The Los Angeles-based Pan African Film Festival launches this year on February 28, screening Black-themed features, documentaries, shorts, and animations online. The more than 135 U.S. films include American Skin, Nate Parker’s fiction film about police brutality, and Abby Ginzberg’s Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me, a nonfiction biopic about the Bay Area’s truly admirable Congresswoman.
The Pan African Film Festival is all about bringing films from near and far about the global Black experience to U.S. audiences who might not otherwise have the chance to view them.
Truth to Power traces Lee’s trajectory from her 1946 birth in segregated El Paso, Texas, to her family’s move, as part of the Great Migration, to California to escape the worst of Jim Crow. Of course, the Bay Area had its own set of problems, and Lee contended with solo motherhood of two sons, domestic abuse, and even homelessness—scars that remain with her and inform the humanitarian policies she has championed.
The film tracks Lee’s work with the Black Panther Party, which was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966 to resist excessive use of force against Black people. Instead of emphasizing the Black Panther Party’s stridently militant stance, Truth to Power focuses on the “serve the people” social service side of the organization, such as free clinics for sickle cell anemia screening and its very successful breakfast program.
After 9/11, remaining true to the Panthers’ anti-imperialist, anti-militarist credo, Lee was the sole member of Congress to vote against the sweeping Authorization for Use of Military Force bill granting President George W. Bush and all future presidents sweeping war-making powers. Lee decried the measure as “too broad . . . crazy” and was reelected to her seat.
History has borne out Lee’s warning, and she proceeded to chair the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, championing left-leaning legislation and causes. Author Alice Walker and actor Danny Glover are among the notables who appear in this eighty-two-minute chronicle of a remarkable life.
With twelve works, South Africa has the largest number of submissions from Africa at the 2021 Pan African Film Festival. Director/co-writer Angus Gibson’s gripping gangster picture Back of the Moon is set in 1958 Johannesburg’s Sophiatown neighborhood, as the iniquities of apartheid rule the land. This moody movie includes many of film noir’s genre conventions found in such classics as 1974’s Chinatown.
Maxwell, a.k.a. “Badman,” is the mob boss of the “Vipers,” a brutal gang that loots and terrorizes Sophiatown. Maxwell is a figure full of contradictions. While capable of violence like Jimmy Cagney in 1931’s The Public Enemy, Maxwell is also strangely cultured, reading books such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, praising Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and speaking French (his mother was from the Belgian Congo).
Gibson’s stylish movie—which is in Zulu, French, and English—is well-acted, but Lemogang Tsipa, as the savagely chilling Machiavellian Ghost, who plots to seize command of the Vipers, steals the show.
The action in Back of the Moon takes place mostly on the night before white police are scheduled to forcibly remove Sophiatown’s Black residents to allow whites to settle in the Johannesburg suburb. Of course, this sense of impending doom looms over the plot of this engrossing, entertaining film. Gibson, who helmed 1996’s Oscar-nominated documentary Mandela, injects Back of the Moon with a heavy dose of social consciousness, asking: who are apartheid’s real gangsters?
My favorite film at this year’s Pan African Film Festival hails from Brazil. The “final solution to the race question” is the central theme of director/co-writer Lázaro Ramos’s dystopian Executive Order. Set in Rio de Janeiro in the near future, Brazil’s elite of European descent renege on promised costly reparations and instead institute a policy of forced mass repatriations of so-called “high melanin” people back to Africa.
Black Brazilians are ruthlessly rounded up by violent riot police and given one-way plane tickets to Angola and other African countries—which most of them have never even visited. But this fascistic “executive order” is less expensive for the rightwing racist whites than paying for reparations in the South American nation where slavery wasn’t abolished until twenty-five years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States.
Of course, there is resistance to this ethnic cleansing. Boldly proclaiming “Brazil is mine, too! I was born here!,” attorney Antonio emerges as a resistance leader. He is played by English-Brazilian actor Alfred Enoch of the Harry Potter films and How To Get Away With Murder television series, while his father, English actor William Russell, who you may recognize from 1963’s The Great Escape and 1978’s Superman, is also among the excellent cast.
In the tradition of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s futuristic, totalitarian parables with a racial twist, this ninety-four-minute “it can happen here” thriller (in Portuguese with English subtitles) is likely to have you sitting on the edge of your seat, anxious about what will take place next.
Executive Order exemplifies what the Pan African Film Festival is all about, bringing films from near and far about the global Black experience to U.S. audiences who might not otherwise have the chance to view them, while also providing these productions with a foothold in Hollywood. The festival proves that not only do Black Lives Matter—but Black movies do, too.
As this year’s festival is online due to the pandemic, more viewers can virtually watch these films from February 28 through March 14. For more information, visit the festival website at paff.org.