REVIEW: Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah’s PUBLIC TOILET AFRICA (Amansa Tiafi)
“In plain language, Amansa Tiafi is the absence of a choice, it is the life of the powerless.”
- Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah
Struggling to abscond the bonds of colonialism: Ama and Sadiq’s lives are upended when a past debt creates a present nightmare…
Reviewed by Dennis Leroy-Kangalee
In 2019, Africa’s biggest film festival turned 50. Many believe the last two decades of the festival (FESPACO) had seen better days. On average, most African films being produced now are as sterile, corporate, and innocuous as their North American counterparts, although every now and then a filmmaker emerges to defy that notion. I was convinced that Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah’s debut feature, Public Toilet Africa (PTA) might as well be that film. And after a successful festival run in Africa and Europe, a world premiere at Locarno, and SXSW in North America, this remarkable film is now available on MUBI for the world to see.
A cinematic tone-poem which at first glance looks like part Bamako (2006) and part Touki Bouki (1973) quickly splinters into a collage of subplots held together by an overarching theme of rebellion and poverty due to the enduring holocaust known as colonialism. Defying the clichés of an “emotionally satisfying” film, it welcomes its audience with an array of characters and ideas about class, race, culture, and government while simultaneously alienating them with its unconventional structure. Ofusu-Yeboah’s aim is to achieve thought and reflection as opposed to emotional identification. The Brechtian “distancing” effect, so organically digested and applied by filmmakers as diverse Ousmane Sembene, Pedro Costa and Godard, does not reduce itself to sloganizing or placard politics but becomes part of the moral authority that Ofosu-Yeboah is trying to assert like Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako.
*
Two films linked in their power and urgency, although vastly dissimilar, are the American-made A Brothers Whisper (2022, Jacinto Tarras Riddick) and the Ghanaian Public Toilet Africa (PTA). If we are going to champion “Black Cinema '' then we must start by acknowledging differences and similarities of our living filmmakers across the continental divide. Riddick and Ofosu-Yeboah want to arrive at a destination that is similar, but their point of departure and approaches are almost opposite. Riddick comes from within, Ofosu-Yeboah from the outside. One goes to Dostoevsky, the other Tolstoy. The way Jafar Panahi grabs the heart is exactly how Kiarostami promotes reflection. These modes create interesting engagement and assessment when exploring Black cinema. Too few are courageous enough to walk this plank.
The reach of modern Black films is not being discussed because the critics and advocates of certain filmmakers don’t have any interest in it. If there is line of progress or influence in Anglo-Western films from Visconti to Minnelli upon DePalma and Scorsese doesn’t anyone in their right mind find it interesting that we NEVER critique or assess our contemporary Black films through our own “Black gaze” criterion of history, art, techniques, and political ideologies? It would be a relief to read an honest comparative essay on a Black filmmaker’s aesthetics and a corresponding painter or composer, for example. Spike Lee, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, bemoaned in the 1990’s that we still didn’t have our Zora Neale Hurstons or John Coltranes of cinema. He is right, of course. But also wrong.
He fomented the self-fulfilled prophecy and stereotype that Blacks are incapable of cinematic mastery because they were cut off from Hollywood’s fiscal structure. For him, our artistic greatness reside in the access we can have to bank accounts. Lee, like his Capitalist compadres Lee Daniels, Jordan Peele - are all basically cut from the same cloth. They make appetizers, not main courses. They are logo filmmakers whose brand’s goal is to dismantle the master’s house (supposedly)…with the master’s tools. And within this, exploit their suffrage. It’s like an eternal Heisman Trophy story: Not who is the better player, but who deserves something because of what they had to overcome in college? The thematic differences alone amongst Lee, Daniels, Peele are the only real difference in their movies. Their politics, admirations, and competitive spirits are all perfunctory hallmarks of a Capitalist Entertainment Industrial Complex. They talk “Black,” but engage “white.” Frantz Fanon would have had a field day with them.
*
The strangeness and casually overt images of a colonized way of life are just one of the lasting impressions “Public Toilet Africa” has to offer
Public Toilet Africa is Ofosu-Yeboah’s first feature film. I had seen his startling short Akata back in 2016. Shot by his long-time collaborator, Marcin Scozinski, PTA is a stunning example of what a good eye, natural light, affective staging, remarkable faces, and having something to say can achieve. Dollar poor, spirit rich is the new cinema that will save us. Ideology aside, that should be the defining criterion. A rare triumph in the visual look of the film is that is works within the somber and heavy tone of the movie; the “beauty” and heat of Szocinski’s photography is never incongruent to what we are experiencing because he does not obsess over gorgeous landscape shots - he keeps the characters, the people, the action itself - the center of it all. And since the rape of the African continent and it’s literal image is a free-floating theme in the film, its photography reinforces the film’s “radical Black gaze”; it is never a commercial for Ghana’s tourist department or some NGO that is looking to titillate Western or Asian audiences.
