Sango Malo

On her way to visit her childhood home in a colonial outpost in Northern Cameroon, a young French woman recalls her childhood, her memories concentrating on her family's houseboy.

In the midst of a volatile regime change in a Francophone African state, Maria Vial is fighting to sustain her family’s coffee plantation. With rebels and the army struggling for control, French peacekeeping forces move out, warning the remaining white residents that they’re on their own. But Maria refuses to be driven off the land, even as tragedy looms.

A film about the difficulty for even the most well-intentioned person to know and respect another culture. In this case, the problem is so acute that there is even heated debate over what to call that 'other.' The subtitles in the film use the familiar word 'pygmies,' a relatively pejorative European term; the Bantu or villagers' expression for the same group, Babingas, carries similar negative connotations. These highly specialized, tropical rainforest hunter-gatherers should perhaps be called by their own ethnonym, Aka, MoAka (sing.) and BaAka (pl.)

After the death of his mother, twelve-year-old Martin joins his unknown father in Africa. Newly conceived by this father, who is more worried about the reserve he manages than about his 'new' son, thanks to the friendship between Fofana and Victor, Martin discovers this completely new country and its contradictions. The disappearance of the elephants brings father and son closer together.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), the mission doctor, theologian and philosopher who founded a hospital in the rainforests of Gabon, achieved sainthood in his lifetime, at least in the popular imagination. The critical assessment of his life and works in recent years, however, has been slightly more ambivalent. Ba Kobhio Bassek is the first director to examine this medical missionary from a purely African point-of-view.