Africa: the Beat -- that other really fine movie from the festival

I mentioned that there were two films that really stood out in the Black International Cinema festival in Berlin.  Let me remind you that I did NOT see every entry, but I did see an awful lot.  This second film, Africa:  the Beat, is a truly fine and moving production, a documentary very skillfully filmed (with little in the way of fancy equipment) in Nzali, Tanzania.

The producers-directors are a cooperative called Samaki Wanne that consists of four people: a filmmaker, a painter, and two musicians.  The mover and shaker is Polo Vallejo (far right in the photo below), a musician who spent over 15 years visiting and learning about the Wagogo of Tanzania, and decided as a result of his research that it would be important to make a film about them.  The Wagogo are a tribe for whom music is an essential part of daily life, of the passing of the year, of the different stages of life, of their relationship to their environment...in brief, an essential part of their existence.

Samaki Wanne--Manuel Velasco, Javier Arias Bal, Pablo Vega & Polo Vallejo (Photo:  Carmen Ballvé)

The cooperative decided early on to make the film without the use of a voice-over or any other kind of detailed narration.  The Wagogo, obviously, are not speaking (or singing) in any of the language with which most viewers will be familiar.  So why did the cooperative decide against a narrative?

Their aim, and it is to their great credit that they achieve this aim, is to let the music and the images speak for themselves.  Polo Vallejo explained, for example, that every cut is dictated by the rhythm of the music.  Their are a few frames with a bare minimum of printed words (spring, the harvest...) but for the most part, we simply see and experience the  complex rhythm of the Wagogo´s life through their music, and their dance.

Aside from the wonderful vicarious experience that this provides the audience, I was interested to learn from Vallejo that only the Wagogo women are allowed to play the drums, and the drums are a very important part of their music.  In many forms of music, most or all of the drummers are men, so it is intriguing to find a peoples with such a different tradition.

A Wagogo musican with his dog.  Photo:  Carmen Vallavé

One of the aspects of this film that I found particularly attractive is the beauty of the music and the dance.  This is due both to the intrinsic merit of the music and dance, and also to the skill of the filmmakers.  I can easily imagine a film in which the music and dance could be made uninteresting by filmmakers unable to let them shine through.  My congratulations, then, to the Samaki Wanne cooperative.

In addition to its screening at Black International Cinema, Berlin, Africa:  the Beat has been accepted into film festivals in New York (USA), Montreal (Canada), Florence (Italy), the Canary Islands (Spain), Zanzibar (Tanzania) and others.  If you have the chance, I certainly recommend that you go to see it.

OUR NEXT POST will be about a few of the other films from Black International Cinema, Berlin--then, we will return to Afro-Peruvian music and dance.

Mike Wiley, Rob Underhill, and the film "Dar He: the Lynching of Emmett Till"

There were two films that I saw in the Black International Cinema festival that really stood out.  I do want to point out that I did not see EVERY film in the festival, so I may have missed some really great things, but I did see an awful lot.

One of these two very special films was and is:  Dar He:  the Lynching of Emmett Till.  It is directed by Rob Underhill and stars Mike Wiley.

Mike Wiley, the masterful and versitile actor and writer.

I should say that it stars, and stars, and stars...Mike Wiley, who wrote the stage play from which the film was made, plays ALL 36 ROLES in the movie.  And he does it so well that you leave not thinking about his incredible acting skills, but about...the lynching of Emmett Till.

Hooray for him.

And hooray for Rob Underhill, who did some pretty fancy stuff in directing the film but again, the fancy stuff doesn´t stand out.  What stands out is the story, and that´s what a good director wants.

Dar He is about a real incident.  Many of you will have heard of it.  A teenager, 14-year old Emmett Till of Chicago, went to a small town in Mississippi to visit his relatives.  Emmett was black, and this was in 1955, in the days of segregation in the south.

Rob Underhill,  the director and co-script writer.

Acting on a dare that his cousins and friends made, Emmett said something like "you´re cute" or "hey sweetie" or something of that sort to the white woman worker in a dry goods store where he went to buy some candy.  When he left the store, the woman came out and he whistled at her.  Emmett had a speech impediment, and the whistle may have been due to that, or it may have been intentional, and due to the dare.

In any event, for this, he was first tortured and then murdered by the woman´s husband and a friend of that husband.  They dumped his body in the river.

The two men were tried, found innocent, and freely admitted they had done the deed.  And in the days immediately after the trial, they were congratulated by many of their white friends and neighbors for upholding "southern values."  Again, this was the segregated south.

A legal note:  once found innocent of a crime, you cannot be retried for that same crime.  It was therefore not possible to retry them after the trail ended, even with their admission of guilt.

The murder of Emmett Till and the outrage it caused is a major element in the growth of the Civil Rights movement.

Again, Mike Wiley as actor, Rob Underhill as director, the two of them as co-authors of the movie script, and the technicians (Aravind Ragupathi and Larry Gardner) who filmed and then composited all those shots so that you saw Mike Wiley playing several different roles on screen together, did an excellent
job.  I highly recommend this movie

OUR NEXT POST will be about Africa:  the Beat, by director Samaki Wanne.