Traversing the continent, this piece snaps a picture of contemporary Africa. At first, one might be tempted to call this a road movie but, in the film's opening sequence, the director's voice-over tells us that, "its not a road movie . . . not a piece of investigative journalism . . . . But the sights and sounds of ordinary pains in Africa." "The pain" is an accumulated history, past and present, of agony and oppression; and, "How are you doing with the pain?" is for the peoples of Africa a daily greeting. The film begins with a 360 degree pan, looking out across the high ground of hope in South Africa. By way of such places as Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt, it ends with another 360 degree pan shot in the filmmaker's home in Villefranche-sur-Saône in central France. However, this film is also a conversation between images of Africa's "Pain" and the filmmaker who has seen Africa's apartheid, starvation, disease, and civil war first hand. In this sense, the film is the director's own subjective travel diary of his relationship with Africa.
© Murayama Kyoichiro
