The African films screened at this year's Cairo International Film Festival demonstrated the dynamism and questioning spirit of Africa's young directors, writes Gamal Nkrumah It is a long way from Conakry to Cairo. Or is it? The five African films screened at the 32nd Cairo International Film Festival, which finished last Friday, brought African cinema to Egyptian audiences and gave a glimpse of the often magical mix of drama and comedy, documentary and fiction, for which African cinema has become famous. Entitled Cinemas of Africa: Goodbye Isolation, the African Cinema Symposium that convened on 20 November at the Sofitel El-Gezeira Hotel in Cairo as part of the international festival gave some idea of the changing tempos and rhythmic variation of contemporary African cinema, demonstrating that African film can appeal not only to African audiences but also to audiences outside its countries of origin. The Guinean film Clouds Over Conakry, one of the best of the African films screened at the festival, was characteristic of this wide appeal, as was Seasons of Life, a quieter, more reflective piece from Malawi. Both films shared a concern with human lives that had been disturbed or uprooted by authoritarian governments or by the military or internecine conflicts that have torn communities apart across the continent. Many African films present accounts of lives that have been lost or dislocated as a result of such conflicts in African societies, and many of them are directed by young men and women who ally political conviction with stylistic inventiveness. The South African film Zimbabwe, for example, directed by Darell James Roodt, mixes realism with something approaching surrealism in a seductive fashion while at the same time suggesting that the South African industry is picking up the pieces of southern African cinema following the collapse of the film industry in Zimbabwe. Changing Faces from Nigeria and Sleepwalking Land from Mozambique depict contemporary cultural conflicts in a sensitive manner, showing how these impact on individuals in both societies. Both of these films picked up on themes also expressed in Clouds Over Conakry, in which the clash between conservatism and radicalism is expressed through the story of the main character, BB, who falls in love with his mentor's beautiful daughter, Kesso. Directed by Cheick Fantamady Camara, Clouds over Conakry is at once an especially impressive debut and a gripping dramatisation of the ways in which the old can attempt to smother the new. Depicting the bitter struggle between a young and talented political cartoonist and his traditionalist father, a devout Muslim marabout, or religious leader, who wants his son to become a religious scholar, the film raises thorny issues of women's reproductive rights and of the younger's generation's adherence, or abandonment, of ancestral vocations. The film showed Guinea as a contemporary society in which issues like the rise of Islamism and the promotion of women's rights are sometimes fiercely debated. In its opening scenes the smog and urban sprawl of the Guinean capital, Conakry, are displayed against a soundtrack of contemporary hip- hop music, as if to underline the city's modernity. Sleepwalking Land, a story of a mixed-race boy in search of his true self, and Seasons of Life, written and directed by Charles Shemu Joyah and produced by the Pakachere Institute of Health and Development Commnication in Malawi, also presented contemporary stories from Africa, each underlining the "goodbye isolation" theme of the Cairo symposium. All the films in their different ways dwelt upon the function of the media and technology in African societies. Some of the societies presented in the films have still-high levels of illiteracy, and film here can play a special role in communicating ideas as well as images. Where film has led, television is not far behind, and, as a mass medium that is able to reach into homes across the continent, it has had a particularly significant role to play in many African countries. Television in many societies has become an important medium, and its mass appeal has been confirmed through the success of the the popular Nigerian soap operas, for example, which have become a staple of cultural consumption not only in West Africa, but also in many other countries south of the Sahara. African film directors who want to call their countries, or neighbouring countries, to account also abound in Africa, and in this sense African cinema is perhaps not so very far from Western sensibilities. Both westerners and Africans have important and often critical things to say about African societies, and the African films screened at the Cairo festival revealed what seemed to be some of the more intractable conflicts at the heart of African societies. There was the familiar dichotomy of the traditional and the contemporary, for example, and of the apparent contrast of those elements that are rooted in the history of the various societies and those that have been brought in from outside. The father figure in Clouds Over Conakry, for example, presented as a traditional African griot, seems to represent the past of Africa, a past that, the director seems to be saying, can no longer cope with contemporary questions. The son, on the other hand, represents the dynamism associated with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Coming out of last week's mini-season of African films in Cairo, I was struck by the thought that perhaps this weighting of many African films towards the present and their rejection of the past could explain why so many western producers are queuing up to fund African films. I was struck, too, by a feeling of nostalgia that sometimes hits me, what I am tempted to call a yearning for the "real Africa." However, what is the "real Africa"? Is it the Africa of modern Conakry, or is the Africa of the traditional marabouts and griots ? Whatever the answer to such questions might be, the films on show invited Cairo audiences to spend some enchanting hours regarding African landscapes and contemporary African towns and cities. The films were also a veritable study in soundscapes, with the variety and layering of the African sound-world being very much in evidence.
