by MATTHEW HAYS

For its 22nd year, Vues d’Afrique, Montreal’s venerable festival institution celebrating African and Creole cinema, has once more pulled together a broad range of films certain not to be at your local multiplex. With 125 entries from every genre and type of film imaginable, from Morocco, Benin, Rwanda, Senegal and Angola—among many other countries—the festival offers several focused tributes, as well as a general glimpse at what African and Creole filmmakers have been producing in the past year.

The festival kicks off with a screening of La symphonie marocaine, Kamal Kamal’s poignant feature about a band of street people who create an orchestra to perform a symphony composed by their friend, who died a tragic death. They dream big, hoping to take their show all the way to London’s Albert Hall. Haitian director Raoul Peck will look back at the atrocities committed in Rwanda a decade ago with Sometimes in April, a film about two Hutu brothers, one a soldier and the other a journalist, whose bond is forever altered by the genocide. Mark Dornford-May’s U’Carmen ekhayelitsha is the South African take on George Bizet’s famous opera Carmen, and was the first African feature ever awarded a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, taking the Ours d’or for best film last year. Famous African auteur Ousmane Sembène’s latest film, Moolaadé, will also be screened at this year’s festival.

As in past years, documentaries make up a large and crucial part of Vues d’Afrique, given the significance non-fiction filmmaking plays in addressing social issues. Several NFB documentaries will be presented, including Cheating Death, a profile of Torontonian Gyasi Ferdinand, a former drug dealer who survived four gunshot wounds that he received at the age of 25. He has since sworn off the crack dealing and has found a new life. Director Eric Geringas follows Ferdinand’s impressive journey, particularly germane given the recent increase in gang-related gun violence on the streets of Toronto. In War Hospital, filmmakers David Christensen and Damien Lewis capture the harrowing goings-on at the world’s largest field hospital. Shot in cinema-verité style, this documentary pieces together footage at the Red Cross hospital, located in Northern Kenya, where the wounded are brought, victims of the Sudanese civil war, the longest-running conflict on the continent. Christensen and Lewis chose to drop many of the conventions we associate with doc filmmaking, instead opting for a Frederick Wiseman-style, fly-on-the-wall aesthetic. There is no narrator here, just the razor-sharp images of a medical team tending to those ravaged by war.

There will be three major threads to look for at the 22nd annual Vues d’Afrique. An homage to Morocco will be presented, in which the national cinema will be feted with a series of screenings. Over 20 films will have women as their central focus, examining the ways in which women are empowering themselves in African and Creole nations. And films depicting Rwanda will also get a series of screenings.

Vues D’Afrique runs from April 20–30, Info: 990-3201 or www.vuesdafrique.org

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