Autocross Blogs - Estelle Jacken

Deciding to calm my nerves by watching a more upbeat view of Africa, I turned to Sascha Paladino's music-filled Throw Down Your Heart (2008), a Cinema Guild release. It has no explicit politics to convey, but its implied politics are quite persuasive. Paladino and his crew accompanied banjo star Béla Fleck on a trip to Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia, and Mali, chronicling Fleck's campaign to reconnect the banjo, originally an African instrument, with the varieties of music that originally produced it. The film consists mainly of music, performed by Fleck and a changing array of African players in outdoor settings before casual, tunedin listeners. The cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, captures everything vividly, expressively, and without a hint of ostentation. The implied politics of the film come across most clearly when one of the African musicians says to the camera, "There is this negative thinking about tiffany shopping Africa.... 'They are beggars, there is HIV-AIDS, they are at war all the time.' But that is just a very small bit of what Africa is." Paladino's movie proves this proposition.

I was less persuaded by Paula Heredia's hour-long Africa Rising (2009). Released on DVD by Women Make Movies, it zeroes in on female genital mutilation, a problem vastly more widespread than the CAR's witchcraft mania. The film travels with activists to villages in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Somalia, Charm bracelet and Tanzania, where they urge "circumcisers" to throw away their knives, police forces to enforce anti-FGM laws, and communities to spread information about the practice's cruelty and hazardousness. Everyone in the movie means well, but we learn nothing about whether their efforts have lasting effects or succumb to the mandates of tradition after the educators leave town; the World Health Organization reports that three million girls are still at risk of FGM each year, and the latest trend is for medically trained professionals to carry it out, reducing the immediate danger but not the permanent damage. Regrettably, Africa Rising works harder at cheerleading for the activists than examining root causes and suggesting solutions more radical than exhortation and admonition. Viewing it was a reminder that the PBS-ization of documentary cinema extends to nontheatrical as well as mainstream film.

Moving from Africa to Europe, I watched a more hard-hitting documentary about a grave publichealth problem primarily affecting girls and women. Lucie Schwartz's Arresting Ana (2009), from Women Make Movies, provides a harrowing look at anorexia, directing most of its attention to the pro-anorexia movement, a ghastly phenomenon propagated mainly by young women on personal Websites. The film's anti-anorexia position is never in doubt, but it offers a balanced look at the efforts of a French legislator to outlaw such sites, discussing the anger and civic-mindedness that motivate her and also the civil-rights liability (censorship) and Bead bracelet practical futility (close one down, another will spring up) of such a move. (As of last year, the legislation had not passed.) Other criminal-justice films in my DVD stack included two extremely PBS-ish documentaries by Rachel Lyon, Race to Execution (2007) and Juror Number Six (2008), distributed by Filmakers Library and dealing with racial bias in American death-penalty cases. The subject is urgent, but neither film has anything new or revealing to say about it.