle," to pen the 'Misty' script. The film will be produced under Smith's
and Lassiter's company Overbrook Entertainment. And speaking of remakes,
Universal is updating the classic "Charade." The new version, to be titled
"The Truth About Charlie," will star Mark Wahlberg, and Thandie Newton.

* "ER" co-star Michael Michele has joined the cast of the much-anticipated
film "Ali," starring Will Smith as the famed fighter. Jamie Foxx, Mario Van
Peebles, Jeffrey Wright and Mykelti Williamson also star in the Sony
Pictures project, which begins shooting in late April in AFRICA (Let's get
ready to rummmbleeee - DR. SOTHA)

* Sisters Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen (she of the much deride musical
choreography of a few Oscar awards back in the day - DR. SOTHA) will team up
to star in and produce "The Old Settler" for "PBS Hollywood Presents," an
upcoming national TV drama series. Based on a play by John Henry Redwood,
"The Old Settler" is set in Harlem in the 1940s and is about two sisters,
whose lives are forever changed when a young Southern man moves into their
apartment. Production starts in January and will air in the spring.

* Andre Braugher and Alfre Woodard have been nominated for the Golden Globe
Awards, which will air live on NBC, January 21. Braugher received the nod
for best actor in a drama for starring as a teaching physician in the
critically acclaimed ABC drama ``Gideon's Crossing,'' while Woodard received
a nod for best actress in a miniseries or movie made for television in the
drama ''Holiday Heart.'' No African Americans -- including Denzel Washington
("Remember The Titans") -- received nominations in major film categories.
The Golden Globe Awards, handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press, are
known as a precursor to what will happen in film for the Academy Awards.

* The NAACP recently announced the nominees for their prestigious Image
Awards, which will be handed out in March in Los Angeles. Denzel Washington
("Remember The Titans"), Cuba Gooding, Jr. ("Men of Honor") Omar Epps ("Love
and Basketball") and Will Smith ("The Legend of Bagger Vance") got nods for
best actor, while ``Love and Basketball,'' ``Men of Honor,'' ``Shaft'' and
``The Original Kings of Comedy'' were nominated for best film. Top actress
nominees went to Vanessa Williams (``Shaft''), Jada Pinkett Smith
(``Bamboozled''), Angela Bassett (``Boesman and Lena'') Nia Long (``Big
Momma's House'') and Sanaa Lathan (``Love and Basketball''). Nominees were
also announced in television, music and book categories.

* Spike Lee has been hired by the NFL to direct an advertising blitz aimed
at boosting viewership of its upcoming playoffs. The move comes as the NFL
has seen its ratings decline during regular season games. And Lee knows a
thing or two about advertising. He co-starred in the widely popular
mid-1980s Nike ads in which he posed as a Michael Jordan fan and Lee now has
his own ad agency.

* Chris Rock has pulled the plug on his late-night talk show on HBO to
pursue his movie career. Rock's show was critically acclaimed for being hip
with biting commentary and no-hold's barred interviews. But Rock also had
his critics. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a three-time interview subject, scolded
Rock for using profanity, only to have the comedian poke fun at his hair.
Sharpton told the Associated Press of Rock's departure, there should be ``a
national day of mourning.'' Rock's last show aired in November. (Long live
Patrick Stewart - DR. SOTHA)

This is the end my friend, the only end, the end. E-mail me at
Africaaicn@hotmail.com and let me light your fire.

FADE TO BLACK.

DR.SOTHA OUT

THE END