E-Mail This Article to a Friend Drama and dance The African Film Festival at the MFA BY GERALD PEARY

Of the films I previewed in the MFA’s 2004 African Film Festival, which screens from February 13 to 28, documentary rules. The most rewarding movies I watched — Alex’s Wedding (1993; February 14 and 22 as part of the "African Short Film Program"; 45 minutes) and African Dance: Sand, Drums, and Shostakovich (2002; February 28; 70 minutes) — are non-fiction works.

Alex’s Wedding, my "Best of the Fest," is an ethnographic film with an implied feminist vantage. Filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno is visiting Cameroon when a native friend, Alex, insists that Teno videotape his connubial celebration. Teno agrees out of politeness, and he shoots as Alex’s friends and relatives, in jackets and ties, gather at the young bride’s house. He interviews Josephine’s unmarried girlfriends, and Josephine herself, shiny, nubile, and bursting with happiness.

A typical wedding anywhere on earth? There’s a hitch: polygamy! Alex is already married to Elise. They’ve been together for 18 years and have six children. Alex is a Catholic, but the ceremony takes place outside the church, since the Church doesn’t abide several wives at once. Yet here in Josephine’s house stands the Catholic priest, and also Elise. That’s the rule of native ceremonies: both wives must be in attendance, the old and the new.

Elise isn’t happy about it, standing cross-armed amid a room of strangers. The male attendees aim to put all at ease with joking advice to the shared husband: "Be fair with your wives. If you kiss one, kiss the other." And then it’s off for the wedding night, to Alex and Elise’s tiny house in another village. Teno’s camera scampers along, too, for a dramatic change of setting. Here, young Josephine loses her bearings, a freaked-out adolescent in someone else’s children-crowded living room. Suddenly, this Cameroonian film connects with Greek myth. Josephine is a mournful Cassandra dragged into exile; Elise is a jealous Clytemnestra; Alex is the African Agamemnon, proud and vain and amazingly indifferent to the suffering his womanizing has caused. At the end of the film, Teno’s voiceover tips his hand: "This film is dedicated to Elise and Josephine, and to my wife, and to my daughter." No to polygamy!

Directed by Ken Glazezebrook and Alla Kovgan, African Dance started in Montreal, where in 1999 the filmmakers video’d African dancers performing eight works and interviewed choreographers touring Canada from the African continent. Several of the Montreal-shot numbers seem out of a time capsule, recapitulating earnest Western modernist movements from half a century ago. But most, built up from drumbeats and tribal ritual, are dazzlingly hip and danced sublimely. The most interesting numbers flirt with postmodernism, as theory-based European choreographers are sprung loose by spry, uninhibited African dancers.

There’s an odd, fiery deconstruction of Antigone by the Mathilda Monnier Dance Company of Mali-Burkina Faso. Even better is a dance from rural Senegal (with a guest European choreographer) in which a black male chorus line, jaunty in formal suits, kicks out, kicks up, in black dress shoes, then sips champagne and clownishly toasts the audience. It has the disquieting feeling of a Samuel Beckett mini-play.

Si-Gueriki: The Queen Mother (2001; February 13 and 16; 62 minutes), by Idrissou Mora-Kpai, another documentary, shows the filmmaker returning, after years in Germany, to his Benin village to reunite with his warrior father. But dad is dead, so, politically enlightened from his European education, Mora-Kpai goes where he never ventured in his childhood: to the women’s compound, to hear what his mother and other females have to say about their lives. His intentions are honorable, but nothing much happens, and the conversations are hardly epiphanic.

Moi et mon blanc/Me And My White Pal (2003; February 13 and 15; 90 minutes) is a fiction film by S. Pierre Yameogo with several improbable turns. An African man writing his PhD at the Sorbonne works at a Paris garage at night. There, he and a Frenchman steal the drug money of two street punks, then flee to the African’s home country of Burkina Faso. It’s melodrama in France, mellow time in Africa, in this entertaining but bantamweight picture.

Rachida (2002; 100 minutes; February 26-28) by Yamina Bachir-Chouikh, is a heavy-handed yet understandably urgent attack on wanton Islamic terrorism in Algeria, bloodletting aimed at its own citizenry.

Khorma (2002; February 27; 77 minutes), by Jilani Saadi, is a somewhat amusing black comedy about a Tunisian village idiot, a goofy, redheaded giant who is employed as an official mourner, wailing loudly on cue at funerals.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com