Dear Mr. Kiarostami:

The title of your freewheeling documentary almost reflects the approach to cinema that is exhibited.  A, B, C.  An effort at simplicity.  A reduction of cinema to its most basic and original component: the actuality (documentary-styled slices of real life, often taking the form of rough footage, which were the first attempts at filmed entertainment over a century ago).  The actuality, presented as a sort of stitched-together diary.  The result of what happens when you turned on your digital camera much in the same way that you would open your eyes on a morning like any other morning.  But Mr. Kiarostami, the documentary form doesn’t offer so simple an out as to say, “What are you looking at?”  The documentary form should, and sometimes does, ask, “Why?”

ABC Africa has the feel of a filmed journal.  “My Trip to Uganda”, by Abbas Kiarostami.  You’re a director of beautifully complex narrative films that has taken the opposite (simplistic) approach here, amidst a difficult subject to tackle – the struggle against AIDS in this plague-ravaged African country you visited.  A struggle that has political, sexual, and moral connotations and concerns.  Concerns and connotations that you have chosen to eschew here in favor of a more sensual (relating to the senses) approach.

I think you would call it “poetic”, but I’m not so sure I agree.  Poetry relates to the senses, true (as does all art).  But underneath the subtle beauty, the effortless charm, of some poems lies a rigid structure.  A form, if you will.  Rules.  Your documentary work here is sensual in that you film what you feel, or what appeals to your senses at the moment.  It’s an attempt to let your instincts thoroughly and completely govern your cinematic choices, through a series of disparate images: Many groups of African children, showboating and laughing in front of the camera.  A droplet of rain, as it wiggles frantically across a car window.  Darkness.  A mother breast-feeding her child.  Life.  A corpse wrapped in a sheet and carted off on a broken cardboard box.  Death.  One leaves this film with fleeting memories of images, disjointed and random ones.  One does not leave this film with ideas.  With all due respect sir, I’m not so sure that’s a good thing for an expository doc.  Experimental, maybe.  But polemical, no.  And any political film that isn’t at the same time polemical must seriously ponder its raison d’etre.

Your film approaches another mode of documentary expression as well: the reflexive.  Of course, you’ve demonstrated before that you are a director who is interested in the self-referential nature of cinema (Through the Olive Trees).  So in ABC Africa, you shot with two handheld digital cameras at all times.  Many of those times, one camera is simply capturing what the other does, fervently documenting the process of a documentary that has no process (there’s irony).  Interviews are kept to a minimum in your film.  When they do appear, they are often spontaneous and improvisational.  In summary, the whole thing feels like an initial attempt at cinema.  A clumsy experiment in the possibilities of the form.  This is something I would accept from a lesser director.  But not you, Mr. Kiarostami.

For you, a veteran of over thirty features, the result feels lazy.  Detached.  Disinterested.  It’s easy to have a clear reaction to the AIDS virus and the horrors it encapsulates.  It shouldn’t be easy to make a documentary about it, and certainly not in such a carefree manner.  I’m afraid to say it, Mr. Kiarostami, but you do a great injustice to a people, a country, and a widespread calamity that affects the world.  You do a great injustice to yourself.  Perhaps you didn’t feel that strong of an attachment to your subject.  That’s easy to believe, having witnessed the power and passion of your narrative cinema.  But if that’s the case, you should have spent a year or two of your life concentrating on another.  I’m sorry if this letter sounds harsh, but for you, the expectations are ten times as high.  The struggle of a great nation, like others that you have captured memorably, cannot be reduced to A, B, C.

Respectfully,

Mr. Bobby Wise