FESPACO

At least the painful ride had a point to it: to enjoy the Festival Panafricain du Cinema et de la Television de Ouagadougou (FESPACO).
Upon arrival in Ouaga, we kept asking ourselves, "Where are we?" There are strawberries sold in the streets, bagged salad with dressing included for your convenience, and cokes in 1/2L bottles. Plus every morning there is an army of street sweepers. The sewers are covered. There aren't black pastic bags everywhere.
Saturday we went to FESPACO siege to register. It was a lot of confusion and after standing in line for 25,000F passes without the required photos we ended up getting the 10,000F passes. We got some cokes and headed off to explore the rest of the FESPACO centers around town. Then, to save taxi fare, we walked all the way to the Stadium for the opening. It was a bit of a let down; the band playing wasn't well microphoned but the stilt people were interesting. Evidently two years ago there were deaths in stampedes at the opening so this year it was toned down a bit. While we waited for the opening film, we played the Movie Game (name an actor/actress, next person names a movie he/she was in, next person names another actor/actress in that movie etc.) The film major got to show off his expertise. The opening movie "Faro" was set in Mali, which made it culturally interesting for us, but was sporadically filmed and without a real point.
All week we had delicious food (ISO should be advertised in all tour books...it's a mini country club of an international school). The films if not moving were at least though provoking. We saw 38 movies over the course of 7 days:

500 Years Later (Owen Alik) United Kingdom -- Documentary on the black experience since slavery
A la reserche de son eau (Sawadogo) Burkina Faso -- The life and trials of a water vendor in Ouaga
Ain Chemata/Perversions (Tlili) Tunisia -- Short on the options a man has after falling into the road
Baara (Souleymane Cisse) Mali -- Factory workers unionize in 1970s Bamako
Barakat!/Enough! (Sahraoui) Algeria -- Two women searching a husband who was taken by GIA
Blood Diamond (Zwick) USA -- DiCaprio, Connelly, and Hounsou portray diamond trade and rebel warfare
Congo River (Thierry Michel) Belgium -- Documentary on the life along the river
Contretemps (Amine Chitoub) Tunisia -- Short showing coffee time up close, repatative and odd audio
Deweneti (Dyana Gaye) Senegal -- Short with little garibou beggar wants to write to Santa
Dormir au chaud (Pierre Duculot) Belgium -- Short with immigrant traveller who finds old woman to help
El Kita/Train-Train (Beki Taoufik) Tunisia -- Short where woman leaves handicapped husband
Essarir/Le Lit (Arafa) Tunisia -- Short where artist leaves her husband after his shop closes up
Ezra (Aduaka) Nigeria -- Child warfare in Sierra Leone
Faro/La reine des eaux (Salif Traore) Mali -- Spirit in water torments village
Growing Stronger (Tsitsi Dangaremgba) Zimbabwe -- Documentary on AIDS survivors
Homeland (Kalimunda) Rwanda -- Documentary on Christianity's influence on genocide
Il etait une fois (Vernant) France -- Martinique love story
Jonestown (Stanley Nelson) USA -- Documentary on Jim Jones' cult and mass suicide
Le Bonheur? (Becher) Tunisia -- Short asking, "Is there happiness in life?"
Le president, a-t-il le SIDA? (Antonin) Haiti -- Rock star has AIDS
Le prince de Ouarzazate (Challa) Morrocco -- Short where a shoe shiner gets a part in a movie
Le rendez-vous/The meeting (Abidi) Tunisia -- Short where a woman gets stood up
Le sourire du serpent (Keita) Guinea -- Woman stranded at bus stop deals with unreal fears
L'ete de Noura (Pascal Tessaud) France -- The tragedy of arranged marriage
Menged (Workou) Ethiopia -- Kid, father, and donkey go to market in this short
Nosaltres (Toure) Senegal -- Documentary on a Catalan community where Malians live now
Nyaman' gouacou/Viande de ta mere (Laurent Senechal) France -- Short showing mother-daughter issues
O grand bazzar (Azevedo) Mozambique -- Two boys try and earn a living in the market
Pillar of Salt: The Angry Woman Syndrome (Farid) USA -- Documentary on women's issues
Pursuit of Happyness (Muccino) USA -- Will Smith stars as failure of a father who really is the best there is
Saba flouss/Mouisson magique (Lassoued) -- Short where boy tries to grow a tree of coins
Sbah el khir/Bonjour (Bouzid) Tunisia -- Short where breakfast is a woman's only constant
Shadow Boxer (Lee Daniels) USA -- Starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Helen Mirrin as assasins
Teranga Blues (Moussa Sene Absa) Senegal -- Musician returns home from France rich but enters crime
Transfert (Matieu Rigot) France -- CGI short on depression
Tsotsi (Gavin Hood) South Africa -- Soweto life for a young thug changes when one job goes wrong
Un matin bonne heure/Early one morning (Gahite Fofana) Guinea -- Two youth want to fly away
Yeleen (Souleymane Cisse) Mali -- Traditional animist beliefs portrayed

