Leo Africanus / Africa is a Country

The Tribeca Film Festival starts next week (April 23) and goes through May 4 (I’ll probably get to see one day) and I had to check for the Africa-related content.

Big news is the screening of a restored print of Haile Gerima’s ‘Harvest 3000 Years’ that he shot over two (!) weeks in 1975 during the Ethiopian revolution (it’s being screened in the festival “Restored/Rediscovered Section”). It’s presented by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation.

Here’s what Scorsese have to say about Gerima and the circumstances under which the film was made:

That sense of monumental effort pervades every frame of Harvest 3000 Years. It has a particular kind of urgency which few pictures possess. This is the story of an entire people, and its collective longing for justice and good faith. An epic, not in scale but in emotional and political scope.

More info here.

Apart from Gerima’s film, what’s with the continued focus on children? See for example: War Child, Marina of the Zabbaleen, and Kassim the Dream.

Yes, Africa has wars and life is hard there, but people love, they laugh, they break up, they make up, they hang out, they govern themselves, they plant. Get my point. This is perhaps why festivals, like the New York African Film Festival just finished at Lincoln Center, are so indispensable (I managed to see the subpar Africa Paradis and the excellent Brothers in Arms at the festival).