Leuven festival hosts hard-hitting South African films
Wide-ranging event takes a broad approach, with a collection including an Apartheid-era courtroom drama and the crowdfunded tale of a Congolese dandy
Out of Africa
The opening film, for example, is the rather French Bienvenue à Marly-Gomont (pictured) by Julien Rambaldi, a comedy drama about growing up black in a small, mainly white town in Picardy in the 1970s.
But it’s South Africa that provides the festival’s most attention-grabbing titles. Shepherds and Butchers by Oliver Schmitz is a courtroom drama set in the Apartheid era, about the prosecution of a young white prison guard who goes on a shooting spree. Steve Coogan plays the lawyer tasked with defending him, Andrea Riseborough the prosecutor.
Then there is Tess by Meg Rickards, about a 20-year-old Afrikaans prostitute on the streets of Muizenberg, Cape Town, whose life is turned upside-down when she falls pregnant. Both films have yet to be released in Belgium, and are screened in English or with English subtitles.
Shot on a shoestring
Also promising is The Wedding Ring by Rahmatou Keïta, a gentle film from Niger about a young woman of noble descent who reconnects with desert culture after going to school in France. And from North Africa, check out A peine j’ouvre les yeux (As I Open My Eyes) by Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid, in which 18-year-old Farah joins a politically engaged rock band just as the Arab Spring gets under way.
An altogether odder film is Papi, by first-time Flemish director Kjell Clarysse. This tells the story of a Congolese sapeur, or dandy, who moves to Uganda and is dragged into a tale of revenge involving a Belgian businessman and a young Ugandan mother. Shot on a crowdfunded shoestring, the film promises, at the very least, to be different.
Highlights among the festival’s documentaries include Hissane Habré: A Chadian Tragedy by celebrated fiction filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and The Siren of Faso Fani by Michel K Zongo, about a textile factory in Burkina Faso and the economic forces that closed it down.
There are lots of short films, both fiction and documentary, with sections devoted to Kenya, Rwanda and Congo, and a kids’ programme focused on migration. Non-cinematic events include a fashion show, an exhibition of photography from Sudan, a concert by legendary West African group Orchestra Baobab, and a conference on the “other” in art and culture.
21 April to May 6, across Flemish Brabant
