FESPACO, the Pan-African Film Festival takes place in Ouagadougou, BurkinaFaso, every two years. I've been looking forward to it ever since I arrived in West Africa.
INSPIRATION
Films are a bit like the stars: old light shining through darkness. Just as one stares up with wonder at the night sky, dreaming of far-off places and catching a brief glimpse of our (small) place in the cosmos, so too do we sit in a movie theater gazing at flickering photographs, twenty four images of old light per second, telling us stories that help us glimpse our place in society.
Like seeing the stars on a clear moonless night (far from citylights), a good film ignites awe and inspiration and reminds us of life’s ultimate paradox: that nothing matters and that everything matters. We are tiny particles of dust, and yet particles that have significance.
So there I was last week, sitting in dark movie theaters in Ouagadougou, a particle of dust perched on a chair, peering forward at projected images of old light. One evening the patterns of light and sound waves coalesced to represent the story of another particle ofdust: Wangari Maathai. As the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in environmental activism in Kenya, she is a human being who understands the meaning of our short existence, and who shares it with the rest of us. I spent an hour and a half getting to know her in the darkness, and I left the theater filled with awe and excitement. Since Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in the1980s, Kenyans have planted more the 35 million trees on their (once deforested) soil. But I already knew all this; I’ve written papers about her and read her books in college. What left me suffused with inspiration was the moving, living, breathing being: the twinkle in her eyes that reminded me of starlight. A light that said to me, yes, this life is worth living. So go out and make it meaningful.
PERSPIRATION
On my way home from Ouagadougou I was mooshed into a battered bush taxi, literally kneaded into a sliver of space over the engine, and then topped off with a three layers of voluptuous African women filling every last crevasse with their giant hips and flowing meters of fabric. I cracked the window and let my hand escape into the wind. I closed my eyes and tried to drift off in the blackness to another place.
I dreamt that I was a little dough ball and a woman (towering before me) was opening a giant oven that was spitting out flames, and she said to me, “In you go, three months in the furnace for you,” and my little dough ball lips stuck together as they tried to burble out,“No! No!” and she shoved me into the oven. So here I rest, a cooking dough ball, waiting for the rains to come along and open the door to let me out.
INSPIRATION
Films are a bit like the stars: old light shining through darkness. Just as one stares up with wonder at the night sky, dreaming of far-off places and catching a brief glimpse of our (small) place in the cosmos, so too do we sit in a movie theater gazing at flickering photographs, twenty four images of old light per second, telling us stories that help us glimpse our place in society.
Like seeing the stars on a clear moonless night (far from citylights), a good film ignites awe and inspiration and reminds us of life’s ultimate paradox: that nothing matters and that everything matters. We are tiny particles of dust, and yet particles that have significance.
So there I was last week, sitting in dark movie theaters in Ouagadougou, a particle of dust perched on a chair, peering forward at projected images of old light. One evening the patterns of light and sound waves coalesced to represent the story of another particle ofdust: Wangari Maathai. As the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in environmental activism in Kenya, she is a human being who understands the meaning of our short existence, and who shares it with the rest of us. I spent an hour and a half getting to know her in the darkness, and I left the theater filled with awe and excitement. Since Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in the1980s, Kenyans have planted more the 35 million trees on their (once deforested) soil. But I already knew all this; I’ve written papers about her and read her books in college. What left me suffused with inspiration was the moving, living, breathing being: the twinkle in her eyes that reminded me of starlight. A light that said to me, yes, this life is worth living. So go out and make it meaningful.
PERSPIRATION
On my way home from Ouagadougou I was mooshed into a battered bush taxi, literally kneaded into a sliver of space over the engine, and then topped off with a three layers of voluptuous African women filling every last crevasse with their giant hips and flowing meters of fabric. I cracked the window and let my hand escape into the wind. I closed my eyes and tried to drift off in the blackness to another place.
I dreamt that I was a little dough ball and a woman (towering before me) was opening a giant oven that was spitting out flames, and she said to me, “In you go, three months in the furnace for you,” and my little dough ball lips stuck together as they tried to burble out,“No! No!” and she shoved me into the oven. So here I rest, a cooking dough ball, waiting for the rains to come along and open the door to let me out.
