Only thing missing is a tour guide

Volunteering at the information desk, Zulaika Mjasiri quickly picks up the buzz. She can tell what’s hot by the number of questions.

“Why can’t we get tickets for ‘SOS’?” asks an African American man interested in the documentary on a program to divert youngsters from gangs and other violence.

In the same queue, Korean doctoral students seek information about “Wet Sand: Voices from L.A. Ten Years Later,” a documentary about Los Angeles a decade after the 1992 riots.

The 12th annual Pan African Film & Arts Festival, which continues through Monday, has turned the Magic Johnson Theatres into an international crossroads in a county that, according to census statistics, is home to people from 160 countries. Conversations can be heard in French, Korean, and Spanish as it is spoken in Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela.

English is spoken here, of course, generally in the form of the ubiquitous film-festival question “What are you seeing?” And never mind the accents, like that of Mjasiri, a Londoner fluent in the lingua franca at Los Angeles City College, and whose mother is from Zimbabwe. Revved up by cans of Red Bull, she points out location changes to filmgoers who, looking for Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” ended up in “Barbershop 2: Back in Business” because the theaters were switched after the program went to press.

“We want to be here with ‘Barbershop 2,’ ” says Ayuko Babu, the founder and executive director of the festival. He reasons that viewers who come to see that popular movie will also see one of the more than 160 feature films, documentaries and shorts listed on the neon movie schedule.

Over the weekend, kids rush into screenings chaperoned by a few parents or teachers. They pack Bill Cosby’s “Fat Albert” cartoons. A few watch “Kirikou and the Sorceress,” a cartoon adventure that, to the disappointment of a couple of adults, is not in the original French.

Stanley and his Camerounian love Yana “Please-Don’t-Use-Our-Last-Names” heard about the movie from her sisters.

“It was out in France about four years ago. My whole family and my friends saw it. I really wanted to see it,” says Yana, who wears a svelte black skirt from Paris and stylish Japanese cleft-toe boots. “When African people are portrayed in movies, there’s a lot of stereotypes. That’s not the case in this one.”

At the Student Fest, packed by teenagers -- many on school trips -- youngsters see a universal story bounded neither by the equator nor longitude or latitude. In “Hang Time,” a short described as representing Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom and Nigeria, a teenager must have the kind of athletic shoes that most parents dread, the ones bearing the name of somebody famous that cost at least $100 -- a fortune for many families and a king’s ransom in a poor country.

Adults who can get the day off, are retired or dared to call in sick swarm the later films.

“Is ‘Le Prix du Pardon’ [The Price of Forgiveness] going to be here?” asks Aziz Diouf, a New Yorker by way of Senegal, who saw the movie last year. He is selling his fashions at the festival’s companion art show in the adjacent Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza.

The English subtitles don’t put off Dr. Melvin Scheer, a Venice physician who returned last month from a trip to Senegal. “The movies made in Africa usually have a very different way of telling a story,” he says, referring to the allegorical film told in Woloff, an indigenous language.

Scheer also attends a Sunday showing of “Me and My White Friend” with his friend independent filmmaker Robert Kenner.

“American films generally have happy endings. European films might have sad endings. Middle Eastern films might not have endings,” Kenner says.

He and Scheer stick out. They are white. They are not uncomfortable.

Neither is Susan Frierson, an architect who works in Newport Beach and grew up in Orange County. She is accustomed to looking like a raisin in rice pudding, for example during the nine months she spent last year working for her firm in the United Kingdom and Dubai.

After watching “Me and My White Friend,” a French movie, she buys tickets for “Emotional Backgammon,” a romance from the U.K., and looks through the offerings for other movies that might remind her of her good time in London.

“The schedule is crazy-making,” says Marlon Tillett, originally from Belize. He and his wife can’t wait for the closing night film “One Love,” a reggae Romeo and Juliet that stars Ky-Mani Marley, a son of the late Bob Marley.

Buzz is also building for “Soldiers of the Rock,” the centerpiece scheduled for Thursday. Set deep inside a South Africa gold mine, this political drama explores the struggle for personal freedom that continues after apartheid.

“South Africa is celebrating its 10th year of freedom,” says Eva Georgia, from Capetown. Here in Los Angeles, she is the general manager of KPFK-FM (90.7), the progressive radio station.

She plans to see this movie and others set in locations that are as familiar to her as a letter from home, just as the scenes in “Wet Sand” and “SOS” are to many who live in Los Angeles.

On Sunday night, just as the Grammy Awards show is beginning, another local independent film causes a line from the ticket booth to the door, parallel to the line for Miramax’s Oscar-nominated “City of God,” described in the festival schedule as a Brazilian picture made with French and U.S. support.

That line is understandable. But what’s with that other long line, mostly women, waiting for the premiere of “Virgin Again”?

The official PAFF description reads: “A 49-year-old woman who has yet to know love is forever changed when she meets LOVE himself in the form of a Black Jesus in blue jeans.” A heard-in-the-lobby description suggests this movie is for all those 40-something black women who want a husband.

This film, like most of them, is one in search of a U.S. distributor. A few big deals have come out of PAFF, largely for African films bought up by Blockbuster, according to Babu.

Much has changed since he founded the first festival. Since then, all of Africa has become independent. That continent dominates PAFF selections, but also offered are films from France, Brazil, the United States, the Netherlands, New Zealand, New Guinea and just about anywhere else there is a black presence.

“One of the challenges we get is trying to get blacks to cross over. We can’t just look at movies by African Americans and get the whole story,” Babu says. “We try to mix it up. A Nigerian film with a Cuban film ... so everybody’s forced to see it.”

Volunteer Zulaika Mjasiri has missed every movie she wanted to see. But she’s up on the buzz and hopes to catch “One Love.”