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January 30, 2003 Volume 24, No. 17
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>>African filmmaker brings connections to BU

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>>ARTBriefs

BU goes Down Under

For the past six years, one of the international study venues that has attracted BU students has been the sunny climes of Australia. Katharine Krebs, director of international programs, said that eight-to-15 students have attended Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia since 1996.

Two years ago, Murdoch began an official exchange program with BU and began sending students here. Two Murdoch students attended BU last semester, and two others attended the previous year. One of the students, Diana Flood, was a student of filmmaker Martin Mhando.

During his visit to BU, Mhando and Suellen Tapsall, associate dean of humanities and social studies at Murdoch, explored opportunities to expand and strengthen the program.
  
African filmmaker brings connections to BU
Filmmaker Martin Mhando, who directs media studies at Australia’s Murdoch University, and Suellen Tapsall, associate dean of the school’s arts and humanities division, visited the University last week to strengthen ties between the two schools. Mhando also introduced his Oscar-nominated film, Maangamizi, the Ancient One.
By Marty Doorey

Fresh from a six-month sabbatical in his native Tanzania, filmmaker Martin Mhando was in Binghamton Friday to promote his latest feature film and to encourage BU students to study in his adopted country of Australia.

While officially on campus as an ambassador of Australia’s Murdoch University, Mhando also had personal business — visiting with his brother Peter, ’95, an area businessman who earned his doctorate in economics at BU. Peter’s wife, Lindah, is currently a Ph.D. candidate in sociology.

The director of the media studies program at Murdoch, Mhando introduced his most recent feature film, Maangamizi, The Ancient One, to a crowd of about 120 Friday night. The film was nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign film category in 2001.

Set in Tanzania and filmed on locales ranging from the Indian Ocean to the heights of Mount Kilmanjaro, the movie explores the spiritual pull of ancestors on an African-American psychiatrist who is working with a Tanzanian woman. The two each find their path to self healing during a trek up Kilmanjaro, the continent’s highest mountain and a spiritual landmark.

“It’s a difficult film,” Mhando says, noting that it has not found an American distributor, nor is it likely to, because of its many changes in viewpoint from one character to another and its switches in pacing.

While he would enjoy seeing the film have commercial success, Mhando and his co-director, Ron Mulvihill, and screenwriter, Queenae Taylor Mulvihill, are reluctant to edit the film to gain wider acceptance. “It’s a spiritual film,” he said.

In spite of Maangamizi’s recent success as a feature film, most of Mhando’s work has been in documentaries. Most recently he won acclaim for a documentary “AFL-Not Just a Game,” about the rough-and-tumble world of Australian football, a game more like rugby than its American counterpart. The film is about the sometimes intense racial incidents that have been a prominent feature of the game in recent years. “Racism has always been a fact in Australian football,” said Mhando, who produced the film as a way of breaching the cultural divide between the predominantly white Australian football culture and many of its recently arrived black players.

As a result of the film — part of a concerted effort by the league to bridge the racial gap — Mhando said, the number of racial incidents has steadily declined.

The film has been so successful that Mhando has gotten inquiries from Britain and Italy where similar racial issues have plagued their football, soccer and rugby leagues.

Mhando’s film career started by accident in 1974 while he was studying theater at Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. A Japanese film company was working on a feature film Asante Sana, and needed native speakers to coordinate the work on location in Africa and to act in the film.

“At first I turned it down,” said Mhando, but after talking over the opportunity with his university mentor, he took the part. “I never looked back.”

Not only did he work for several months in Japan in a directorial role, he also acted in the film and worked with the production crew.

One of the early productions Mhando worked on was the Tanzanian-segment of the BBC production of The Africans — written by Ali Mazrui, now director of BU’s Institute for Global Cultural Studies. During Friday’s visit, Mhando and Mazrui sat for an hour to catch up.

“We had a good talk in fluent Swahili,” Mhando said, adding that he could almost hear ideas for a new paper percolating in Mazrui’s brain, based on Mazrui’s close questioning of him on current political events in East Africa.

Before heading back to Western Australia, Mhando will show his film and recruit exchange students at several universities including the University of Colorado, Georgetown, Penn State and Boston College. He is accompanied by Suellen Tapsall, associate dean for humanities and social studies at Murdoch.