Race and politics highlight this year's Pan African Film Festival. The Pan African Film and Arts Festival just wrapped up in Los Angeles screening a total of 160 films in 12 days. Based at the Magic Johnson theaters in Baldwin Hills, the festival is in its 14th year and is the largest international Black film festival in the US screening shorts, features, and documentaries from all over the world. Reinforcing the growing resurgence of South African film, the festival opened with the Academy Award nominated. TSOTSI (see our INsider feature) and closed with the critically acclaimed, SON OF MAN. Directed by Mark Donford-May, SON OF MAN which had its world premiere at Sundance this year, is a fantastic hyper-realist retelling of the Gospels as a parable for the corruption and political strife in contemporary Africa. It won the Festival Award for Best Feature. The majority of the festival's award winners were also either politically or racially charged: the Jury Prize for Best Documentary went to Thomas Allen Harris' THE TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA: A SON'S TRIBUTE TO UNSUNG HEROES about a son's search for reconciliation with the man who raised him, an African National Congress foot soldier who sacrificed his life for the freedom of his country; the Jury Prize for Best Director First Feature went to Donovan Marsh's DOLLARS AND WHITE PIPES, a rags to riches story of a former gang member who becomes a well respected businessman; and the FESTIVAL AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY went to ARISTIDE AND THE ENDLESS REVOLUTION (directed by Nicholas Rossier) which chronicles the events that led to the removal of Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. One of the most terrifying films that I saw at the festival that was all about race and politics was a documentary called THE ORIGIN OF AIDS (directed by Peter Chappell and Catherine Peix) which traces the appearance of HIV back to the experimental polio vaccine that was given to nearly a million Africans in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s. A multi-layered multi-national story, the film is a must-see civics lesson on how governments are capable of instituting tremendous campaigns - medical, political or economical - without any kind of accountability or recourse. I thought about it for days after I saw it. You will too.

Keeping it indie,
Julie