Freedom Can Be Rough Too

The Pan African Film Festival, which will present some 70 programs through Feb. 16 at the Magic Johnson Theaters, opens tonight at 7:30 with Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Sense Absa’s “Tableau Ferraille” (Scrap Heap).

The film is a strong, socially conscious drama about the rise and fall of a naive young politician (Ismael Lo) with two very different wives, the devoted but barren Gagnesiri (Ndeye Fatou Ndaw) and the bored, glamorous Kine (Ndeye Beneta Diop). When Daam becomes a minister of development, his impoverished community expects him to be a savior--especially a corrupt developer eager to build an unsafe bridge.

“Tableau Ferraille” is preachy and melodramatic, but it’s vital, and Sense Absa is able to see people in the round and to capture the jarring clashes between past and present through which we’re able to understand the perils of post-colonialism.

Among the shorts playing with it is a ravishing work of animation, Cilia Sawadogo’s sendup of class discrimination, “The Cora Player,” in which the title character, a young griot who performs with a stringed instrument, falls in love with an aristocrat only to enrage her snobbish father.

Cameroon filmmaker Jean-Marie Touro’s outstanding “Clando” (Saturday at 8 p.m.) is a complex work of impressive style and sophistication, also set in an unstable, brutal post-colonial present.

When we meet Anotole Sobgui (Paulin Fodouop) he’s a former computer programmer reduced to turning his car into an unlicensed taxi--he and it are referred to as “clandos,” from clandestine. When a radical political group involves him in a murder, he grabs the chance to flee to Cologne, Germany, where he is to buy cars for a wealthy man from his home village--and also to locate the man’s prodigal son. There he meets a young German woman (Caroline Redl) with whom he becomes involved but whose whose greater impact upon him lies in her work as a human rights activist.

In a work of considerable intricacy, Sobgui emerges as a mature man capable of changing the direction of his life, no matter what cost.

In “Taafe Fanga” (Skirt Power), which screens Sunday at 8 p.m., Mali filmmaker Adama Drabo draws upon folklore to make a lively, mischievous comedy on women’s lib. Set in the 18th century, it tells of a young tribal wife, who while out collecting firewood for her husband’s bath, encounters a bush spirit, struggles with him successfully and comes away with his powerful mask.

Once she dons the mask, she terrorizes the men of her village into a role reversal, doing the work of women. Intriguingly she and other women are not out for revenge but for a balance that keys into her people’s view of the universe. There is a great deal of native mythology, religion and ritual involved in “Taafe Fanga,” but you don’t need to be an anthropologist to enjoy it. These and many other films will be repeated. For full schedule and festival information: (213) 896-8221; Magic Johnson Theaters: (213) 290-5900.

*

The American Cinematheque and Outfest present tonight at Raleigh Studios “Queer Shorts,” two engaging programs of gay and lesbian shorts, at 7:15 and 9:30 p.m. Highlights are splendid documentaries on writer Dorothy Allison, radical performance artist Ron Athey (Program 1) and on a gay couple, lovers and South Texas ranchers for 14 years (Program 2). (213) 466-FILM.

*

The crown jewel in Exposition Park’s magnificent new California Science Center is its Imax Theater, which has 3-D capabilities and has a screen 91 feet high and 68 feet wide (the original theater was 70 feet by 50 feet) The Imax 3-D Theater opens Saturday with two films, the 3-D “Into the Deep,” a wondrous undersea exploration--you have the illusion of being able to reach out and touch kelp and every manner of sea creature--which opened the Imax 3-D theater at the Edwards 21 Cinemas at the Irvine Spectrum in March 1996, and the new 2-D “Mission to Mir.”

Also on the bill with “Into the Deep”: “Paint Misbehavin,” a knockout two-minute preview of Imax 3-D animation.

Imax is always a perfect medium for space travel, and “Mission to Mir,” co-directed by Ivan Galin and James Neihouse, gives us a good idea of what it’s like to be in the cramped quarters of Mir and of the awesome view of Earth it provides. But it’s a bit bland, heavy on the brotherhood theme, in comparison with Andrei Ujica’s more amusing and far more personal Mir documentary, “Out of the Present.” (213) 744-2016.

*

LACMA’s “Luis Bun~uel in Mexico,” a series of 12 of the 20 films the iconoclastic Spanish master made in his long exile, commences Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “Los Olvidados” (The Young and the Damned), a timeless 1950 masterpiece in its depiction of juvenile delinquency.

