Africa is a Country

I finally got to see Chop Shop, probably one of the best films of 2008. The film was directed by Ramin Bahrani, the young American director, also behind the equally impressive, but underrated, Man Push Cart. Both films feature “marginal people” (really the majority of people in the world as he points out himself) in unglamorous settings (what most of the city looks like) in New York City — Man Push Cart is about a Pakistani street vendor in Manhattan and Chop Shop about a young Latino boy working in a scrap metal district in Queens. Bahrani is heavily influenced by two of my favorite directors Ken Loach and Luis Buñuel. For some of the praise Chop Shop got when it came out, including from mainstream critics, see here, here, here and here.  Bahrani’s latest film, a feature with an African link (that’s the obsession of this blog, BTW), Goodbye Solo, will be released in the US sometime in 2009 (the film was shot in September 2007). Goodbye Solo “… tells the story of Solo, a kindhearted and friendly 34-year-old Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina, who is hired by William, a tough 70-year-old white southerner, to drive him in two weeks time to a mountaintop from which William plans to jump to his death. But Solo decides to charm his way into William’s life by becoming his driver, and this odd couple begin an unexpected friendship as Solo hopes to change the old man’s mind before the two weeks are up.” [Source]
Its a shame Bahrani’s films does not get the kind of mainstream exposure afforded other “independent” filmmakers, whether publicity or number of screens (I missed both Chop Shop short runs at two alternative film theaters in New York City earlier this year, so I finally got to see it on DVD last week). Bahrani, as he makes clear in interviews, is aware of this slight, but could care less [Source]:

… I don’t know what the reaction is going to be to Chop Shop when it’s released in the [United] States, when more people in the States see this film. I think both these films [the other film he is referring to, is Man Push Cart] are about immigrant-type characters … but I don’t think that’s the essential tissue of the film. I just feel like I’m tired of seeing the same independent films being made over and over again. This “mumblecore” stuff that’s popular right now — I’m not interested in these stories about these really attractive white kids, and their really attractive friends, and their problems. I’m interested in these groups of people, the people you don’t see featured so much in films, and that’s why I focus on them.

It’s unclear when exactly we’ll get to see Goodbye Solo in US cinemas (I think it is more like “art cinemas” or small, independent theaters) next year.
* The image, above, taken by Bahrani’s brother, Hooman, who was still photographer for the film, shows one the main actors, Souleymane Sy Savane, with the director.