I was scanning the foreign film section of the Schlessmann Family Branch Library when my gaze froze on a VHS box with a picture of two young men playing chess in what I mistakenly took to be a Moroccan setting. The blurb on the box informed me that AFRICA DREAMING is a collection of four 26-minute films on love made for a 1997 African TV series: "Sophia's Homecoming" from Namibia, "Sabriyah" from Tunisia, "So Be It" from Senegal, and "The Gaze of the Stars" from Mozambique. 

What, I wondered, is African TV like? Is it a clumsy, amateurish, underbudgeted imitation of American TV, or something else altogether, something strange, something wonderful? I had to know! Needless to say, after a 104-minute dose, I still don't have a clue what African TV, in general, is like, but I do know that each of these four shorts more closely resembles an avant-garde arthouse flick than anything I've ever seen on American TV.

The cinematography features dramatic camera angles, chiaroscuros of sunshine and shadow, brilliant foreground colors set against bleak, washed-out, monochromatic backgrounds, and shots carefully contrived to be artistic or to convey a symbolic meaning.  The pacing in several of the films is deliberately slow, with prolonged shots that show a character sitting or standing alone, not moving, in silence. All four films use their natural settings to create atmosphere and mood. I was reminded, for example, that our planet has many varieties of arid terrain. The baked hardpan of Namibia is completely different in its look and feel from the eerily windswept, forever shifting, fine-grain sands of Tunisia.

In contrast to the insipid recitation of clichés in American TV shows about love, the treatment of love in these films is mature, serious, tangled, complex, layered, ambiguous, morally challenging, and well designed to stimulate intellectual debate. Each of the four films shows that love inspires both sweetness and cruelty, that love inflicts pain as readily as it grants happiness, that it destroys as often as it creates, and that it is inextricably intertwisted with the dark impulse to control (or be controlled by) one's beloved.  

I've long assumed that throughout much of Africa men view women as chattel and treat them with brutal indifference. But as I watched AFRICA DREAMING, I saw that the distribution of power between the genders appears to be different in each of the four featured countries, and in each case the power politics are complicated, paradoxical, and impossible to summarize simply. The four films provide a gold mine of discussion material for anyone interested in cultural anthropology and/or feminist theory.

"So Be It" is my favorite. It succeeds not only as a puzzling variant of the opposites-attract theme but also as a completely realistic and believable tale of suspense and terror that slowly fills the viewer's skull with a screaming dread of the unknown and a chilling certainty that something horrible is about to happen. This is precisely the same dramatic principle that made THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT so popular.

Unfortunately, several weaknesses keep AFRICA DREAMING from being a truly outstanding collection. For the most part the acting is mediocre, with a few actors who try so hard not to ham it up that they make themselves stiff and flat, and also some who go to the other extreme, striving self-consciously for style and effect. And all too often the artsy cinematic techniques are blatantly overdone. For example, one ill-conceived camera shot in "Sophia's Homecoming" shows the protagonist sitting hunched over in misery with her face buried in her hands while a sharp wind blows a window curtain into the room, flapping it wildly over her unmoving figure. It's much too obvious that the curtain is being flapped not by the wind but by a huge fan set just outside the window, and the camera shot lasts forever, emphasizing not only its symbolic meaning but also its painfully obvious and pretentious artificiality.

Oh yes, you're still wondering about those chess players, aren't you. They're gay ne'er-do-wells, of course! But you'll have to watch AFRICA DREAMING if you want to see what sort of moves they make against each other. I'm not telling.