About the film that opened the festival, I Am Not Your Negro, I have already spoken on this site. Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born director, who spent most of his life in Congo, has acquired the rights of an unfinished essay of writer and essayist James Baldwin and entrusted to the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, building with the pictures, much from repertoires, a powerful audio-visual text that is the most important cinematic contribution to the debate on African-American in a season too crowded with titles. The picture becomes an integral part of an analytical criticism (also founded on autobiographical memories) not only ideological but also a deeply compromised imagination with it. African short films have offered a glimpse not only of situations, themes (migration, memories and roots, political metaphors, corruption, childhood conditions, etc.) and production areas, but also of cinematic techniques: traditional fiction but also animation film and found footage, not to forget the New Dimensions section (out of competition), which proposed three striking examples of virtual reality films shot: thanks to visors and headphones you find yourself immersed in a 360 ° virtual environment, each time in a video art experimentation with dancing and underwater shooting (Berries Nairobi, Kenya), in a kind of game in which the viewer is the victim under threat (Let This Be a Warning, Kenya) or an art festival open-air in Accra (Spirit Robot, Ghana). Un enfant perdu (Abdou Khadir Ndiaye, Senegal) won the competition for short films: the movie follows the odyssey of a middle-class family child who is lost from school and discovers a world unknown for him. Among the films I've seen, I found touching (though perhaps technically is the weakest) Une place pour moi by Marie Clémentine Dusa bejambo (Rwanda), about a little girl entering into the schools who discovers superstitious discrimination which albino people are still today subjected to in certain parts of Africa. She will react by putting in writing his simple childish words of a in a letter that the teacher will distribute to parents of his classmates. Turning to the competition for feature films "Windows overthe world", I missed unfortunately the film which won the main prize, House in the Fields (Tigmi Negren, Morocco) Tala Hadid, which tells the life and traditions of Atlas Berber population, focusing its attention on two female characters. Perfectly adequate however the audience award "City of Milan", gone to what I think is the best film of the festival, El Amparo, a Venezuelan-Colombian production, the young director Rober Calzadilla. In the 80s a fishing trip turns (off-screen) in a massacre toward the Colombian border: the Venezuelan Army killed 14 unarmed fishermen mistaking them for guerrilleros. The only two survivors were imprisoned and subjected to enormous pressure to confess themselves to be part of the guerrilla to avoid the army and the Venezuelan government the shame of a lethal mistake. Film about dignity of human endurance, beautifully lowered into a well-characterized local reality, emphasizing the main characters (the story, true, it was translated first into a play) but never forget the choir, collective, political of the story. A fluid directing, tense, equally at home in the use of hand-held camera on busy shooting in open spaces and in claustrophobic spaces of the country's prison, and a perfect cast of actors. If you really want to find a fault, the film proceeds in anticlimax, since the most dramatic scenes are concentrated in the first part; but in any case it is a great movie. In an edition of the festival which strangely was not discussed very much, at least directly, the rights of women, stands out A Day For Women (Yom Lel Setat), the Egyptian director Kamila Abu Zekri. In a popular neighborhood of Cairo opened a new swimming pool and, amazingly, Sundays is reserved for women, otherwise excluded by the use. The collective, playful, sensual staying in the pool, which allows women to be together, a bit less covered than usual, to enjoy the sun, water, music and each other's company, of course, it will have a beneficial effect (except stir irritation of the fundamentalists, however, promptly thwarted by the community), even on the three main protagonists, inconsolable widow who finds a new reason for living, a model for painters who manages to goal an old dream of love and uninhibited girl considered a bit crazy, which in turn will find here someone that understand and appreciate for what she is. The film is not simplistic propaganda, but capable of many shades: the young director juggles well in handling different registers - the funny, pathetic, sentimental, dramatic - and closes on a beautiful underwater image of freedom. A strong female portrait is also outlined in the Senegalese Felicité, by Alain Gomis, already won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale: