Film: ABC Africa
Year of production: 2001
UK Release date: 27th June 2011
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Certificate: 15
Running time: 84 mins
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Genre: Documentary
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Iran
Language: Persian/English
Review by: Paul Kelly
Released as part of The Abbas Kiarostami Collection. In 2000, Abbas Kiarostami, one of Iran's foremost filmmakers, received a fax from the UN's International Fund for Agricultural development. In it, he was asked to visit the Uganda Woman's Effort to Save Orphans charity in order to make a documentary about their work. After going to the area to scout for locations, Kiarostami and his assistant Seyfolah Samadian decided to put together the raw footage they had shot on hand-held cameras. ABC Africa is the final result of their work.
The Ugandan Woman's Effort to Save Orphans is a charity which works with children and teenagers left without parents as a result of the AIDS epidemic which still exercises its stranglehold over the continent. By a sharing of money and business incentives, these woman take orphans into their care and help them to live a normal life, as well as providing for themselves.
We learn little about the inner workings of the charity because sit-down, one on one interviews are not in the nature of the film. ABC Africa is an example of pure, minimalist documentary filmmaking. There is no structure to what Kiarostami and his assistant set out to do, no agenda on their minds as they chat with the locals. What results from this is a film which may lack the kind of hard hitting journalism that we are accustomed to seeing in tales from some of Africa's poorest countries, but one which offers a candid insight into a way of life we cannot possible fathom…
As hard hitting and insightful as much of the footage is, much of it is far too long and the film could have done with an awful lot longer in the editing suit. Here a director has a chance to make a film that will really get people thinking about an important issue that is too often overlooked. But instead of strongly focusing on the important points at hand, Kiarostami allows his camera's attention to wander into crowds of dancing children or clouds drifting by for periods of time - so long that it is easy to forget you are watching a film. Much of what takes an hour and twenty minutes could have been distilled into a far more impactful ten minute promotion for the charity.
This is a shame because there are moments when the fly-on-the-wall immediacy of the film is striking. This is particularly true of a visit to a centre which cares for AIDS victims, where the gaunt, hopeless and helpless faces of young and old alike make their way across the screen in a solemn procession, before a nurse is shown removing the body of a child with a blanket and a cardboard box with an efficiency which is as haunting as it is deeply sad. The style also works during an impromptu meeting with several families living in one shared house with open windows and doors; the happy dancing feet of the children and the patter of the rain outside working in harmony, reminding us that there is hope even in places seemingly void of it at first glance.
These moments are exceptions in Kiarostami's film, however, and do not do enough to lift the rest of the film, which feels like being forced to sit and watch a friend's holiday videos; undoubtedly interesting to have made and important socially, but unforgivably boring to watch. I use the word unforgivable because it seems to me that having the opportunity to make a film about people who deserve our help for the great work that they do, and failing to portray their story in a way which is interesting to watch, is just that. It's all very well to enjoy looking at the smiling faces of these children on film, but if Kiarostami had made a more watchable, structured film, he could have done a lot more to keep those faces smiling. This is not to question his motivation, he certainly made ABC Africa for all the right reasons, but the fact remains that Abbas Kiarostami is a talented and experienced enough filmmaker to have done far better with the chance that he was given.
Undoubtedly a film needed to be made to share the great work that Uganda Woman's Effort to Save Orphans does, but perhaps Abbas Kiarostami was not the man to make it. What should have been one of the most impactful documentaries of its day is rendered almost unwatchable by the director's refusal to structure the film even slightly.
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