9:05 p.m.	Head in the Clouds Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon, 1995)

(La Tête dans les nuages). "The goat grazes wherever it is tied," explains a Cameroonian proverb about the country's endemic kleptocracy, where low–level bribes and high–level corruption keep the government and "official" economy moving. Teno interviews entrepreneurs, whether successful, would–be, or failed, but his findings leave him wondering if Cameroon's economy "is like a man with his feet in trash, his head in the clouds, and nothing but chaos in between."

—Jason Sanders

• (37 mins, 16mm)

Followed by:



Alex's Wedding

Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon, 2002)

(Le Mariage d'Alex). Asked to film a friend's wedding, Teno discovers an at first comic, increasingly powerful drama of polygamy and ritual, where duty and submission take precedence over love. Alex, our groom-to-be, visits the family of his future bride Josephine, a woman half his age. In accordance with tradition, he is accompanied by Elise, his current wife. Teno's camera captures not only the macho joking of the ceremony (“Be fair! If you kiss one, kiss the other!”), but the developments afterwards, when the weight of polygamy becomes all too clear, and sorely balanced against the brides.—Jason Sanders



Photographed by Teno. (45 mins, 35mm)



(Total running time: 82 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, From Les Films du Raphia)