a proud woman, but also arrogant and presumptuous, who makes his living by singing in local, finds his life turned upside down by a serious motorcycle accident in which his teenage son gets involved. Many beautiful the first part, with a linear iterative taut (the Dardenne, or as some Iranian cinema), until Felicitè does everything to put together the money that serve for the operation of the child; then the film is lost and stagnant before reaching the close. Not easy indeed to find common themes among the features of the competition, if not generically the emergence of individual stories of geopolitical historical and socioeconomic contexts. A film more directly involved in a political controversy is Santa y Andrés, by the Cuban Carlos Lechuga. In Cuba eighties a Commissioner of the people, lonely woman, and wiry, is responsible for monitoring Andrés, confined to a rural isolation, accused of homosexual writer and dissident ideas. Obviously the meeting of two solitudes and mutual understanding will lead to a very different human relationship between the two protagonists, in a sort of Caribbean version of A Special Day. There is Bangladesh in the grip of a social economic crisis instead as background Live from Dhaka by Abdullah Mohammad Saad. The situation is well set, direction works and the two lead actors, male and female, are good; but the film is plagued by two problems: a photograph in black and white dull and low in contrast (many night scenes), and the string of misfortunes that affects the protagonist (he is lame, is losing all his possessions in financial speculation, is haunted by creditors, has a junkie brother - who steals his money, who dies -; he has a girlfriend that's jealous - who becomes pregnant; who needs money for an abortion, who do not abort -; they burn his car in the unrest; he tries to leave the country but they steal the money, and so on, until the last sequence and beyond) are way too many for just one man. An aged woman is protagonist of Burning Birds (Davena Vihagun, Sri Lanka) by Sanjeewa Pushpakumara: anticommunist paramilitary militias slays her innocent husband; she has eight children to maintain; she passes from the exhausting work in a stone quarry to one revolting in a slaughterhouse; she is beaten and raped several times by various characters (including the murderess of her husband met again by chance); she is forced into prostitution; children are expelled from school; she is arrested and so on up to a bloodish end. The director looks for beauty in suffering with aesthetic references to European painting (he names Caravaggio and Rembrandt), but the film is sometimes and as a whole rather insostenibile. Very also funereal My Friend Hindu (Hindu Meu amigo, special event out of competition), directed by Hector Babenco (kiss of the spider woman, at Play in the fields of the Lord, Ironweed), already ill with cancer, which tells himself, played by Willem Dafoe, who, prestigious guest of honor at the screening, do fine figure, elegant, nice and cool. The first half takes place mainly in the hospital, waiting and after a bone marrow transplant, but the whole movie is revealed a grim preparation for death, even when it seems to depart from it. Among the many films by directors who tell themselves, the most direct references are at All That Jazz by Bob Fosse, or other film-will, Radio America by Robert Altman, in which Death was between the scenes wearing a waterproof . Personally I do not love the register of the grotesque, and the film makes extensive use of it, perhaps to exorcise the deadly issues, but in my opinion with the effect of aggravating an already hardly sustainable situation. A decidedly not successful movie, including clumsiness screenwriting and even direcion; the final scene with Babenco’s (real) wife who dances naked in the rain over Dancing in the Rain music embarrassed me. More "light," although set also in a situation of social distress, El soñador by peruvian Adrian Saba, which more than others look to western models - even from independent films - including flashforward and dream sequences, in telling the story of a shady teenager, "blacksmith" in a burglars pandilla, which will change his life after meeting the sister of one of his accomplices, which he injured in a clash. It 'a bizarre cinematic object finally Honeygiver Among the Dogs (Munmo Tashi Khyidron), by Decher Roder. Among the wooded and misty mountains of Bhutan and its urban centers the tale unravels from time to time road movie, romantic comedy, mistery (the plot is wrapped on the case of an abbess lost, possibly murdered, and on the investigation of a young detective that puts on the heels of a fascinating suspected), all sprinkled with Buddhist mysticism. So landscapes, skirmishes between the two, femme fatale, dreamlike visions, surveys, twist, showdown. Maybe a little shorter and in the hands of a more visionary director it could have become (in his own way) a cult movie…