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Movies & TV

Once again Under African Skies

Forced to relocate to the TIFF Bell Lightbox during the Bloor’s renovation, the Doc Soup series makes a triumphant return to the newly rechristened Bloor Hot Docs Cinema for this season’s final screening.

The feature this month is Joe Berlinger’s Under African Skies, a crowd-pleasing documentary that commemorates the 25th anniversary of Paul Simon’s Graceland by following the diminutive musician back to South Africa for a reunion with the musicians with whom he recorded the album.

This would be the bit where I trot out my surly observation that what’s basically a glorified CD box-set extra is being treated like an actual movie event – like Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam Twenty or Thom Zinny’s The Promise: Bruce Springsteen And The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Davis Guggenheim’s U2: From The Sky Down, which somehow opened last year’s Toronto Film Festival – but Under African Skies distinguishes itself from its cohort by having actual substance.

Simon’s trip to South Africa was a radical act at the time, defying an international boycott of the Apartheid nation and the flying in the face of other artists who’d publicly spoken out against the nation’s oppressive policy – Graceland arrived shortly after Steven Van Zandt and Artists Against Apartheid released the protest single Sun City – and the film doesn’t shy away from it, presenting both Simon’s protestations of artistic freedom and the cultural blowback that followed.

Berlinger never explicitly takes a side, but it seems pretty obvious that Simon would have come off looking a lot worse if the album hadn’t turned out as well as it did. Instead, Graceland became one of the key records of the 80s, introducing African music into the pop soundscape in a way that the form’s two largest Western proponents, Peter Gabriel and David Byrne, had never been able to accomplish.

Simon himself says he was never concerned about making a political statement with the music – if he had, the controversy might have stuck harder – but just liked the way it sounded. A quarter-century later, it still sounds pretty damn great.

Under African Skies screens Wednesday at 6:30 pm and 9:15 pm at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. Tickets are still available for the 9:15 pm show here.

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