Editorial Reviews and
DVD Information about
ABC Africa
Description
"Of all the movies I've seen this year, the one that has stayed most strongly in my mind is Abbas Kiarostami's ABC Africa." (Martin Scorsese) Over the course of a ten-day visit to Uganda, Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us) uses his camera to capture and caress the faces of a thousand orphans. Although a documentary about the ravages of AIDS and civil war in Uganda may seem at first like a radical departure, one of the most remarkable things about ABC Africa is the way that Iran's most celebrated auteur makes such unlikely material very much his own. In true Kiarostami style, an impressionistic, deceptively simple record of a journey becomes the film itself. This striking visual poem is full of echoes from his oeuvre: the hypnotic tracking shots from car windows, the dirt-road villages, the majestic landscapes and, above all, the emphasis on the resilience and resourcefulness of children. Alternately heartbreaking and optimistic, ABC Africa records a people struggling to survive. Filled with laughter and music, and pulsing with life, Kiarostami's vision attests to Africa's sunny spirit
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Customer Reviews for
ABC Africa
An African viewmaster reel
This is how developing Africa looks and feels. (And, the film deserves great credit for that. This is the only film I've seen since my return from teaching in Malawi 25 years ago which makes me feel there again.) Yet there is only so much of children mugging for the white man's camera, of drunks outside the village bars, of shy young mothers trying to avoid the camera. . .before. . .you want a story.
Maybe, that is the director's intention: to capture the everyday. But then, and this is the film's other great strength, there is the footage of the home, ruined by civil war, still rented out to government workers; of the hospital spilling those dead from AIDS, of the--almost countless-- orphans and the small, locally-organized groups of women trying to help them, and, finally, most memorably, the clouds below the jet bound back to Europe. That final minute is poetic cinematography.ABC Africa
10 days with Ugandan orphans
Written, directed, and edited by the Iranian film maker Abbas Kiarostami, this documentary portrays the plight of Uganda's 2 million children who have been orphaned by the ravages of civil war, life under the psychopathic despot Idi Amin, and AIDS. Kiarostami made the film at the request of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development. If you have been to Africa the sights and sounds are very familiar--piles of smoldering garbage, orange clay landscape, rutted roads, rusted corrugated tin roofs, bicycles, the ubiquitous rubber flip-flop sandals, and a weary yet resilient, elegant, and remarkably joyful people. In the film's most powerful sequence, a nurse wraps a dead child in a dirty blanket, packs him in half of a cardboard box ripped open for the purpose, and then loads the corpse onto the back of a bicycle. In particular, Kiarostami highlights the work of UWESO--Ugandan Women's Efforts To Save Children, an all volunteer organization of women who give themselves to care for the orphans and to train women in small business skills. The film has almost no narrative, and would have been even more powerful if it had. But the images speak for themselves. The title refers to a t-shirt worn by a small child featured in the film who was adopted by a young Austrian couple.ABC Africa
Kiarostami Amazes
It would have been easy for Abbas Kiarostami to fly to Uganda and play "Bono" -- giving the world "simple answers" (send money; buy "red" products) for "simple problems" (they have AIDS and are dying) -- instead he takes a harder path: providing no answers or questions, forcing the viewer to find the significance for all that he just saw. It's a difficult picture, because it appears as if there's very little going on, besides some tourist videography, but soon you start to question the helpfulness of the UN (in sending a camera crew instead of something better) and the savings clubs for the women, and the adoption of little Ugandans by Europeans. The thread of futility strikes daggers at the heart of "Oprah Do-Gooderism" by wondering if it's all for naught. There are beautiful scenes in this movie (of children dancing and singing and automobiles driving along dirt paths) and scenes of torment both of which feed into what we stereotypically expected from the film and from "Africa" itself. Perhaps it's all lost on this age which views self-reflection as something foreign.ABC Africa
self-absorbed and ignorant
This documentary was clearly made by a man who had not only never been to "Africa" (Uganda, actually), but had done absolutely no research prior to his filming. The film is more a boring examination of Samadian's culture shock and ignorant observations, then an examination of the effects of HIV/AIDS on Uganda. Even the title, ABC Africa, reflects Samadian's ignorance of the African continent in all its diversity--it is similar to titling a film about Sweden "ABC Europe." It is painful to watch anyone stumbling through their first journey in a new culture--culture shock and ignorance are never flattering--but not to realize one's woefully inadequate knowledge of a subject and distribute one's experience as a documentary is just plain crazy. Someone should have taken him aside and told him he was acting a fool.ABC Africa
Loads of potential....but falls far short!
I agree with the previous reviewer. Martin Scorcese must have poor taste in movies. In fact, most of his suck, so I shoulda known better. Anyway, this film takes a subject that is very much worth making a film about, has some great shots in it, but overall, there's NO story whatsoever. Felt like an 84-minute commercial for Feed the Children. Not very moving or very educational. I think the folks that consider this a "top 10" are just "feel-gooders," who rated the movie more on the subject matter than the actual film itself. You want a better movie that also shows you some of the cultural in that region, see Hotel Rwanda, or even Endurance. Much better.ABC Africa
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