Underplayed Gems

ABC Africa (2001)

ABC Africa poster
Directed by
Abbas Kiarostami
Genre
documentary film, LGBTQ-related film
Country
Iran
Runtime
1h 24m
Rating
4.8 of 10 from 25 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami travels to Uganda with a handheld camera. He documents the work of an organization supporting children orphaned by war and AIDS. The film finds reasons for optimism amid difficult circumstances.

observationalintimatehopefulhumanisticnaturalisticlow-keyearnestsubtle

What happens

ABC Africa (Persian: ای‌بی‌سی آفریقا) is a 2001 Iranian documentary feature film directed by Abbas Kiarostami. It was screened out of competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Invited by the United Nations to study the endeavors of the Uganda Women's Effort to Save Orphans, Kiarostami and his collaborator Seifollah Samadian initially went to the country to scout locations for a feature-length film. However, when the pair returned home and examined the more than twenty hours of digital footage shot on digital video with a handheld video camera over the course of ten days, they decided their material was worth editing into the feature-length film. For Kiarostami, this film was a return to his early themes of resilient children in the face of adversity, but for the first time it was outside his homeland with a more versatile format. Nevertheless, Iran’s foremost film-maker has succeeded in locating reasons for optimism among the nearly two million orphans left helpless by the ravages of civil war and AIDS. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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