a small problem

The African Film Festival kicked off at PFA this afternoon, and Brent and I made it over there today in time to see José Zeka Laplaine's excellent 2006 film Kinshasa Palace.  The story follows the narrator Kaze as he searches for his brother Max who he grew up with in pre-dictatorial Congo, and the journey takes Kaze from Paris to Lisbon (through the medium of Max's home movies) to Cambodia (where he has supposedly has missed his sibling by only a week).  Laplaine shoots exclusively with a digital camera and uses his own family members as cast, the first-person perspective and deliberately amateurish filming techniques messing with the line between fact and fiction.  What happened in the Congo is real, the resulting dispersement of Laplaine's family is real...but who is Max, really?  The answer remains ambiguous to the end.  The African Film Festival continues at PFA through February with a particular emphasis this year on diaspora, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.