AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA (MELBOURNE ONLY): It may not have been the reason for its exclusion from the Sydney season of the African Film Festival, but Liberia 77 feels more like a Canadian film than an African film. A documentary about two Canadian photographers who grew up in the titular country and return to it, nevertheless nudges at important questions about the rest of the world’s relationship with Africa.
Canadian-born but raised in the West African nation of Liberia, Jeff (director) and Andrew Topham are the sons of a man who was the manager of a Canadian company that manufactured explosives for Liberian mining companies. Established (with help from the US Government) in 1822 by emancipated men who were early proponents of what was much later referred to as the 'Back to Africa" movement, Liberia’s ruling class were not originally Africans per se, but former American slaves who moved to Africa. An oddity on the highly colonised continent, Liberia was also a trailblazer for African rights. However, the country also eventually fell prey to the common problem of 20th Century African states: military coups and dictatorships. When things started to get dangerous in 1989, the white Topman family who had lived idyllically in Liberia for three years, high-tailed it for the relative safety of Canada.
As the documentary starts, 25 years later, the Canadian sons have returned to the place they once called home.
For its first half hour, the documentary’s lazy curiosity, offers a tantalising introduction to an unusual place. The Tophams, meet the men and the families of those men who worked for their father and had no choice but to stay on as the country plunged into a brutal, two-decade-long civil war. The film charms, but the joy of sharing the nostalgic warmth – aided by slick images – of these privileged North Americans (and professional photographers), soon ebbs.
Where the film gets provocative for the white protagonists is when the son of one former Topham family associate unambiguously puts the hard word on the Canadians for a ticket out of Liberia’s post-war poverty cycle, maybe even a ticket to Canada. To the film’s – and the film-makers’ – credit, Liberia 77 takes the time to sit with the uncomfortable dilemma of how even well-meaning interlopers can aggravate situations by offering charity not change, or even less than charity with an illusion of nice talk and unintended promises. It’s a scenario that puts a white, privileged, well-educated audience in the hot seat right alongside the Tophams.
Responses to the way the Topham brothers respond to their dilemma will vary – I’m still disturbed by the film’s soft depiction of their father and its decision to end with him - but the film does resolve itself and the dilemma in a satisfactory way, while still leaving questions open for consideration. Ultimately, the documentary provides an interesting take on the importance of the visual image, not just in these men’s lives, but in all, and a nation’s life.
