Africa Addio
| Africa Addio | |
|---|---|
Blue Underground DVD cover
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| Directed by |
Gualtiero Jacopetti Franco Prosperi |
| Produced by | Angelo Rizzoli |
| Written by | Gualtiero Jacopetti Franco Prosperi |
| Edited by | Gualtiero Jacopetti Franco Prosperi |
| Distributed by | Rizzoli (USA) |
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Release date
|
1966 |
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Running time
|
140 min |
| Language | Italian |
Africa Addio is a 1966 Italian documentary about the end of the colonial era in Africa. The film was released in a shorter format under the names Africa Blood and Guts in the United States and Farewell Africa on UK VHS. The film was shot over a period of three years by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, two Italian filmmakers who had gained fame (along with co-director Paolo Cavara) as the directors of Mondo Cane in 1962. This film ensured the viability of the so-called Mondo film genre, a cycle of "shockumentaries"- documentaries featuring sensational topics, a description which largely characterizes Africa Addio.
The film includes footage of the Zanzibar revolution, which included the massacre of approximately 5,000 Arabs in 1964 (estimates range up to 20,000 in the aftermath), as well as of the aftermath of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya.
Prior to the film's release, allegations that a scene depicting the execution of a Congolese Simba Rebel had been staged for the camera resulted in co-director Gualtiero Jacopetti's arrest on charges of murder. The film's footage was seized by police, and the editing process was halted during the legal proceedings. He was acquitted after he and co-director Franco Prosperi produced documents proving they had arrived at the scene just before the execution took place.
Jacopetti has stated that all images in the film are real and that nothing was ever staged. In the documentary The Godfathers of Mondo, the co-directors stressed that the only scenes they ever staged were in Mondo Cane 2. In the same documentary, Prosperi described their filmmaking philosophy: “Slip in, ask, never pay, never reenact.”
The film has appeared in a number of different versions. The Italian and French versions were edited and were provided with narration by Jacopetti himself. The American version, with the explicitly shocking title Africa: Blood and Guts, was edited and translated without the approval of Jacopetti. Indeed, the differences are such that Jacopetti has called this film a betrayal of the original idea. Notable differences are thus present between the Italian and English-language versions in terms of the text of the film. Many advocates of the film feel that it has unfairly maligned the original intentions of the filmmakers. For example, the subtitled translation of the opening crawl in the Italian version reads:
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Wikipedia