The movie opens up by showing a group of orphans and talks about the women who are taking care of them. There are 1.6 million children who have lost one or both parents. This number astonished me; it's crazy to think how many kids are living over there without parents. Parents also have to deal with the loss of their children as well. There was one woman shown who lost all 11 kids to AIDS.
Some of the images are tough to watch and think about that lifestyle. There are shots of teenagers and young children, even babies, walking and crawling on the ground. They have little clothes on sometimes and no shoes, with all the disease-infested bugs flying around. Mosquitoes are a real problem and carry malaria a lot of the time. I can't even imagine living like this. I freak out if I see a spider in my house; I can't even start to think how I'd handle that many diseased insects flying around.
One scene that will stick with me is a section in the film where it is just complete darkness. The power is cut off at midnight so they have no light at this point. The director kept filming with his small handheld camcorder. You just hear some talking and then you see the flashes of lightning in the sky. It is such a different way of living. We're so used to coming into our warm homes at night, having the ability to control whether or not we want light on, and not usually worrying about our house flooding any time it rains. In Uganda, this problem happens to them frequently.
This film was shot with a small video camera that the director carries around with him. There is no voice over in this film, in fact there are scenes that go on for a while without any translation of conversations, or just no conversation at all. Sometimes in this film, there are still images of certain people that seemed to catch the director's eye. These images remain in my head as I think about the film. There are so many other films like this that deal with huge issues, but not many people have seen. I think we all need to start looking a little harder to learn about these types of issues that happen everyday.
Nicholas Sheffo has a lot of input to say after watching ABC Africa. According to him he gave the movie average ratings because some things worked for him and some did not. He did not like the point they wanted to show which was the children being born into bad families so they automatically suffered. He did like the fact that they showed some images that affected people by just looking at them. With these images, Nicholas felt that they could have been shown by themselves because they alone explained everything. http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2318/ABC+Africa+Documentary+
ReplyDeleteMost of the rating for this documentary were average and ended up in the 7 out of 10 range.
The director of this documentary, Abbas Kiarostami is seen as an important man in Iranian films, art, poetry, and other things. He is a very creative man and is well respected because of the work he has created.