Rome’s Pliny the Elder commented that “there is always something new out of Africa.” Writing his Natural History less than a half-century after Jesus, he could have had no idea of how true he wrote about this largest (if excluding the former U.S.S.R. from Asia), poorest, most heterogeneous and second most populated continent of all. Two millennia later, it will surprise no one that the area’s growing film output should be as varied and unpredictable as its peoples, languages, customs, history, geography and politics.

Under auspices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the African Film Festival, Inc., the 13th New York African Film festival begins April 20 with a high-powered public panel discussion at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. Initial April 26-May 4 screenings at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater then move, May 12 and 19, to the International Center of Photography as part of its “Snap Judgments” exhibit, and culminate at BAMcinématek, Rose Cinemas, featured in “Dance Africa 2006.”

Including a majority of U.S. premières and some other recent and classic works, shorts, a retrospective on Cameroonian Jean-Pierre Bekolo and appearances by him and other filmmakers and, in conjunction with NewFest: The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival, a program of South African shorts examining sexuality, gender and homophobia, the current year’s festival is near intimidating in scope and ambition. This “Citywide Cinematic Celebration” takes as its theme, “Africa in Transition—Today!” but, really, no words can hope to give an idea of the richness, variety and quality of the whole. Nor can any summary encompass that whole. Thus, what follows will cover only two of the numerous outstanding features and twice that number of shorts and/or mid-length selections.

In overview, the North African shorts program, “Emerging Voices from the Maghreb,” as well as Rachid Bouchareb’s nine-minute The Colonial Friend/L’Ami ya bon (Algeria, 2004; U.S. première), is reverse mirror for Helle Toft Jensen’s Hotel of Dreams (Senegal/Denmark, 2005, 55 minutes; U.S. première). Within that Maghreb program, director-screenwriter Namir Abdel-Wasser interviews his father Waguih in Toi, Waguih/You, Waguih (Egypt/France, 2005, 28 minutes; U.S. première), about his past, particularly the imprisonment and torture forty years before, 1959-64, for being a Communist in their native land under Nasser, and about the steady, laconic sire’s feelings concerning their long-time adopted France: “50-50. I found my place in France [but] don’t see myself as a Frenchman today. I’d rather live in Egypt but I don’t.”

And stage and film director Kamal Al-Mahouti’s My Lost House/Ma maison perdue (Morocco/France, 2001, 19 minutes; U.S. première) is a reminiscence triggered by the Winter 2001 mandated demolition of Saint Denis housing project units where, arriving from Casablanca in 1970, the then-six-year-old and his family were to live for two decades. Without actors or other people, to child-and-adult voiceover, the camera walks slowly through deserted apartments, schoolrooms and courtyards as immigrants become, but do not become, French.

In-between length Hotel of Dreams is the reverse side of the coin, as, dreadlocks greying, frameless-bespectacled Jean Marie “Jeannot” da Sylva returns at forty-five to the Senegal he left with his family at eighteen. Amicably divorced from his wealthy white Belgian wife, he is Catholic and Europeanized but since the age of ten has dreamt of operating a hotel in Popenguine. Tourism has already begun to touch the Muslim fishing village -- locals’ sardonic comments are both for and against -- and he envisions an establishment that will reflect well on the country and not be your typical “place where white men look for women.” He has gone into debt, and as visitors come for the beach and native craftware, his “baby” attracts not a single booking and there is open tension among his staff.

The lens shifts back and forth between locals and Jeannot, the latter “lonely in Europe” but lost here, too, at home. He has “come not to change you, not at all . . . [but] to learn from you,” so, on volunteered advice from taxi driver Birane, the European Senegalese must come out of his compound-cocoon, humble himself, rejoin his countrymen and ask their help and understanding. The fate of his business venture remains unanswered, but this longing “child of the village” finally comes home in the “hope that it will love me.”

Returnees who, on the contrary, did not reach their physical or spiritual homes are the subject of The Colonial Friend. In sepia black-and-white drawings, with a few shocking reds, this is a comment from the receiving end of colonialism/racism. Europe’s shameful, little-known reneging on promises made in World War Two extremis, has recently been to the fore in Burkinabè Kollo Daniel Sanou’s Tasuma, The Fighter, and the specific massacre of Bouchareb’s short was the center of father of Black African cinema Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow’s masterful 1988 Camp Thiaroye/ Camp de Thiaroye.

Sans CGI frills, in effectively flat drawings with two or three 3D sections, French-born Algerian Bouchareb gives the story of Senegalese Aby, mustered against the Nazis, captured and then liberated from a POW camp, repatriated and, set against his family’s simple farming, slaughtered along with other demobilized blacks for insisting on the service pay due them.

Much but certainly not all of Africa’s today is the result of four centuries’ outside exploitation, and the two features to be considered here do not take as their point of departure Africans’ relationship with the invariably deadly white man. Opening the NYAFF, director Mark Dornford-May’s U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (South Africa, 2005, 120 minutes; U.S. première) does, admittedly, start off with a statement about Spanish conceptions of beauty and is a Xhosa (the Bantu “click” language) recasting of French Bizet’s work from fellow Parisian Mérimée’s novella of “exotic” 1820s Seville. Memorable for its lush melodramatic score rather than the Meilhac-Halévy libretto, the 1875 opera did not come to supreme popularity until after its composer’s young death. Since as early as 1915, it has been brought to the screen half-a-hundred times, notable among them Rossi’s realistic-balletic opera version and, a year earlier, Saura’s ambitious transposition into a sensual folkloric and dance mix structured around the extra-rehearsal loves of the choreographer and prima ballerina.

