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In the Shadow of AIDS, Glimmers of Life By Ann Hornaday The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami returns to his roots in "ABC Africa," a film about the AIDS crisis in Uganda. Of course, he has never really strayed from his roots over a 35-year career devoted to making poetic, elliptical films about the redemptive nature of art and the human spirit, often told through the eyes of children. In 2001 Kiarostami was commissioned by the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development to make a documentary about the 1.6 million children orphaned by AIDS in Uganda. Rather than produce the cinematic equivalent of an informational pamphlet or polemical tract, the filmmaker did what he does best: make a Kiarostami film. Like so many of the director's other recent movies, "ABC Africa" is filmed in large part from a moving car, whence digital video cameras held by Kiarostami and his cameraman, Seifollah Samadian, capture long, mesmerizing tracking shots of the verdant Ugandan countryside. A once thriving, even elegant country ravaged by disease and civil war, Uganda comes to vibrant life under Kiarostami's forgiving gaze. Although "ABC Africa" contains its share of confrontational material -- from the suffering and death on a hospital AIDS ward to a coffin factory bustling with business -- Kiarostami leavens the desperation with portraits of resilience, optimism and enterprise. In a culture that is now a functional matriarchy (AIDS has been particularly virulent among men between 15 and 45), village-based economic development projects are giving women a shot at financial autonomy. "ABC Africa" dispenses with the narration and numbing statistics that are the usual stock in trade of earnest public health documentaries. Instead, Kiarostami has created an impressionistic visual essay on Uganda, his camera quietly observing its citizens' faces, their dances, their laughter and their passing. (In one of the film's most wrenching sequences, hospital workers calmly construct a makeshift cardboard stretcher for a child's corpse.) But rather than bemoan tragedy and injustice, "ABC Africa" is much more interested in the work of getting on with life: We watch as people marry, adopt the children of the dead, educate them and eke out meager livings. Brimming with vital visual imagery and suffused with an exhilarating spirit of courage and endurance, "ABC Africa" was made with an alertness to the contradictions that animate life in Uganda, where billboards for condoms are just as common as pictures of the pope, whose church vociferously opposes their use. The film's title is taken from the ABC T-shirt worn by a little girl who is being adopted by a white couple from Austria. Like many of Kiarostami's films, "ABC Africa" occasionally teeters into self-indulgence, as when he films during a power outage in a thunderstorm, resulting in minutes of black screen with only periodic flashes of light. But eventually, even such otherwise meaningless scenes accrue into a gorgeous and surprisingly profound meditation on a place and its people. Perhaps it takes someone of Kiarostami's patience and persistent humanism to make a film about death a testament to hope, endurance and life. ABC Africa (84 minutes, in Farsi and English with subtitles, at the AFI Silver) is not rated. It contains adult thematic material. |
