Africa at IFFR 2013: Something Necessary

Something Necessary made its international premiere at Rotterdam, shortly after opening in Kenya. As director Judy Kibinge pointed out, its story of people coming to terms with the post-election violence of 2007 is particularly timely given that the country goes to the polls again in March this year.

“All of this happened five years ago, but already there are certain conversations that we are having and certain anxieties,” she said following the screening. “I think it was very important that this open before the elections to just get a constructive conversation going.”

The film tells the interlocking stories of a victim of the violence, Anne, and one of its perpetrators, Joseph. Anne lost her husband when a mob invaded their farm, and while she seems to have recovered, her young son Kitur is still in a coma. When she leaves hospital, she throws all her energy into rebuilding the farm in anticipation of Kitur’s recovery, but the physical and mental scars run deeper than she realises.

Meanwhile Joseph is troubled by the part he played in the raid on the farm. Resolving to break away from the gang that carried it out, he tries desperately to find work. Moving from one casual job to another, he crosses Anne’s path once more.

There is a lot to like here, even if the film as a whole film is rather uneven. Susan Wanjiru is a striking presence as Anne, haunted by what has happened but not willing to be a victim. She also delivers one of the films most harrowing scenes, a frank depiction of the consequences of the violence she has suffered.

Susan Wanjiru in Something Necessary
(photo: IFFR)

Not everything hits home in the same way, however. Some of the supporting cast are rather mannered, and their acting sits uneasily with the more naturalistic performances of the leads. The music is similarly out of step with the serious intent of the plot, anticipating emotions like the score for a TV soap. Meanwhile characters such as Joseph’s girlfriend are paper thin, and some elements of the plot strain credulity.

Perhaps the biggest problem is the decision to draw Anne into a truth and reconciliation hearing. Important in reality, this is a dead weight in the drama, telling rather than showing, adding detail but no depth or feeling. In contrast, the film provides a tantalising glimpse inside Kenya’s entrepreneurial class through Anne’s property developer brother-in-law. This could have been taken further, adding to the film’s exploration of the economic factors underlying the violence.

Even with these reservations, Something Necessary remains a pertinent drama, engaging seriously with social and economic issues. As Kibinge explained, this was her motivation for getting involved in the project.

“When you see a conflict in a place like Kenya or Somalia, I think there’s a certain image that you have: ‘Who are those people? Why on earth are they doing that to themselves? There they are, fleeing again with their luggage on their heads!’ It’s really easy to depersonalise those streams of people that you see — even in Nairobi, which is a very cosmopolitan city — to sit there and think: ‘Oh my God, look at these guys!'”

The goal of the film is to shift the viewer from the general to the personal. “To put those images that we see and then somehow to try and draw us into the story of one woman and therefore help us make sense of all that madness that we see and dismiss.”

Song of Lawino

The rural English charity shops have been surprisingly forthcoming in African literature today. The copy of Maru in the picture is a relatively recent UK edition, but this Song of Lawino was published in Nairobi and is dated 1966. It is well-thumbed, but perhaps in too good a condition to be the first or early edition that date suggests.

I particularly like the introductory note: “Translated from the Acoli by the author who has thus clipped a bit of the eagle’s wings and rendered the sharp edges of the warrior’s sword rusty and blunt, and has also murdered rhythm and rhyme.” The English is free verse, so I’d be intrigued to see what the original looks like, but I can’t even scare up a couple of lines on the internet by way of illustration.

The singer Lawino is a traditionally minded woman, uneducated but not stupid, who laments the westernised attitude of her husband. In addition to eating, drinking and dancing like a white man, Ocol has taken a second wife with the same tastes. He has converted to Christianity and gone into politics, following the conservative Democratic Party while his brother has joined the Uganda People’s Congress. Both parties advocate a form of pan-Africanism.

Lawino rails against all of this and more, constantly advancing traditional values over those her husband has adopted. The language is simple, staccato but very expressive. Bitter observations of her rival, comments on religion and politics, evocations of Acoli dance all strike home very effectively.

Even with my limited experience of African literature I’ve read several stories featuring educated men fretting over marriage to ‘traditional’ girls, so it is interesting to see the other side. Quite how ‘other’ it is remains an open question, I suppose, since p’Bitek resembles Ocol more than Lawino. But he throws himself into it, for instance in the section headed “My husband’s house is a dark forest of books” which attacks both books and learning:

And the reading / Has killed my man, / In the ways of his people / He has become / A stump.

Later editions of the book include the Song of Ocol, apparently a riposte satirically justifying the husband’s point of view. Later still, another writer took issue with p’Bitek’s version of his own poem and produced a ‘better’ translation.

African fiction in Rotterdam

In 2010 the Rotterdam Film Festival included a substantial selection of recent African films, the result of programmer Gertjan Zuilhof spending much of the previous year south of the Sahara looking for material. Without this dedicated effort in subsequent years a decline was only to be expected, but it is surprising how far that has gone. This year, 2013, there were just three fiction features by African directors in the festival. Two of these — Something Necessary and Nairobi Half Life — were nurtured by Tom Tykwer’s admirable One Fine Day film workshop, while the third, Ninah’s Dowry, won prizes at the Fort Lauderdale film festival last year.

