听 Winner of the United Nations' Fellini medal for humanitarian film-making in 1997, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami takes up the plight of AIDS orphaned children in Uganda for his latest film.
Shot with digital cameras, "ABC Africa" follows Kiarostami and his team as they travel through the country, meeting the charity workers, orphaned children, and carers who are struggling to cope with the tragedy that has blighted the land.
Asking few questions but always filming, Kiarostami senses that the epic proportions of this humanitarian catastrophe - two million dead from HIV/AIDS, two million affected by the disease, and 1.6 million without one or both their parents - are too great in scope to be slotted into an hour and a half. Instead, he pieces together various images and sequences, juxtaposing scenes of children dancing and performing for his cameras with the AIDS-ravaged victims slowly dying in the nearby hospital.
Mortality pervades the film and, as you might expect from such an internationally recognized director, even becomes part of the cinematic event itself. One unsettling scene takes place in the film crew's hotel when the electricity is cut off and they are plunged into ten minutes of absolute darkness. Yet, for all the death that surrounds them, the children we see are happy, excitable, and desperate for attention.
Kiarostami proves more interested in capturing the resilience of these children on camera than in documenting the forces that have allowed the AIDS pandemic to spread unchecked throughout the country. Emphasizing images over words, the film repeatedly denies its subjects a voice (there are very few interviews with Ugandans themselves). But if it helps to remind the First World that HIV/AIDS is far from being yesterday's news, such failings are easily excused.
