My Eyes Will Send a Light to You: Africa Cinema Icon to Narrative Films (Series 5)

Join us via Zoom: https://bmcc-cuny.zoom.us/j/86573589111?pwd=cUczSXBxTmpsQ0Zjd0JZeGVnSnZIZz09
Meeting ID: 865 7358 9111
Passcode: 229009

The following three films will be shown today:

MUNYURANGABO 2007, Director: Lee Isaac Chung Rwanda, 1hr: 37Mins

From opposing ethnicities, Ngabo and Sangwa are tested when old-timers warn, “Hutus and Tutsis should not be friends.” An intense and inspiring portrait of youth in Rwanda, ‘Munyurangabo’ features Poet Laureate Edouard Uwayo delivering a moving poem about his healing country. Rwanda.

 THE HERO 2004 Director: Zeze Gamboa 1hr: 31Mins Angola

A 20-year veteran of the Angolan civil war returns to the capital city of Luanda where he faces the challenges of assimilation and survival.

Everyday life is a struggle in Luanda, capital of Angola where a thirty -year civil war has left its mark on the souls of the people. On a television program called “Meeting Place,” men and women, young and old, hold up pictures of their loved ones and plea for help in finding them. Work is hard to find, electricity goes on and off sporadically, food and medical supplies are scarce, and old women still must walk long distances to get water. The city is filled with refugees and veterans who exist in a twilight zone. The countryside is littered with dangerous landmines, and the government has bee able to do very little toward removing them. Many families cannot return to their homes.

Vitorio (Oumar Makena Diop) is a war veteran who lost his leg when a landmine exploded under him. After much squabbling with the bureaucrats at a government hospital, he is given a prosthetic leg. But Vitorio has no luck in finding a job since most supervisors only want able bodied men. He ends up sleeping on the street. When his prosthetic leg is stolen, he plunges into a whirlpool of despair. Luckily, Judite (Maria Ceica), a prostitute who lost her son years ago, befriends him and gives him shelter.

Ten-year-old Manu (Milton Coelho) lives with his grandmother, Flora (Neusa Borges). His mother abandoned him, and his father went away to war years ago and has never returned. Although Manu is one of the smartest boys in the school, his teacher, Joana (Patricia Bull), is worried about his lack of interest in studying. He and some of his street buddies have formed their own gang of thieves to steal bike parts and car radios. This gets him into trouble with Caca (Nelo Helder), a violent thug who doesn’t want anyone else on his turf.

First-time feature director Zeze Gamboa has fashioned a compelling and richly developed drama that brings three of the main characters together and opens up new possibilities for each of them. Joana meets Vitorio at the hospital and is deeply moved by the hardships he has endured. She has recently re-established contact with Pedro (Raul Rosario), a rich young man who has just returned from his studies abroad and is going to work for his uncle, a Minister in the government. Joana’s idea is to put Vitorio on the radio with a plea for the return of his artificial leg. Manu finds himself drawn into the life of the war veteran, but thankfully it is in a beneficial way for both of them.

The Hero is an emotionally involving drama that realistically shows how a little kindness on the part of those in power can result in miraculous changes in the lives of those who are without hope or the resources to transform their own lives. Harriet Beecher Stowe has observed, “To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.” This film illustrates the truth of this observation with its convincing depiction of Vitorio’s perseverance, Joana’s empathy, Manu’s hopefulness, and the simple heroism of his grandmother who makes lugging water into a spiritual act.

YEELEN 1987 Director: Souleymane Cisse   Mali/Burkina Faso 1hr: 45 Mins.

It is the 13th century, in the time of the Malian Empire. Nianankoro, a young man, sets off on his initiation journey through the bush. His father, Soma, a priest who has become corrupted from exposure to the soul-changing power of his magic, pursues him, intent on ending Nianankoro’s quest to become a man before it can be completed, before Nianankoro can claim some of the authority of his father. Nianankoro understands that he must gather additional power before he can break his father’s will — or kill him. In greens and golds under a shining Malian sky, their fears and ambitions collide, in a story that feels even more ancient than the epoch in which it is set. For, to destroy Soma’s influence over him, Nianankoro must also engage the spiritual foundations of the world. Soma invites the gods to destroy his son, and Nianankoro invokes the powers of the earth in his defense. Theirs is a trial of and by the African elements themselves, heat, fire, and light.

Cissé has woven this tale of generational conflict in a tapestry of mythology as dense as any the cinema has seen. The worldview of these characters is not offered as a set of exotic practices or curious traditions; instead, it is lived as truth. Bambara custom is presented in Yeelen not as festival culture, to be tasted for a moment like a strange dish at an ethnic street fair and then forgotten in favor of one’s own cuisine, but as that cuisine itself, the food of life. Few works of any culture have succeeded as Yeelen does in thus not only speaking simultaneously to a culture, and for it, to an outside world which has a long history of patronizing those customs. Cissé sees the spirit world as one of intense vitality and presence, dissolving the Western boundaries of inner and outer humanity, past and present. This is, for instance, a place in which the hypnotic, handmade rhythms of the drum and the chant live joyfully with modern jazz. (His soundtrack brings together Malian vocalist Salif Kefta and French jazzman Michel Portal.) Likewise, Cissé’s storytelling style disdains linearity, borrowing instead the circular form of the oral tale. Western ideals of causality, with their assumption that humans can know the answers to their own lives as they can fully know (and thus command) the world around them, is ignored here, as Cissé sends scenes and stories streaming to us which have a sense of adjacency to one another, but rarely give the easy satisfactions of Hollywood’s archly constructed narratives. Grumpy critics have called this approach “primitive.” Yet, what could be less primitive than a storyteller who demands that we see the universe as it is, not as it might be in some infantile fantasy of control, instantly knowable and without mystery? And if Cissé’s is a view of existence where the human being insists on a prideful, prominent place, it is also one which honors the non-human natural world, its trees and animals and water, as powerful creations in their own right.

See the complete list of films (pdf) in this series.

See a list of all Afrikan Heritage Month events. Attend 2 or more events for Co-Curricular Transcript credit.

For more information, contact Professor Horace Brockington at hbrockington@bmcc.cuny.edu.

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