Of the short films Deweneti was my favorite. The boy was endearing, the filming well planned and shot, and the portrayal of the goodness of innocence was refreshing among so many other heavy films. I also thoroughly enjoyed Menged which won the short film prize, because it was goofy and had great Ethiopian music.
Of the documentaries, I most enjoyed Congo River for the cinemotography and story line (actually had a constant theme unlike Pillar of Salt). It was chilling to see the warfare in the deepest part of the country, but overall the movie was effective in showing the medical struggles and solutions and the lives of Christians along the river. We actually walked out of Pillar of Salt because it was so bad. It was on the "angry woman syndrome" drawing somehow from the biblical story of Lot's wife turning back. It was supposed to discuss women's issues and racial issues and misinterpretation of the scripture, as the director said when he introduced the film; but all it did was make us angry! I don't need to see scenes of women being battered, nor nonsensical interviews of black women seriously expressing their beliefs followed by co-eds just being whiny.
I enjoyed Tsotsi, but of the more local feature length films, Un matin bonne heure was my favorite. I also enjoyed seeing the Malian retrospectives including Baara and Yeleen. It was shocking to see how little Bamako has changed in 30 years! The clothing was certainly different, and the audience cheered (all week I loved the vigor of the audiences) when the main actor struts onto screen in bell bottoms, pink shirt with huge lapels, and a neck scarf. Oh, and an afro. After all the subtitled foreign films and films in French, my language has definitely improved. It was too bad Blood Diamond was dubbbed without subtitles, for its original artistry was probably lost somewhat. We actually walked out of the screening of The Last King of Scotland because I didn't want to see and Oscar-winning performance with a different voice!
Because coke sponsored the festival, there was the spot where the woman passes out open cokes to people on the street before each film. We started singing along by the 15th or 16th movie :)
Ouaga was a great host to the festival. Certainly, there were more obnoxious English wanna-speakers roaming. A Liberian followed us one day, then even though we lost him, he found us the next day. As he was explaining how we ditched him and he had put all hope in us, a French man interrupted and asked him in French, "Is this what you do for a living? Just ask all white men for money?"
Our transport back to Mali (this time I was headed to Bamako) went much much more smoothly than coming. The four boarder checkpoints scared me, but it seems a US passport with PC stamp is an all-access pass! At the third one, I went to go wash up. When I came from round back the buildings, there was the crazy woman from the Gao Songhoy festival!! How did she get over 1500 km away?? I wanted to know if it really was her, so I greeted her in Sonrai. She was sooooo very happy she gave me a big hug and a kiss on the neck. A little close, but it made her smile. She ended up boarding our bus until the next town, leading a sing along to the music. Just like camp. Trouble-free transport is ellusive, I've found: one PCV got in an argument about the window being open, 3 separate packages fell on my head from the upper compartment, and the driver stopped much too often. At least the broom lady got off in Segou. There had to have been 50 brooms all up and down the aisles and in the upper shelves! For dinner we had beans, bread, and warm milk with a tabal-tigi from Gao. Lots of men at the bus stop were trying to get us to buy them dinner, so annoying when they speak slowly to me and then quickly to each other about me as if I don't understand. Blech. A later stop woke me up because an army of garibous (beggar children who study the Koran) was beating tin cans and running around the outside of the bus trying to get in. I thought they'd overpower us!
We rolled into Bamako around 1 am, 18 1/2 hours after we left Ouaga. Feet swollen, we argued for a cab at a decent rate, missing the waste-management of Burkina as the pungent odor of rot violated our senses. Oh Mali.