TORONTO WITH A DASH OF DIOP.

Toronto International Film Festival

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

September 9-18, 1999

It is best to arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) with a careful road map that includes room for diversion. My map this year took me to the Planet Africa program with detours into documentary, experimental work and a few tailgate picnics of international cinema.

Planet Africa was programmed again this year by British curator and writer June Givanni, and one of her revelations was that hardy and mutant blossoms are rising from the scorched earth of apartheid. The South African series "SA Short and Curlies," financed primarily by Film Four (UK) and the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation, showed the exciting directions in which film and television are moving in the Mandela era. Three selections from the series depicted a brutal and brutalized nation, in styles utterly devoid of sentiment. All share searing performances and startling cinematography. If this flowering of uncompromised vision is permitted to continue, South Africa will have a world-class cinema. Interestingly, two of the films dealt with the violence that haunts white South Africans. In Lucky Day (1999) by Brian Tilley, a black day laborer is hired by a white farmer for what turns out to be a grisly job: to absolve the latter of the crime of murdering his child by witnessing his suicide. Tactful editin g makes Lucky Day not sensationalist but deeply eerie. Husk (1998) by Jeremy Handler shows the unique inertia of violence. In a desolate country village, a young woman's father is so drunk and useless that she must use her own wit, and her pet viper, to corner and kill a slimy debt collector. Intercut with this nasty transaction is a scene of her father at a bar, flipping coins into a bottle. The most stomach-churning of these three powerful shorts, Portrait of a Young Man Drowning (1999) by Teboho Mahlatsi, takes place in a South African township scarred by intercommunal violence. The young man of the title is a vicious killer, but, even though the members of the township fear his violent nature, they use it to their advantage by attempting to make him kill an accused rapist, running him out of town when he refuses. The unnerving cinematography by Dewald Aukema conveys the killer's anguish through surreal images, such as the image of him dipping his clean hands into a basin only to bloody the water.

Givanni spoke with me about the changing conditions for African diaspora filmmakers. In Britain, on top of general funding cuts, minority filmmakers no longer receive special government funding, making it more difficult for black filmmakers to produce and find distributors for their films. Distributors deem these films' above-the-line costs too high and therefore do not promote them except as a "labor of love." The solution to the distribution problem, Givanni speculated, is a time-consuming but carefully tailored promotional program. Givanni's choices this year struck a careful balance between innovation and audience appeal, including African American independents, mainstream African American films that manipulated conventions (such as Dwayne Johnson-Cohran's Love and Action in Chicago [1999], a screwball romantic comedy), a single British film and those African films that stood out at FESPACO earlier this year. Also included in the festival was Third World Cop (1999), Jamaica's interesting nod toward the m ainstream: a sort of Caribbean Shaft in which a cop named Capone uses suspect methods to deal with organized crime in Kingston and is a magnet to the ladies.

For countries that have been damaged either by tyranny or democracy, the question of justice and the right to serve it is a bitter one. Vigilante justice was a theme of a number of third world films at this year's festival. Cameroon's Jean-Marie Teno, director of Afrique, je te plumerai (1993), presented Chef! (Chief!, 1999), a documentary essay on the power of chiefs at all levels. It begins in violence as the filmmaker confronts a mob trying to kill a boy for stealing a couple of chickens on the day of a ceremony commemorating local tribal chiefs. It extends to a discussion of wife abuse sanctioned by civil law, illustrated by an amusing/appalling wedding ceremony in which the festivities are briefly supended while the officiant reads off the husband's rights over his wife. "If every husband is a chief, then Cameroon is a nation of seven million chiefs," the filmmaker observes. The activist tone of Chef!, which also documents the abuse of prisoners, offers hope for a system less enmeshed in corruption, but Teno's chilling linkage of injustice at family, village and state levels is the film's most volatile aspect.

