Pan African Fest Gets Magic Assist

Before there was video, searching out foreign films beyond the usual European variety in Los Angeles was a real adventure. For Japanese movies, you had to go to the old Toho La Brea or the Shochiku. The Picfair Theatre offered a feast of Indian movie musical epics. After its life as L.A.’s best retrospective house, the Fox Venice was the place to go for Iranian cinema. And you can still catch new goodies from China, Hong Kong and Mexico at several venues from downtown to San Gabriel.

But except for one tiny Fox Venice festival in 1984, African movies were nowhere to be found. AFI’s international film festival is international until it comes to Africa--where it can’t seem to find its way in. Go to a video store well-stocked with foreign titles, and if you find anything African, it’s probably the South African apartheid-era comedy hit “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

Enter Ayuko Babu.

Seeing a vacuum and filling it, Babu organized the Pan African Film Festival in 1992 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theatres. Finally, there was a temporary haven for films from the African diaspora, spreading from the African homeland to the United States, Caribbean and South America. The Laemmle chain, a longtime supporter of foreign film, was a natural home, and the target African American audience came. (Babu estimates that blacks made up 95% of the audience.)

Still, for Babu and African American filmmakers who saw the festival as a chance to get their films shown, having to rely on a theater on the Sunset Strip was a strange irony, pointing out the lack of cinemas in L.A.’s black neighborhoods.

Enter Magic Johnson.

With the once and current Laker great opening up a multiplex in the Crenshaw shopping district, Babu sensed an opening. As a trial balloon, Babu urged the Magic Johnson Theatres to showcase Haile Gerima’s acclaimed “Sankofa.”

“That was it,” says Babu, walking through the LAX-scale lobby of Magic’s house of movies. “What happened was that people might come to see ‘Batman Forever’ or ‘Congo,’ find them sold out, and then notice that ‘Sankofa’ wasn’t. They’d wander over to ‘Sankofa’ and see something really African.”

“Sankofa” was a long-distance runner, playing for nearly five months, mostly on word of mouth, and proving for Babu and the theater that the local audience would come out for African movies.

Thus, most of the screenings of the fourth edition of the festival (opening tonight with a double-bill of Idrissa Ouedraogo’s “Cry From the Heart” and Ngozi Onwurah’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” and continuing through Feb. 18) are at the Magic Johnson Theatres, with the Sunset 5 as an additional venue.

The number of titles has expanded beyond past festivals (55 features and shorts, compared to about 30 in 1993), as has the global and artistic reach of the event. The first-ever feature from Papua New Guinea, Pengau Nengo’s “Tinpis Run,” will appear, and a large gallery showing of African American artists (including Albert Clayton Fennell and Charles Bibbs) will complement the films at the adjacent Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.

“It’s part of linking movies from around the world with the community,” says Babu, who is working up until the last minute to get some of the far-flung filmmakers to the festival.

Babu reckons the reason he has succeeded where others have failed trying to make African films visible stems from his background as an international legal and business consultant. Serving African American entrepreneurs looking for business links to Africa, Babu explains, “I aimed to promote small-scale industry that was of no interest to large multinationals, but appropriate for the growing African economy.”

Meeting the late Gilbert Minot, a USC film alumnus and head of the Guinean-based Syli Cinema, was a turning point, Babu says: “He told me that my idea of small-scale industry was perfect for the African film industry. It had an international presence in the old colonial countries like France, England, the Netherlands, but it had to come to Hollywood. Showcasing the films could attract distributors, which could bring in hard cash.”

For filmmaker Charles Burnett, coming off last year’s “The Glass Shield” with two festival entries--the Disney Channel-produced feature “Night John” and a short, “When It Rains” (part of the omnibus film “Postcards From L.A.”)--Babu “has gradually helped build an audience for African films. But with the move to Magic’s theaters, there’s the chance to build an even broader audience, reaching out, for instance, to kids in the community. The festival section devoted to children’s films [on Saturday and Feb. 17] is part of that.”

Another section, devoted to films by and about Africans living in France and co-sponsored by the French Consulate, reverses the rules of foreign movie marketing. “Rather than having a white-dominated festival doing outreach to nonwhite audiences,” Babu says, “we’re turning that around and inviting a white audience to an African event.”

Babu hopes that a film like “Cry From the Heart” can break out from the festival screening and into wider distribution, while filmmakers like Burnett see the larger value of “an audience getting to see styles of storytelling that are totally different from Hollywood, and that has roots they can feel and understand.”

* The Pan African Film Festival opens tonight and continues through Feb. 18. Screenings at the Magic Johnson Theatres, 4020 Marlton Ave., Los Angeles; Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. Information: (213) 896-8221.