In pointing this out I don’t mean to suggest that the films were out of place at the festival, simply that they already had an international profile. No-one had to look very far or think very hard in order to programme them. Nairobi Half Life even made it into the Hollywood trades last autumn as Kenya’s first contender for the foreign language Oscar.

Meanwhile the festival’s own pipeline from the developing world, the Hubert Bals Fund, appears to have dried up as far as Africa is concerned. In 2002 it provided the fesival programme with three African films, and four the following year. In 2010 it managed just one (Soul Boy, the first project from One Fine Day), none at all in 2011 and 2012, and only Something Necessary in 2013

Whatever connections Rotterdam has with producers, funders and festivals in Africa, they are not delivering the newer, lesser known or more fragile films provided by its networks in Asia, Latin America or far flung parts of Europe. Yet the festival’s ability to go beyond the obvious is one of its strengths, and I want to see African cinema be a part of that.

In the coming weeks I’ll post some thoughts on the three films mentioned above, along with Grand comme le Baobab, a US film shot in Senegal that was also part of the festival.

Belgian cinema in January

The most powerful moment in Belgian cinema during January was the avant premiere of La Cinquième saison at Cinéma Vendôme in Brussels. With snow and ice on the ground, the salle filled to overflowing. People seemed to huddle together, still wrapped up in coats and scarves, as they watched the film tell its story of a world in which spring and then summer refuse to arrive. Entering into the chilly, magic realist tale was not at all difficult.

La Cinquième saison

This is the third feature of directing couple Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens, American and Flemish respectively, but long resident in Wallonia. After filming Khadak (2006) in Mongolia and Altiplano (2009) in the Andes, La Cinquième saison represents their first wholly domestic fiction. Filmed close to their home in the Condroz (a band of rolling agricultural land bordering the hills and forests of the Ardennes), the film is mainly in French but was majority funded by the Flemish Film Fund. Hence, a properly Belgian film.

Thematically it continues their concern with the environment, community and destiny, explored though strikingly constructed images. As before they draw on local folklore, the difference being that this time the folklore is Belgian rather than Mongolian or Peruvian. In previous films the viewer had to take it on trust that the more ornate images drew on authentic sources, but here the rituals, with their masks and giants, are instantly familiar, if not from life or the media then from the paintings of James Ensor.

La Cinquième saison

For local viewers, a layer of political references also comes into play. One Flemish character, an itinerant beekeeper played by Sam Louwyck, suffers a fate satirically emblematic of tensions between the north and south of the country. Another well-known Flemish face, actor Peter Van Den Begin, plays a character engaged in a battle of wills with an unresponsive rooster, the symbol of Wallonia. It ends badly.

In the context of Belgian cinema, the film fits into a long tradition of fantasy and fable, yet also joins a small but significant body of rural storytelling, drawing visual inspiration from the work of artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Constant Permeke. It’s notable that the cinematography was by Hans Bruch Jr, who shot Gust Van Den Berghe’s equally striking winter fable Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (2010).

The directors say that La Cinquième saison closes a trilogy of films and that their next project will be different: a comic road movie provisionally titled Kebab Royal.

January also saw the release of Fien Troch’s Kid, a rural story of an entirely different kind. It concerns two young boys whose mother is struggling to maintain a farm in eastern Flanders after the disappearance of her husband. As the money runs out, the threat of violence from her creditors becomes ever more tangible.

Set in the summer, and shot in bright, clear images from the child’s point of view, the film builds up a level of menace and tension that is quite remarkable. Yet it also proves too much to sustain, and the conclusion doesn’t quite hit home as it should. Nevertheless, Kid remains an impressive continuation of Troch’s strongly expressed worldview, begun with Someone Else’s Happiness (2005) and Unspoken (2008).

In addition to these films from established directors, two relative newcomers also had national releases in January.

Kadija Leclere’s debut feature Le Sac de farine tells the story of a young Moroccan girl, raised in Belgium in the 1970s, but forced to move back to her family’s home village at the age of eight. Left in the care of an aunt (Hiam Abbas) she grows up with independent ideas that put her on the side of rebelling students in the mid-1980s. The story is attractive enough, but Leclere’s direction is uneven and there are some frustrating narrative loose ends.

David Lambert’s Hors les murs is a more assured debut, recounting the shifting dependencies in a gay relationship in Brussels, from first meeting to bitter parting. Performances by Guillaume Gouix, Matila Malliarakis and Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin are spot-on, and the city’s bohemian side is pleasingly realised.

Make-up, cinema, jazz…

“This was a girl who belonged strictly to the city. Born in the city. A primary education, perhaps the first four years at secondary school; yet she knew all about western sophistication — make-up, cinema, jazz…” From People of the City (1954/1963) by Cyprian Ekwensi, part of an on-going project to collect cinema references in African fiction. The previous owner of the book seems to have a slightly different interest.