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