Entertainment is rarely the point of the Museum of Fine Arts' African Film Festival - certainly not for its own sake. The films in this year's group want to impart wisdom or serve as a wake-up call. If they amuse or thrill, it's a bonus. They wrestle with recent history and contemplate change. Other years have seen the festival, which begins Feb. 1, in more confrontational, imaginative, or artistically daring moods. But almost regardless of what's on the slate, this is a necessary bulletin from a roiling part of the world, although there's the usual imbalance. Most of the films bring news and drama from the continent's western, francophone side.
And this year, ideas of identity and the realities of corruption get great big workouts. The Cameroonian director Jean-Pierre Bekolo deals with both in "Les Saignantes" - or "The Bleeding" - a 2005 movie set science fictionally in 2025 and whose eagerness to provoke, teach, avenge, and titillate turns a sex mystery into something impossible to classify. The film is visually bold and narratively impenetrable; but, in his way, Bekolo, a smart, mischievous moviemaker, is celebrating female independence by concocting a tale of two killer prostitutes - playfully named Chouchou and Majolie - who strike against the country's self-interested muckety-mucks.
There is witchcraft. There is a severed head. There is judgmental rhetoric. (At some point the question "How can you make an action film in a country where acting is subversive?" is super-imposed on a local movie screen.) Bekolo combines David Lynch nightmarishness with feminist political action and African purification ritual. The result is a work of winking polemical insurgency that could also be mistaken for a blaxploitation-era cologne ad.
The average African movie mixes enough of the dramatic and the didactic to blur the line between neo-realism and documentary. But African cinema prizes theatricality over straight-up naturalism. "The Juju Factory" works as theater. It's a comparatively navigable family drama set among the exiled Congolese of Brussels. Still, as written and directed by Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda, the film has little use for narrative handholding - it can be pretty digressive. A writer conveniently named Kongo (a striking Dieudonné Kabongo) is working on a book about his exile. He's found a publisher, a fellow African, who is appalled by Kongo's poetic interest in his native country's awful political history, including the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Why can't he just write a nice travel book? That's where the money is.
Meanwhile, the film tracks the doings of other characters, including the author's and publisher's respective wives and the progressive white Belgians who recognize the value of Kongo's tome. The film's central dramas epitomize the tension central to a number of African movies in this festival and beyond it: Can real social progress and cultural tradition peaceably coexist?
The most successful work of fiction in the lot, "Clouds Over Conakry," squarely addresses the question. A young agnostic political cartoonist, B.B. (Alexandre Ogou), is drafted by his father to prepare to become an imam like his old man. It's an ancient story of filial fealty vs. personal conviction, new world vs. old. But the Guinean writer and director, Cheick Fantamady Camara, has fashioned a satisfyingly juicy drama out of that and other conflicts. What will happen when B.B.'s father, who doesn't even know his son draws, sees his most blasphemous cartoon? Will B.B.'s girlfriend - his editor's daughter - tell him she's expecting? Find out the answers to these and other mysteries in the next episode of "Clouds Over Conakry." Seriously, do.
The festival's documentaries, mostly from the tireless, invaluable distributor California Newsreel, are brief but worthy. There's a chapter from Connie Field's six-part "Have You Heard From Johannesburg?" series. The one here, "Apartheid and the Club of the West," details the United States' role in the anti-apartheid movement. "Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man" is a fascinating profile of the political leader who in 1984 renamed Upper Volta (he called it Burkina Faso) and remade the country's self-esteem. Favorably compared to Lumumba and Che Guevara (Sankara was assassinated in 1987), he stood up to Burkina Faso's French former occupiers, challenging François Mitterrand and daring the neocolonialist African leaders to cut the strings tethering them to the French government.
But Sankara's legacy is complicated. He fired the country's striking teachers, replacing them with underqualified military pedagogues, a move that basically broke the education system. And yet he was a dedicated environmentalist and promoter of women's rights. The director, Robin Shuffield, gets a lot done in less than an hour, using Sankara's short political life to craft a rich cautionary tale about revolution and its limits.
On a lighter note, I didn't know a lot about Nigeria's filmmaking scene until "This Is Nollywood," Franco Sacchi's look at an industry that produces about 500 to 1,000 movies a year. Sacchi hunkers down with the production of an action film called "Checkpoint" and shows us its technical woes (generator problems, for instance) and its leisurely pace. The filmmakers we hear from don't seem to be making movies like Bekolo's or even those of Haile Gerima's or Abderrahmane Sissako's. They are making movies influenced more by Bollywood, Hollywood, and Hong Kong. In other words: movies that won't show up at African film festivals but maybe should.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
