No land is more prone to reductionist narratives than Africa. Whether it’s the invisibilizing of thousands of ethnicities and languages, or its chronic depiction as a place of famine and war, it’s no secret that the Western World is trained to see Africa as a monolith of despair.
For that reason alone, it’s exhilarating when the African Film Festival comes to New York. Yes, once again, an entire universe of voice and imagination is crammed into a week-long event. But with 100 films from two dozen countries, the festival represents an opportunity to see the continent with at least entry-level complexity.
Among the festival’s feature-length offerings (it closes with women-centered shorts), three films in particular are getting some upfront love: “Freedom Way,” from Nigerian director Afolabi Olalekan, opens the festival. The “Memories of Love Returned,” directed by American-Ugandan documentarian Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, is presented as the festival’s “centerpiece” film. And the festival organizers have made honorable mention of the New York premier of “Black Tea,” from the Mauritanian-born Malian director, Abderrahmane Sissako. Sissako’s 2014 film “Timbuktu” was nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Language Film category.
“Black Tea” is set in the so-called Chocolate City in Guangzhou, China, a not-quite melting pot of Anglo, Franco, and Lusophone expats from across the African continent striving for economic opportunity alongside leery Chinese neighbors. Among them is Aya (a luminous, but listless Nina Mélo), who has bolted her native Côte d’Ivoire and a cheating fiancé to resettle in Chocolate City and build herself in the art of tea making. Cai, her employer, tea guru, and slow-burn boyfriend, is himself trying to reconcile a past that includes an ex-wife and a child from an extramarital relationship. “Black Tea” has the high production values and feel of a well-funded independent film, and Sissako clearly knows his way around a camera. The film’s cross-cultural fluency is impressive, and while there are obvious tensions and acts of racism dramatized in Chocolate City, the cultural exchanges between the characters are often seamless in a way that most Americans will find unrecognizable.
FLC Press photos
But what “Black Tea” gains in cosmopolitan flair, it loses with its arthouse affectation. The central animating relationship between Aya and Cai is frustratingly stilted and somehow manages to be both heightened with sexual possibility and devoid of it. The gaps in time, plot points, and backstories are disorienting: How and when did Aya learn Mandarin? What’s up between Aya and Cai’s ex, and Cai and his daughter? In the moments Sissako seeks to be enigmatic, he is confusing at best, pretentious at worst.
“Freedom Way” is a far more scrutable exercise in filmmaking. Using a storytelling device in which seemingly disparate human stories — a couple of tech entrepreneurs, a ride-share motorcyclist and his family, a doctor, and a police officer — converge with tragic consequences, “Freedom Way” is a lament on the destructive force of Nigeria’s notorious culture of corruption. Like a centrifuge at the center of the city, the police in “Freedom Way” project their grift onto the streets of Lagos until every corner of life is compromised. “Freedom Way” is several cuts above average Nollywood fare, yet struggles to rise above melodrama. Still, the situations and characters are sincerely drawn and are instantly recognizable for anyone who has spent 5 minutes in Lagos. Most importantly, its plea for social transformation will stay with you after the credits have rolled.
“Memories of Love Returned” is a more introspective and personal work.Through documentary footage spanning decades, Mwine brings us along on a journey to pursue dual, intersecting compulsions: To recapture his Ugandan family legacy and to salvage the work of a talented photographer in rural Uganda. Although Mwine’s project feels a touch frivolous and self-indulgent at first, the film eventually proves how any expedition can be insightfully consequential when pursued with a sense of wonder and the right set of questions. In Mwine’s case, he theorizes that his creative purpose as a photographer and pilgrimages to Uganda are prompted by the loss of family photos. Upon fortuitously stumbling into the studio of a talented portrait photographer, Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo, in the Ugandan town of Mbirizi, Mwine launches a crusade to recover and catalogue thousands of Ssalongo’s photos, while making meaning of his own life.
The film crescendos when Mwine decides to create a pop-up museum of Ssalongo’s portraits, which document 70 years of Mbirizi life. The exhibit ends up gently shocking the system of the town: Village yarns are reconstructed, families are reunited, awkward interpersonal histories are dredged and confronted, and Mwine probes Sslongo’s sprawling paternity, which becomes a random subplot of its own. Like the film festival it’s nestled in, “Memories of Love Returned,” reminds us of the power of photographic image, whether still or moving, in marking the humanity of a people.
The 32nd New York African Film Festival is co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the African Film Festival. It features more than 30 films screening at Film at Lincoln Center May 7 through May 13, with 100 films in total as the festival continues through other venues throughout the month of May. For more info, visit africanfilmny.org.
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