Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé
Besides the usual Planet Africa program, which presents five features and eight shorts, the 2004 Toronto Film Festival is offering a look at South African cinema. The five features presented in the sidebar South Africa: Ten Years Later are Darrell Roodt's Zulu-language Yesterday, Red Dust, Drum, Forgiveness, and Cape of Good Hope.
Film topics range from the bleak (AIDS in Yesterday) and the political (the fight against Apartheid in Drum) to the uplifting (the bond created among humans through their love of animals in Cape of Good Hope).
Other African films to be presented at the festival include Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene's La Noire de … / Black Girl, which was first released in 1966 and is widely considered to be the first feature film ever made in sub-Saharan Africa. The story of an African woman hired as a maid in France, Black Girl is described as a parable about colonialism and independence.
Sembene's latest film, Moolaadé, the story of a group of women in a small West African village who fight to save their daughters from genital mutilation, will open the Planet Africa program on Monday night.
Also part the series, O Herói / The Hero is one of the rare Angolan-made films to hit the festival circuit. Directed by Zézé Gamboa, The Hero depicts the paths of four characters who try to rebuild their lives after the end of the Angolan civil war.
Terry George's Hotel Rwanda, a dramatic retelling of the Rwanda genocide starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, and Nick Nolte, is part of the Toronto festival's Special Presentation program.