It’s been a Cannes constant to comment on the relative absence of films from the African continent. This year there were films aplenty from South America, and the Asian presence is now a regular feature, both in terms of film production and audiences.
Still, Cannes 2012 welcomed four films flying in from different corners of the biggest continent: two from north Africa dealing respectively with the Arab Spring and jihadi suicide bombers; and two from below the Sahara telling stories that again confront the dangers and indignities that people are driven to by deprivation.
In competition was After the Battle by Yousry Nasrallah, an Egyptian film that tackles the aftermath of the skirmish where camels and horses were ridden into Tahrir Square to violently intimidate protestors on 2 February 2011.
It tells the story of an unlikely relationship between a middle-class advertising executive and one of the offending horsemen. She is also a democracy advocate investigating the events from a human rights perspective, and he is now humiliated and unemployed in his village adjoining the pyramids.
Their lives and families and colleagues intermingle and, though the film doesn’t hit any cinematic high notes, the story reveals just a few more layers of the deep complexity of the Egyptian chapter of the Arab Spring.
Horses of God by Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch was presented in the parallel Un Certain Regard section. The film comes with the tagline “No one is born a martyr…” and tells the story of four young boys who find themselves becoming such figures.
This fictional story is based on four synchronised suicide bombings that took place in Casablanca in 2003, when 14 young men from the Sidi Moumen quarter bombed several locations in the city, killing dozens.
What is most revealing in Horses of God is the separate motivations and personalities of the bombers and the differences in perspectives and opinion of the population.
Paradise: Love is the first part of a trilogy by controversial Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl, set to be followed by films titled Paradise: Faith and Paradise: Hope. Seidl has an established reputation for his harsh and uncharitable take on the human condition.
Here we follow Teresa, an overweight middle-aged Austrian woman who travels on a package holiday to a splendid Shanzu Beach holiday resort, near Mombasa in Kenya. With the encouragement of her fellow mature lady tourists she seeks love in the arms of local beach boys.
From episode to episode, her experiences become more and more grotesque and pitiful, as Seidl strips away cultural curiosity and human warmth to reveal how an absence of love is a sure path to indignity – for everyone.
Despite everything, he does make some interesting, if extreme, points. However, I’m sure the Kenyan Tourist Board would feel little for him and will not be keen for him to return to make the sequels.
The pirogue is a large seafaring, flat-bottomed fishing boat commonly found in west Africa, and provides the title for a Senegalese film by Moussa Touré, a tale involving the smuggling of Africans to Europe on the long journey to Spain in a desperate attempt to find a better life. Many don’t make it and thousands have died trying in the past few years.
The Pirogue follows one particularly fraught journey, complete with impressively filmed storm sequences and a complex set of characters and relationships among the diverse, thirty would-be exiles that set out on the dangerous journey to a better life.
Having a film industry is a way to ensure that a nation can tell its own stories to the world, and is also a barometer for economic development. However, it should be noted that while these films are individually very African in their settings and in their subjects, all received significant support from France.
The French industry continues to find both its duty and self-interest in supporting the development of world cinema, and Cannes is an annual reminder of this.
Séamas McSwiney is an Irish film journalist based in France.