More germane is Preminger and Hollywood’s 1954 Carmen Jones, all singing dubbed (even Belafonte’s Corporal Joe), all black, insinuatingly racist, relocated to a parachute factory down South, with a boxer standing in for the “toreador,” and Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyrics overflowing with “dis,” “dat,” “dem” and “dey.” How far from such California condescension Dornford-May’s assured feature début is, and why it received a Golden Bear at Berlin, is readily apparent. Set down at eye level among bone-dry flatlands, the shanties and alleyways of Cape Town’s Khayelitsha Township, it has the vitality of Bizet’s score and, as importantly, places its drama easily and fully within the context of this section of South African life. Sexy without pandering to flesh, fresh in its modern idiom, it relies not on the camera but, instead, on the screen presence and voices of a first-rate cast.

The famous tale needs no retelling. Indeed, some instances of too great a faithfulness to the original might best have been worked around and left out, such as the recurring religious messenger from mother to “my precious sergeant,” and cousin opera star Lulamile Nkomo (Zweilungile Sidloyi), who stands in for the bullfighter since there is only a single fatted calf, really a skinny cow, to be ritually slaughtered.

As the title femme fatale, Pauline Malefane is magnificent. Even among the others’ fine voices, hers is amazing, and her anti-Kate Moss, full-figure sexuality is intoxicating. The chorus of township (hence, lower-class) women from Gypsy Cigarette Factory amply backs her up whether singing and dancing at work, partying at Bra Nkomo’s (Andries Mbali) local hotspot or, in significant orange, at the haunting death concert in a white cinderblock pavilion. Don José to her Carmen is Andile Tshoni as Bible-reading Jongikhaya, “Jongi,” the soldier with the mark of Cain in his closet who will fall further from grace in this film for everyone, even those who do not fancy opera.

Although with a more Western aesthetic, equally sensual and equally concerned with Africa itself rather than the culture clash with that West, is “renegade” Bekolo’s fourth feature-length (two earlier ones are also included in the Festival). No imagination is needed to see why Les Saignantes/The Bloodettes (Cameroon, 2005, 92 minutes; NY première) has run into “pornographic” and “against the regime” problems with President Paul “Cameroon of the Great Ambitions” Biya’s quarter-century rule.

Its stylish adventurous excesses do not add up to the advertised action-horror hybrid, nor does the stated sci-fi veneer come through in this film which engrossed a screening audience that confessed to enjoying immensely without exactly understanding. The Yaoundé setting of 2025 is patently today, not futuristic but surreal, swathed in fog, crisscrossed by dank waterways and dark with overripe reds and blues (from filters or lighting or both). Like “city of nowhere” Cairo in Ossama Fawzi’s undeservedly ignored 1999 Fallen Angels Paradise, the capital is Hell, and this a descent into it energized by a humorous death.

Subversive, however, it is, retailing the universal bedfellowship of sex and politics, power and money. Sly, funny, yet deadly serious, it has moments of campy martial-arts parody, intercuts signboards asking non-sequitur questions of viewers and irregular shots of strange Mama and her four sinister attendants, frequently references its opening female concept or spirit or secret society of indefinable Mevoungou, and verges on lesbianism in a fun-sisterly-best-of-friends-just-girls relationship.

Some of these hints might arguably have been omitted, but all actually contribute to the intended provocative “cool.” From the very first scene, the director never lets up, and what a scene it is: to throaty-voiced assertions of what Mevoungou is not, dangling from a ceiling harness in bra and bikini panties, Guy (listed as Majolie and played by Adèle Ado) does the Shooting Position over a prone, underpanted, 5’5”, sixty-six-year-old “granddaddy” (Louis-Balthazar Amadagoleda). The trouble is, he dies, and even bigger trouble is that he is the SGCC, Secretary General of the Civil Cabinet.

She applies for help to bosom buddy Chouchou (Dorylia Calmel), and the two gorgeous-by-any-standards prostitutes begin their journey into the enigmatic twinned hearts of darkness and power where, in Fawzi’s words, “anarchy, chaos, reality . . . create their own paradise.” The seemingly empty nighttime-nightmare city of seven-hundred-fifty-thousand actually teems with hidden life, with feckless disgruntled cops in patrol cars, butchers who may convert cadavers into “prime meat” but clownishly only decapitate them, morticians who may recover or substitute missing torsos from state morgues, and venal panty-collecting high government officials with haughty mistresses. “Bloodettes” appears to refer to a union of upper-end call girls, and this latest inconvenient mishap during the practice of the oldest profession threatens to endanger an accepted system wherein sex is exchanged for government contracts. The two empowerment-oriented women turn the situation to advantage to clean up the sleazy male powers that be. Elegant and sassy, the winning duo is onscreen relentlessly and are smashing in a scene where they try on various outfits and mug for an oval mirror. Dressed for bear, they crash one of the season’s gala social events, a W.I.P., Wake for Important Personality, in this dying city of dead souls.

With frequent jump cuts, eerie music and an illogical absurdist logic to its madness, the film concludes with, “the country couldn’t continue like that. It had to change,” and a last billboard: “How can you watch a film like this and do nothing?”

One can do no more than scratch the surface in covering this edition of NYAFF. But then, even with cinema for all tastes, no festival can do more than scratch the surface of that Cleopatra landmass in “her infinite variety.” More than and different from its bad news that dominates our media, with also emerging Asia, Africa is arguably the future, and we had better understand it today. Above all, despite all, it is youth and hope, as attested by the fact that two-thirds of this Festival’s directors have not yet turned thirty-five.

(Photo: U-Carmen eKhayelitsha from Spier Films.)