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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 20, 2021)
Page 6 October 20, 2021 Arts & ENTERTAINMENT Two Inspiring Documentary Films Beauty and variety in places we don’t think to look Othmane Zolati on his journey through Africa in “Africa and I.’ Photo courtesy Showmax. Two documentaries are espe- cially worth a look in the current line-up for the Portland Film Festi- val (pdxff.com). Both offer oppor- tunities to see beauty and variety in places we don’t think to look, or don’t know how to see. “Africa and I” is born out of the youthful idealism, fierce curiosity, and unusual determination of one young Moroccan man. At age 20, Othmane Zolati had never left his home country. Growing up in a small coastal town south of Casa- blanca, he noticed the complicated relationship he and other Moroc- cans have with the African conti- nent. “We always put Morocco as an Arab country and not Africa. But it’s not.” And something in him burned to travel the continent, all the way to its southernmost tip, Cape Agulhas in South Africa. Perhaps only an idealistic and determined (and physically strong) 20-year-old man would ever un- dertake such a journey and live to tell the tale, let alone actually achieve his goal. Watching this film made me notice the lack of any other stories like this; travel- ing the whole continent of Africa presents many challenges. Zolati survived three bouts of malaria; got lost for five days in a desert without enough water; and was stopped in a desolate area by people with guns. Starting with just $80 in his pocket, he walked, hitchhiked, cycled and skateboarded over 18,000 miles through 24 countries. And getting a visa to travel in South Africa re- quired four attempts, from four dif- ferent countries. Over four years, he supported himself with a range of jobs, working as a fisherman in Senegal, as a mechanic in Mali, as a photographer and tour guide in Zanzibar, and selling shoes in Cote d’Ivoire. Fortunately for us, Zolati was determined to document his jour- ney. The film is built from100 hours of footage that he taught him- self to shoot along the way. How he captured much of it I can’t imag- ine -- he is credited as a director and executive producer, and then worked with a co-director, a com- poser, an editor, and a production company, all based in South Afri- ca. What they have assembled is glorious for its beauty, variety and specificity, in part, due to Zolati’s delighted extroversion and his fear- lessness. He found a professional music recording studio in a back- yard next to some chickens; toured Ethiopia on a skateboard; boated through the Venice of Africa, in Benin; and traveled with a trucker for a time. The discovery of varied landscapes, cultures, languages, ar- tistic expression and food is unpar- alleled -- and one could not wish for a more delightful contrast to the more typical explorations of small pieces of Africa by European or American outsiders. Zolati’s curi- osity and perseverance has yielded a rare feast. A different kind of feast, equal- ly rich, is on offer in “Street Her- oines,” an exploration of women graffiti artists. Filming over several years in the boroughs of New York and also in various parts of Latin America, director and producer Alexandra Henry aims to lift up work at the margins of the margins -- women who brave physical dan- ger and legal jeopardy to produce remarkable feats of beauty, wit, and vision. Though their work may only live in physical reality for a short while and then only in pho- tographs, these remarkable women pass along profound insights about what drives them to create, what it costs them, and what they mean to communicate. If you realize that much of the deepest wisdom resides at the mar- gins, you know to be grateful that Henry went to the effort to open space for these voices and their work. The film’s feminist sensi- bility is especially inspiring -- sev- eral of the women recount stories of men not being able to compute that they created their art, even after watching them create it, or telling them they can’t work in this medium because they are women. They climb bridges and rooftops and fend off street harassment and hostility in terrible neighborhoods, finding that “spray paint is a very, very good weapon.” To the insis- tence that “you can’t climb that ladder because you’re a girl,” one artist retorts, “What? You need a penis to climb that ladder? Does it help you hold on?” The chance to glimpse parts of Latin America through the lens of Continued on Page 11