While PTA pays homage to the cool stately anarchism of Touki Bouki it is less punk rock and more open-ended blue jazz. Both Mambéty and Ofosu-Yeboah abhor capitalism and relish freedom; they seek the romance of the road, the danger of love. They distrust the spoils of colonialism in all its flavors and they resent the impact money and power have on the soul (Thinking further upon it, PTA has more connection to the angry thrust of Mambéty's Hyenas or the absurdism of Le Franc).
PTA is assertive and distinct in what it is showing. Unlike most first films, Ofosu-Yeboah’s style is already confident, it has nothing to prove, no ostentation. He doesn’t editorialize much and is concerned that you simply deal with what is in front of you.
The movie is a reflection on the spiritual dissonance caused by colonialism. As an artistic dissident (my claim, not Ofosu-Yeboah's) PTA is not following in the great master Mambéty’s footsteps but walking beside them and making its own impressions in the sand. A cool-looking African couple, sunlight, motorbikes and the desire to be free are not enough and tell us nothing about Mambéty nor Ofusu-Yeboah. Similarly, those who have criticized Ofosu-Yeboah's use of narration seem to miss the point. Narration is a tricky technique but its power lies in its execution, its aural power. Not in moving plot along or answering questions. In fact, films that employ it well often urge us to ask more questions as opposed to answering them. Picasso said computers were useless, they only provide answers. Art should ask questions.
PTA's melancholic tone reflects the meanderings of loneliness and sadness. It’s a world forsaken: government has abandoned us, the history of racist brutality flows upon the shoreline, the Atlantic itself is tortured - one can only look inward. Systems and rules cannot be trusted. Only individuals out of step, only those gently renegade.
The wistful irony of the movie is indicative of the times Mambéty warned us of: capitalism in 21st century Earth is no longer something that can be fixed or fought but one we must endure through. Ofosu-Yeboah is clear about this. Whether China, Russia - or a salesman from Osh Kosh, Kansas declares themselves owners of the African continent – we are all light years away from any solace. This is not to arouse despair, it means that individuals have to take it upon themselves to do what they can just to get from morning to night. And then disappear relatively unscathed. Public Toilet Africa expresses this angst and frustration, it admits that the entire world has taken a piece of Africa and similarly shat upon it. The White Man, the Yellow Man…there is no difference.
Some of us, like the main character Ama (played pointedly by Briggitte Appiah) return to the scene of the crime - she revisits Accra in pursuit of the white photographer, whom she was once “gifted” to who demeans and exploits the African image and its soul with abandon. The ‘capturing’ (photographing of) the African image is a draconian metaphor for the literal usurpation and enslavement of Black people, how we are exploited and tossed off - whether in image, advertising, or a police beat down is all one and the same.
With help from her lover Sadiq (David Klu), she confronts the photographer and then is forced to deal with the consequences but still cannot annihilate the damage of hundreds of years of colonialism.
Because the world has actually exceeded the horror Fanon gave voice to and is unsuccessful at taking his advice (many of us are intelligent, but far too many lack audacity) - cinema may still be the last resort at sharing our awareness and artistically rendering any joy or pain we have left. But in order to do this audiences have to be as complicit in taking something serious as much as its authors. Both have to be willing participants in a sentiment that’s considered criminal.
Ofosu-Yeboah’s vision is a steel-eyed ship that moves slowly, cuts through the ocean very slowly, with no pomp or circumstance, and yet while some may feel the omniscient narrator as a tenuous glue for an uncertain narrative, they should remember: still waters run deep. And, sometimes a film is a hand-made work of art, not an industrial product decided on by a board of voters.
USE OF ACTORS
David Klu and Briggitte Appiah as the mysterious radical lovers
In 2022, the world is reeling from information overload, with answers to questions which are not necessarily difficult but perennial, and insistent on pretending that all the solutions are somehow wrapped up or hidden in a vault. If the visceral thrust of certain modern films, A Brother's Whisper, for example is couched in the neurotic force of the raw naturalist acting, complementary films like Public Toilet Africa are ethereal and mystical, floating like a tormented ballet dancer. In Powell-Pressburger’s 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, the dancer is not grounded and stomping like a martial arts expert, she is suspended into the cosmos, eventually spiraling upwards to her death. But where there is a Dionysus, there must always be an Apollo not far behind. There is always an anchor if we take a moment to look for it. We need to champion and discern the emotional and the intellectual; the raw and the well-simmered.
