Moolade and Ebertfest

My wife and I were in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois over the weekend for Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, and we had an absolutely wonderful time. We've been fans of Ebert's work for many years, and we wanted to pay our respects, particularly given Ebert's poor health. We saw some amazing movies on the big screen, including a beautiful print of Fellini's La Dolce Vita and a restored version of Sadie Thompson, a silent film starring Gloria Swanson that was accompanied by a live orchestra.

The most important movie we saw, however, was Ousmane Sambene's Moolade, a 2004 film about female genital mutilation. The film is rich, detailed, and literate, and it provides one of the most striking portraits of human courage that I've ever seen in a movie.

Anyway, in the panel discussion after the film, the head of U.S. distribution said that the movie was intended primarily for African audiences. Sambene wanted African moviegoers to appreciate the harm that the procedure causes, and to recognize that a woman's capacity as a wife, mother, and head of the family does not depend on whether she has been "purified." He made a movie to promote a social goal. Unfortunately, the film has only been screened three times on the African continent to this point, largely because Sambene is a pariah to many African political leaders.

Another comment the speaker made was that Sambene wanted to portray Africa in an honest way. Many people have no idea what life in Africa really looks like; one anecdote I heard was that a young child, after visiting Africa with her American mother said on the plane home: "Mom, when are we going to get to Africa?" Her images of what African life really looks like were so deeply formed by television cliches that she had no idea of the reality she saw with her own eyes.

This got me thinking about American movies. It is so profoundly rare that our movies present an accurate portrait of what American life is really like. Most of us get married, have a job, children, and treasure the weekends. Our life is about enjoying the moment, and working toward long-term goals we define for ourselves. Yet our films portray sex and violence with a nihilism that doesn't reflect our daily experience, and the demands of film narrative seem to turn the focus from a realistic portrayal of the American experience to an emphasis on the unusual and uncommon. As many foreign observers have noted about our movies, they are like "dreams." We present ourselves not as we are, but how we would like to be or how me might be under different circumstances.

So, what I'm wondering about is this: since Americans are now hated around the world as a result of our foreign policies, do filmmakers have a new responsibility to present American life as it actually is? Of course, many of them already do, but their work is rarely shown at the multiplexes. Or is it in the nature of things that our cinema is destined to focus on our occasional serial killers, police shoot-outs, and drunken orgies? I suppose these things are rather appealing to audiences in a commercial medium, but given our new circumstances I wonder if American cinema could do better P.R. for American life.