And after the Festival?

women in reviewed last week, (directed by Ken Loach from the novel by Barry Hines, shown the London Film Festival) is set in a mining community.

Photographed on location in Barnsley, it is the story of Billy Casper, who trains a kestrel; an inoffensive enough subject one would think. Good safe Disney terriYet 'Kes' is one of the most moving and passionate indict nents against capitalism made y a British director last few months it schoo of Billy, the um poses over and over arall human wastage, creauve talents stunted by system than dem they provide fodder demands nothing than Wildl for exploitation and industry.

For this choul like thousands throughout country. the unspoken recogninon cnal their clock. to lose their libertv in a respites no meaning or numan rewara.

That education under capitalism for VasU scares and that is the tutere is as certain as the pits tnal violate the landscape.

that kilv trains the its training preserves its own predatory instincts as bird Own private world, class spellbound explaining nem how he trained Ke lesitan at first, with suspicion towards anc class, • DeCOr and eloquer classroom shouted at late ing Something mean.

aggression.

1 nere marvellously filmed sequence the oys are playing football, com fantasies Bobby Charlton all rolled into This is Drilllant comedy reveals It nas a genuine respect I( the authenticity a kind that that him never appeared formances, which that live ont to lie set. straignuorward sudden found himself as a film directalent at that. of enormous thE edus broken from some of mentary jerkiness that style that is direct, controlled There nothing explicitly political in the film, yet it underlies understanding that selecuon it must be changedes also that There can no questions oI retorms in education cause ine relationship between caucanor clas. • expioita• the film Billy do-gooder, , who for Bly. make no real change the problem involves the totality of society.

Tesser ass that revotore with the Billies acting given a general release.

would outrage if this film is not shown and the trongest pressure ANOTHER film in the Festival again probably will not be seen by a mass audience.

t is called 'Mandabi' (th Postal Order' and is made b a Senegalese director.

To my knowledge it is the first film made by an African director specifically about life in Africa.

It is a far cry from much of the western bourgeois rubbish that has appeared in this For this is a film from the grass roots of Africa that lays bare the glaring inequalities of wealth, the economic backwardness, the raw need of survival, financial and cultural impoverishment.

Its story is simple and its style of presentation similarly direct and unvarnished.

Tontan, a Senegalese in his fifties, a man who lives by the book, by his religion, by his culture, who has. two wives and a family as decreed by his religion, lives in a shanty community in Dakar.

Like most of his neighbours he has been unemployed for One day a postal order arrives from his nephew who has • gone to Paris to find a job. The job he has is sweeping the roads and just from the lines of the letter one glimpses the isolation from his family and friends, the loneliness in the metropolis, that unemployment has forced upon him.

Immediately the whole community is curious. The tradesmen he owes money to see a chance of recouping their debts; the other unemployed see a new source for survival; his wives see the chance of stocking up food and buying some clothes.

But Tontan has to cash the postal order first and it is here that his nightmare begins, for unless he can produce an Identity Card the Post Office will not hand over the money.

He begins his long trek around the various officials, completely at the mercy of the petty functionaries who speak to him in French, who show him forms that he cannot read.

He is hustled, conned, cheated at every turn, until hnally the local schoolmaster promises to cash the order for him.

By now Tontan is even more in debt; the creditors bang on the door, his nephew's mother demands her money, and the final straw comes when the schoolmaster announces that a pickpocket has stolen the money.

Tontan breaks down, crying: It is impossible to be honest in Seneral'.

Mandabi gives insights into life in underdeveloped countries. that are rarely glimpsed in the West.

For what is foremost in the experience is , the total preoccupation with money, with survival.

Everybody is driven to it, where hustling becomes a fulltime occupation.

The film reveals whole layers of exploitation with an unpretentious honesty and often humour.

For us it should be a reminder that this is life in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, that this is the price of imperialism paid for in total impoverishment, that on the backs of Tontans the imperialists have plundered and massed their wealth.

Two thirds of the globe live like this, in poverty, illiteracy and sickness.

'Mandabi' reminds us of it.

Bds.... 'schoolboy who plays Billy 'Kes, shown at the London veral release. 6.03 6.30 7.30 8.00 9.00 10.00 10.30 11.00 11.45 12.00 Frien WHEN BETTY REID will be dealt with in the same way as we dealt with the futile Stalinist attempts to exclude the Workers Press from the CP Congress.

Remember, Reid, Gollan and company, this is not 1937.

Unable to take on the SLL politically, Reid has to resort to slanders such as these:

No truth "The techniques of keeping members at. a high pitch of activity and excitement, promising them the leadership of the revolution as an immediate perspective, and from Stalinism and social democracy.

It is the political striking power and principled firmness of this leadership that Reid hates and slanders.

When she lyingly refers to the decimation of leading figures', she is really protesting against the principled way in which we have always carried through our splits with revisionist and opportunist elements. Lawrence was He joined Mrs Reid and the Cliff became an apologist for imperialism by adopting a 'neutral' position in the Korean War.