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Cinema found again

Come back, Africa ( Afrique du Sud 1959 )

Color: Docu- fiction 95’

Direction: Lionel Rogosin

Screenplay: Lionel Rogosin

Director of Photography: Ernest Artaria, Emil Knebel

Music: Lucy Brown

Editing: Carl Lerner

Cast: Miriam Makeba, Vinah Makeba, Zachria Makeba, Molly Parkin

Production: Lionel Rogosin

Synopsis

Zachariah, a Zulu living in poverty, moves to Johannesburg looking for work. He finds several different jobs, all marred by ambient racism. During his free time he goes to blacks-only bars, full of illegal liquor and heated debates over racial segregation. His wife and child join him, but hope soon gives way to tragedy.

Réalisateur

Lionel Rogozin, documentary master, and precursor of the New American Cinema. After obtaining the nomination on the Oscar in 1954 with his first film On the Bowery, he ventured into an unprecedented venture: filming clandestinely, in 1959, in the darkest years of apartheid of a film to halfway between documentary and fiction about the life of blacks people in South Africa. With Come Back Africa, Rogozin condemned without appeal the racial regime in South Africa. Among these performers, mainly non-professionals, Miriam Makeba, launched here on the international scene.