Due to limited venue availability, this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival is less expansive than previous years. The quality of programming, however, remains undiminished, and the festival will once again be co-hosted in the East Bay at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Of the films I was able to pre-screen, two are definite must-sees.
Banel & Adama (screening at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 27) is a drama about a rebellious young couple from a tiny Senegalese village reliant on cattle and subsistence farming. Banel is the widower of the village’s tribal chief, while her new husband, Adama, is the deceased chief’s son. The villagers demand Adama become chief, and Banel’s mother begs her daughter to give her a grandson, but both prefer not to play by the rules — and when a drought sets in, their recalcitrance is blamed for the slow-motion disaster.
Written and directed by Ramata-Toulaye Sy, Banel & Adama begins with magical realist visions of an idyllic and romantic rural existence, but slowly transforms into a grim essay on the vicissitudes of weather. The elephant in the film’s room is, of course, climate change, a subtext Sy addresses only subtextually — not least via her film’s stunning final image of Banel striding through a relentless windstorm toward two abandoned, sand-buried houses. It’s powerful and beautiful stuff.
Before I watched Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat (7 p.m. Thursday, April 25), I initially balked at its two-and-a-half hour running time — in fact, I almost skipped it altogether. Don’t be tempted to make the same mistake I nearly made. This bravura piece of documentary filmmaking is well worth your time. Not a minute is wasted.
It’s hard to adequately describe director Johan Grimonprez’s film, but I’ll give it the old college try nonetheless. Focusing on the mid-20th-century history of the benighted Belgian Congo and its successor state, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Grimonprez connects the imperialist pillaging of this country (which made the building of America’s atomic arsenal possible and still holds an estimated $24 trillion worth of mineral resources) to the liberatory power of jazz music.
I’m not a huge jazz enthusiast, but watching Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and others perform in their prime — and seeing their artistry contrasted with the lies of CIA Director Allen Dulles and the coldblooded murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba — is revelatory. The film also examines the ‘jazz diplomacy’ of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, who were used by the State Department in the 1950s and ’60s to sell capitalism to newly independent African countries. Without a doubt, both Soundtrack and Banel & Adama will feature prominently on my favorite films of 2024 list come December — see them while you have the chance.
Also worthy of your consideration: Farah Nabulsi’s The Teacher, a nuanced drama about Palestinian resistance starring Imogen Poots and Salih Bakri (who previously headlined Nabulsi’s Oscar-nominated 2020 short The Present); The Cats of Gokogu Shrine, a Frederick Wiseman-style observational doc about the titular felines and the people who care for them; and Black Box Diaries, a documentary in which a Japanese journalist reports on her sexual assault.