PTA’s rhythm and performances are reflective of the cerebral hemorrhaging brought on by the exasperation of racism. Ofosu-Yeboah's actors behave as if in a trance (one could argue anyone living under capitalism behaves this way!) If Fassbinder conducted his actors like an anesthetized puppeteer and Bresson like flat spiritual icons turning in quicksand, Ofosu-Yeboah's actors are just as aware of what is imminent, carrying not merely the tradition of Protestant understatement (a hallmark of the first wave of Francophile African and European art films), but a quasi-hypnosis that permeates the film in a mesmerizing way. The actors - the acting - at times adapts to the scene itself. Never comfortable with the declamatory angst of Western Method acting or passionate theatricalism, Ofosu-Yeboah still knows how to stylize and hone in meanings through the presentation and behavior of his actors. Where Portuguese rebel filmmaker Pedro Costa remains embedded in his own unique fusion of theater, staging, lighting, and cinematography -- his actors seldom shift in style or technique, there are no jarring interludes. But there is in PTA.
The best example of this, one that creates tension wonderfully within the rest of the film, are the drunkards in Accra, Kwaku and Atta. Played by Ricky Kofi Adelayitor and Brimah Watara (celebrated for their performances at the 43rd International Durban Film Festival!), this audience favorite is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's tramps -- but even that is too easy of a comparison. Ofosu-Yeboah allows their humor to give texture, verve, and spunk to his ponderous excoriation of colonialism. He gives the engagement of such a bleak reconciliation of the past and present a little more heartbeat to hang on to.
*
Public Toilet Africa feels like a subtle homage to West African griot storytelling tradition as it emphasizes community over character. Individual characters become part of a commune just as quickly as audiences begin to invest any emotion. The transient personality of the film is a return to the confrontational and offbeat elements of the “glory period” of 1970’s Cinema due to its insistence on breaking away from forms, while establishing its own.
Lingering scenes, ensemble acting…these dynamics and grammar are employed not as gimmick but as part of a personal and political vocabulary that seeks to enlighten us in the less obvious corners of the mind (movie) and in the underbelly of a “plot.” It is a double- edge sword. And as always the case with most transgressive cinema - from American auteurs like Carl Franklin and John Sayles to Europeans like Von Trier or Herzog to African or Caribbean directors like Euzhan Palcy or Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – the melding of “professional” and “non – professional” actors (perhaps “trained performers” would be a better term) is one of the essential constants of a cinema that seeks to break and disturb the establishment’s mores of what film is…and slowly begin to function again as an art form that is both artistic and of the “artistic” class – but not at the expense of the very community and sensibilities of actual lives that gave birth to it. Palcy’s use of “real” people and “professional” actors was sublime in her 1983 Sugar Cane Alley. The utilizations of expressions and vitality of actual authentic communication on screen (a “non actor” cannot be ‘false’ on camera) between two types of actors is a welcome breath of fresh air.
Subject and plot and even themes no longer matter as the empires dwindle into our cultural “Dark Ages” mess; the only thing that matters in cinema now is the physical look and sound of a movie and – if it chooses to honor actors – how those human beings behave on the screen.
Traditionally in bourgeois cinema a director cries “Action!” at the beginning of a take when shooting a movie. Ofosu-Yeboah has shown us that you need to have a whole lot more to say than “action.” And a whole lot more to express than one’s cultural or racial clichés, handed down by an oppressive regime’s stereotypes.
Public Toilet Africa revolves around two lovers escaping the city after a heist-gone-wrong, two drunks evading capture from a debt owed to a local palm wine tapper, a goat thief fighting the system and a corrupt politician seeking re-election. All in all, these are micro-revolutions that take place every day and a sign that sometimes filmmakers are well aware of what lurks beneath and that they have faith that the talismans of establishment cinema can be made innocuous, that there is a place for artists who make films for audiences who need them.
Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. It’s coming is always a surprise...but its nature should not be.” She could have been referring to the new films developing around us, one of which is Public Toilet Africa.
Guerrilla filmmakers like Ofosu-Yeboah, clawing through the foliage, urge us all to be willing to shed blood at 24 frames per second and make myths out of what is around us.
Truth, unfortunately, is debatable. But not blood.
Gives us films with fingerprints and blood.
PUBLIC TOILET AFRICA
Written & Directed By Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah
Ghana, 95 Minutes, Color, 2021
Watch it now at MUBI.com or catch it on the film festival circuit