The jewel of the festival for this writer was the final film by Senegal's Djibril Diop Mambety, who died in 1998 at the age of 44. La petite vendeuse de soleil (The little girl who sold the sun, 1999), second in Mambety's projected trio "Histoires des petits gens" (Histories of little people), was completed after his death by his brother Wasis Diop. It concerns Sili, a little girl who is crippled but nevertheless has the gumption to compete with the tough boys who sell newspapers on the streets of Dakar. The boys beat her up and steal her Sun newspapers, but Sili brandishes a crutch and cries, "We will continue!" with a radiant smile that gave me chronic goosebumps. Wasis Diop, a musician, worked closely with his brother on all of his films, and his hybrid and percussive soundtrack drives La petite vendeuse de soleil. Packed with keen and loving observations of the "little people" of Dakar, the film is a final gift from a filmmaker who will be sorely missed.

I had the opportunity to speak with Wasis Diop, an elegant man who spoke with reverence of his elder brother. He described a man for whom cinema was life, who loved to be among people but was intensely solitary and who lived with an intensity that shortened his life: "He thought himself eternal." He said Mambety always embraced people in the street with both hands but that as a child he was already solitary and sad. His brother had a devouring intelligence that led him to read Kierkegaard and to speak French so eloquently that the Minister of Culture once half-jokingly invited Mambety to replace him. The brothers were raised by their austere and devout father--"We never smiled around him"--who imbued them with a strong belief in the sacred and mystical and the sense of being surrounded by transcendental things, forbidding them to kill ants and lizards. The brothers share both a strong connection to Wolof tradition and an affinity for modernity. In their working relationship, he said, Djibril had the ideas an d Wasis was the doer--for example, he fashioned the ornament of metal and animal horns that decorates Mory's motorbike in Touki-Bouki (1973). He was guarded about speaking of future plans, but this successful Paris-based musician hints that he might move into filmmaking himself, beginning with the final film in the "Histoires des petits gens" series, which Djibril described to him in its entirety before he died.

Zeinabu irene Davis's daring first feature, Compensation (1999), presents two parallel melodramas set in Chicago in 1900 and the present, each about the courtship of a deaf woman. The historical story was fascinating for its recreation of a prosperous Black community in the segregated city, illustrated with archival footage as well as detailed period sets. I loved a scene in which the characters go to the movies and comment with great hilarity on the action. Davis produced the pseudo-archival short that they watch, a feminist twist on the early cinema chase genre. Although Compensation is rather deliberate in its pace and the contemporary story not as compelling as the historical one, it is exciting to see a filmmaker take so many risks--ambitious historical reconstruction, dialogues in sign language--and succeed.

Cheick Oumar Sissoko, director of Guimba (1995), returns to the historical epic with La genese (1999), a stunning recreation of the story of Jacob, Esau and Joseph from Genesis. Forget The Ten Commandments: this extraordinary film shot in Mali eschews glamorous casts of thousands for a desert setting and exquisitely costumed actors who channel fierce dignity. From the circumcisions of Shechem's tribesmen to the story of Tamar conceiving children of Judah's lineage by disguising herself as a prostitute, Sissoko underscores the origins of the fratricidal battles that occupy the monotheist origin tale and that persist today.

British filmmaker Nelson I. Aduaka's first feature, Rage (1999), a fresh and uncliched look inside youth culture, uses a light-handed verite style to land in the middle of three young men's lives. They're just musicians trying to get some money to produce a demo tape when they start committing crimes. The film is driven by the random fury of the main character, who is of mixed race but in fervent denial of his white side and who keeps reminding his mother to call him "Rage." The teenagers shift uneasily between identities and loyalties--black or white? gay or straight? rap, reggae or jazz?--and Aduaka lets the film move with them.