Set in the slums of Mexico City--though Bun~uel takes care to suggest the locale could be any major city in the world--”Los Olvidados” is social protest raised to the level of tragedy. Its key figure, Pedro (Alfonso Mejia), is a well-meaning youngster victimized by circumstances and a vicious older youth, Jaibo (Roberto Cobo).

Bun~uel’s compassion and powerful Surrealist images give the film extraordinary impact. Inevitably, “Los Olvidados” brings to mind the postwar Italian Neorealist films, but it is more concerned with its people’s inner lives than most of them were. It has been said the film is so angry and unblinking in its bleak vision of life that it elicits a sense of the tragic without evoking pity in the conventional sense. Indeed, for all its dark beauty, “Los Olvidados” is a film without any consolations whatsoever. For full schedule: (213) 857-6010.

*

“Gaach” (The Tree), Catherine Berge’s 63-minute, deeply touching documentary on Soumitra Chatterjee, the star of 14 Satyajit Ray films, takes its title from a piece of advice given the internationally renowned actor-playwright-poet to be like a tree--to be useful to others and give shelter. “Gaach” opens a one-week run at the Grande 4-Plex Friday.

Chatterjee has done just that, entertaining and stirring audiences on stage as well as screen and with open-air poetry. Born in 1935, Chatterjee first came to world acclaim as the adult Apu in “The World of Apu” (1959), the final film in Ray’s famed Apu Trilogy about the childhood and coming of age of a rural Bengali. Produced by Merchant Ivory, “Gaach” is a portrait of a warm man of great civility as well as talent and versatility, and his reminiscences of Ray are profoundly moving. (213) 617-0268.

*

The UCLA Film Archive’s outstanding and venturesome “Contemporary Latin American Films” concludes this weekend with “There’s No Pain in Paradise,” a Mexican film dealing with the reactions of two gay men to the death of their closest friend from AIDS; the film was unavailable for preview and screens tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater.

Screening Saturday at 7:30 p.m. is Dajalmi Liomongi Batista’s ultra-pagan “Bocage, the Triumph of Love.” It is a surreal sexual odyssey inspired by the work, life and legend of 18th century Portuguese poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, a Casanova whose celebration of physical passion is earthy enough to make Henry Miller blush.

We meet this self-described “conquistador of love” (Victor Wagner) on a Brazilian beach where a beautiful belly dancer chooses him among her audience to share her favors, having been beguiled by his poetry, and handsome looks. “Bocage” unfolds like the late Sergei Paradjanov’s lush tableaux vivants-- with considerably more sex and nudity.

Closing the series Sunday at 7 p.m. is Ciro Cappellari’s absorbing and adult “Time of the Flamingos,” in which a young engineer (Daniel Kuzniecka) comes to a small town in Patagonia to survey the area for the construction of a bridge to transport a steamship to an inland lake, site of a future resort.

The locals see the chance to make some money, especially since the bridge and an improved road will allow them to exploit better their saltpeter mine. The engineer drifts into an affair with a woman (Angela Molina, superb as always) married to a much older man.

“Time of the Flamingos” is an astute mood piece that, in its observation of small-town life, recalls “The Last Picture Show” and “Lone Star.” It considers the status of women, the terrible treatment of the natives to the region and the eternal lure of greed. The film’s ending is gratifyingly grown-up. (310) 206-FILM.

*

If, as has been observed, experimental filmmaker James Benning reveals American history as tragedy, he also celebrates the redemptive power of art. His “Four Corners,” a major work, makes us think of the decimation of Native Americans--and also the oppression of blacks--in a fresh, deeper way.

Benning intersperses superbly composed long-held shots of ancient Navajo and Hopi ruins, a Milwaukee slum and a bleak New Mexican city with several paintings by the famous (Monet, Jasper Johns) and the obscure, along with considerable biographical and historical text. “Four Corners,” which Filmforum premieres Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., is a triumph of formalism that gradually accumulates emotional impact. (213) 526-2911.

*

Note: UC Irvine’s “Post-Colonial Classics of the Korean Cinema” continues Saturday in 100 Humanities Instruction Building at 4:30 p.m. with the 1956 “Madame Freedom,” about a bored professor’s wife having an extramarital fling and, at 7 p.m., the 1996 “The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well,” an enigmatic vision of intertwined lives in present-day Seoul. Festival information: (714) 824-992; ticket and parking information: (714) 824-1992.