African Films at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival
September 13th, 2004 by Andre Soares
Besides the usual Planet Africa program, which presents five features and eight shorts, the Toronto Film Festival offers a look at the South African cinema. The five features presented in the sidebar South Africa: Ten Years Later are Red Dust, the Zulu-language Yesterday (directed by Darrell Roodt), Drum, Cape of Good Hope, and Forgiveness.
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 sub-Saharan African feature film ever made. The story of an African woman hired as a maid in France, the picture 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.
Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, a dramatic retelling of the Rwandan genocide starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, and Nick Nolte is part of the Special Presentation program.
And O Herói (The Hero), screening in the Planet Africa series, is one of the rare Angolan-made film to hit the festival circuit. Director Zézé Gamboa’s picture depicts the paths of four characters who try to rebuild their lives after the end of the Angolan civil war.
Toronto Film Festival 2004 Controversies
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