Notable among the international films was Split Wide Open (1999) by Dev Benegal of India, a hallucinatory tale of corruption in mafia-run and media-mad Bombay. The protagonist, KP, works for the "water mafia," unlocking the city's water supply for the poor for a stiff price. Nan, who produces the hip TV program of the title in which people spill their juiciest secrets for the camera, enlists him to deliver material for the show. Meanwhile, KP's street sister Didi is kidnapped to be a sex slave, a life she ultimately prefers to cozy poverty. Fast and light, the film gets its sexy international-style edge from film/video interleaving and a hot Indian hip-hop fusion soundtrack from Britain's Nitin Sawhney.

More independent documentarians than ever are turning to low-budget digital video, and the result can be a visual disaster when transferred to film for festivals. One realizes the importance of crisp deep focus in Chantal Akerman's interminable tracking shots when watching her Sud (1999), a European look at the U.S. South and the recent lynching death of James Byrd Jr. Similarly, negative space (1999), British filmmaker Chris Petit's experimental documentary about film critic Manny Farber had unintended irony: Farber is wonderfully portrayed as obsessed with the telling visual details and negative spaces in cinema, but digital-to-35mm rendered Petit's video-clip illustrations a smog of moire patterns and digital shimmer. The lesson of these anti-visual experiences might be that it is time for festivals like Toronto to drop the celluloid requirement and respect the media in which artists are actually working. A sheer relief in the same program was Vivian Ostrovsky and Yann Beauvais's split-screen portrait of the former Soviet Union, Work and Progress (1999). The double image, together with a complex soundscape of old pop songs, provided a rich audiovisual montage.

Another notable documentary was Homo Sapiens 1900 (1999) by Peter Cohen, director of The Architecture of Doom (1989). While visually leaden, the film's content is fascinating and concerns the rise of eugenics in Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. We learn in rich detail of the Soviet schemes to breed perfect Bolsheviks by selecting a few great men to serve as sperm donors (the ova considered to be only hosts). We also learn that eugenics, rather than being snuffed out in the aftermath of Nazi Germany, was actively practiced in Sweden until the 1970s in the sterilization of people deemed mentally unfit to procreate.

Canadian experimental work was, of course, well represented at the festival. In a program of queer films, the one that had international critics talking was Quiver (1999) by Scott Beveridge. In a dark and grainy five minutes, a man in an empty room is brutally beaten and fucked by another man; on the soundtrack the low voice of the filmmaker tells how this abjection is exactly what he himself wants. In Robert Kennedy's witty, experimental Hi, I'm Steve (1999), Steve endures the humiliation of the personal ads until his listing describing his desire to be a porpoise finally brings him the mate he craves. Jean-Francois Monette's Where Lies the Homo? (1999) distinguishes itself from other coming-out stories that pair found footage with a ruminative voice-over because Monette is so visually aware and verbally acute. Finally, Hope Thompson's Switch (1999) painstakingly recreates a 1949 mise en scene to create a stylish lesbian film noir.

Even the most demanding drive through the TIFF permits a few tailgate picnics. For me they included Orfeu (1999) by Carlos Diegues of Brazil, a flamboyant return to the myth of Orpheus and Euridice set in a picturesque favela in Rio during Carnaval; Les Civilisees (1999) by Randa Chahal Sabbag, an interreligious love story set in civil war-ravaged Beirut that looks like a jolly sitcom with bombs falling; and Speedy Boys (1999) by photographer James Herbert, perhaps better called Languorous Boys or even Catatonic Boys, as it features two flowers of American young manhood living in Tuscany, always undressed, draping themselves over furniture, women and scratchy-looking grass. I wondered about the nature of the transaction between the filmmaker and his evidently reluctant models. It would go well with a young Pinot Grigio and some gorgonzola.

Of course, one festivalgoer's detour is, of course, another's main highway. It is satisfying that Toronto's programmers continue to select an eclectic array of works from many nations, in many forms and with budgets differing by a hundred-fold. Whatever route you take through the festival (as long as you avoid the bottleneck at the Hollywood galas), you are sure to create a map of the most interesting new developments in world cinema.

LAURA U. MARKS is assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.