Hot Docs: Highlights from North America's Biggest Documentary Film Festival

Mama Africa dir. Mika Kaurismäki (Finland, Germany, South Africa)

The late South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba, known as Mama Africa, died just before Mika Kaurismäki, who grew up listening to her songs on Finnish radio, could start this film. The film is a love letter to his lost Mama A. Through expertly remastered archival footage and interviews with Makeba’s family and former band members, she is drawn as the greatest role model in the world: a brilliant talent, a hero of the pan-African movement, an influence on virtually every South African singer who followed her, and a treasure to all who knew her. (Admittedly, only one of her five husbands is interviewed.) None of my friends wanted to come see this with me because Superheroes was playing the same night, and that movie is about civilians who dress in costume and fight crime, but they missed out! Not only is this a great movie (bring the young impressionable girls in your family), it screened with a short about Celine Dion fans in Kenya, which featured shots of giraffes and elephants striding over the plains to “The Power of Love.”