It’s a curious feeling driving to the cinema to see your friend’s debut feature. You want it to be brilliant. You know how much hard work has gone into it and how talented the director is.
But you also attempt ambivalence. It will be okay if it’s not perfect. Like sitting on the edge of your seat in the ultrasound room as the nurse scans your wife’s belly, knowing that any moment she will proclaim the sex of your next child, hoping that it’s a girl (having got 3 boys already), yet accepting that it’s okay if it’s more of the same. Which of course it is. And was.
Because the first time you make a feature film can’t be easy. Especially with a small budget (only £3m for a multiple locations overseas) and a ludicrously short period in which to make the film. I spoke to Debs, the director, recently about just how challenging the time frame was, especially for a cast and crew who were largely first-timers. It was, she said, her annus horribilis.
In the event, waiting in Cineworld, I decided to suspend as much of my hope and resignation as I could and just try to enjoy the show.
Thankfully, it was easy. Africa United baptises you into colour, story and tongue-in-cheek humour from the opening line. It’s the tale of a random band of African children, starting in Rwanda, hitching, stowing, walking and paddling their way through thousands of miles and several borders to reach South Africa for the opening ceremony of the World Cup (or ‘warldcap’ as I now can’t help but hear it).
It’s instantly funny. The children’s wry comments are sometimes conscious, sometimes unaware of the satire, about AIDS and charity handouts and sex trading and the unavoidable stains of poverty and genocide. Though strange to imagine how one could laugh at these monumental atrocities it works perfectly. The children deliver the witty script in passing with a light touch.
The ensemble centres on the cheery, malaprop-prone orphan Dudu (played by Eriya Ndayambaje). He is relentlessly optimistic, like Mike Leigh’s Poppy in Happy Go Lucky, and invites the same kind of scorn from people who do not like happiness thrust upon them. Upbeat characters hold up a mirror to the miserable and judgemental, and I can’t help wondering if that is not in part responsible for some of the film’s less favourable reviews.
In context Dudu’s optimism and vision is the soul of the film. He and the editing move us quickly from scene to scene. This flitting could be seen as a weakness but it is essential to the tale. While we in the West like to cogitate about what this-or-that means, analysing the matter ever so seriously, in Africa you’ve got to lighten up. Move on. The horrors of the past cannot be changed. You begin to realise as you watch the film: this is the way to deal with deep tragedy.
The overall result is a southern Africa that dances swiftly and colourfully past our eyes, acknowledging ethnic warfare and disease and poverty in the lightest but sincerest fashion. There are segues into a charming animated story that punctuates the live action and is Dudu’s device for motivating the group. The deliberately rough collages reminded me of Wes Anderson’s Steve Zissou and evoke the improvisation of people without riches, while providing the play-within-a-play motif where the story has power to make sense of the present. As the characters move on from tragedy, we are invited to move on from our present stereotypes of Africa, and given a new story to tell.
Africa United tips its hat to Stand by Me and has been compared to Slumdog Millionaire but the most wonderful thing about it is its originality. The style is generous, hope-filled, visually rich, intimate, flighty, unrefined and, well, African. It feels like a fresh story-telling mode, a new voice and eye in cinema, with a novel narrative about the world’s oldest continent – fitting for the first ever feature film made in Rwanda.
I remember cooking for Deb Gardner-Paterson when we were students together, and she would sit on the floor mopping up curry from her plate with her fingers. Though based in the UK her background and life take in several continents, not least Africa, and this tumbles out gloriously in her work. Her poetry is in there and her belief in other people, drawing former child soldiers and local non-actors into the film. She has a unique history and this has given her an original voice. She has used it, admirably to paint countries like Rwanda in a new light.
Whatever the box office returns or the critics write, Africa United is a delightfully original movie. I always knew Debs would make great films and it’s a joy to watch such a sweet beginning. No need to worry after all. It’s a girl!
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