By Katrina Manson
OUAGADOUGOU (Reuters) - The day after Nadege Batou's first solo documentary premiered, national authorities in her home country the Republic of Congo banned it.
"It's about a taboo topic," said Batou of 'Ku Nkelo, a la recherche de l'eau' (To the source, in search of water), which focussed on the nation's water problems.
"We don't lack money in Congo and we have a big river, but the poor have nothing to drink."
Batou, 30, said she was called in by government officials and told never to show her 26-minute reportage again, but it is one of hundreds of films on show at this year's 40th anniversary pan-African FESPACO film festival.
"It's not money that counts; it's showing it ... That's why coming to FESPACO was so important," she said.
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Several screenings at Africa's top film festival take a critical look at the continent, from documentaries about state terror in Cameroon and Morocco, wrongful imprisonment in Ivory Coast, villagers forced to shift to make way for plantations in Burkina Faso, and feature films that dramatise injustice.
Among the most arresting of this year's 19 movies competing for the top award at the festival is Teza, an Ethiopian film about Mengistu Haile Mariam's 1974-1991 authoritarian rule, when political dissidents were killed and children stolen from villages to fight for the self-styled revolution.
"I was there during the Red Terror and I saw many killings, just on the streets. Life meant nothing. How can we forget that," said Selome Gerima, associate producer and director Haile Gerima's sister.
"I wanted this film to be seen by everybody especially the young generation. It's about those who can't change their beliefs, and so have to flee or die. We need peace."
POVERTY, INJUSTICE AND CORRUPTION
Three films from South Africa selected for the top prize, more than any other country bar Morocco which also has three, show a post-apartheid landscape seared with pain and poverty.
"The big problem of South Africa today is class, not race," said director Michael Raeburn, whose film 'Triomf' focuses on incest in a white family in a poor Johannesburg suburb on the eve of the country's first free all-race elections in 1994.
"Triomf is a warning about marginalising people into poverty, about turning in with disastrous results," he said.
'Jerusalema' is the story of a young black boy in a Johannesburg suburb who dreams of going to university, but progresses through carjackings and bank robberies to become a gangland boss known as the 'hoodlum of Hillbrow', an area where in real life 59,000 crimes were committed in 11 years.
'Nothing But The Truth' shows a family coming to terms with its history after the end of apartheid. Director and lead actor John Kani plays a librarian who fails to be promoted, and believes freedom's dividends have not been realised.
Kani's own brother was shot dead by police while reading a poem of honour at the burial of a nine-year old girl killed during an anti-apartheid riot.
In FESPACO's host country, a packed local crowd -- which included Prime Minister Tertius Zongo -- shrieked with laughter and applauded scene after scene of corruption in Missa Hebie's 'Le Feuteuil', set in Burkina Faso.
The office melodrama reveals a Burkinabe mining department in which bribery and collusion permeate the hierarchy; all but one woman are on the take.
"With us in Africa, corruption is very developed," Hebie told Reuters on the red carpet after the screening.
"We fight it, but it's going to take time."
(Editing by Alistair Thomson)
