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.