Following the revival of Lionel Rogosin's awkward, riveting skid-row fiction-documentary hybrid On the Bowery, the Film Forum presents a restored print of his even more eye-opening 1959 drama, Come Back, Africa. Rogosin arrived in South Africa in 1957, when apartheid raged unchecked and Nelson Mandela and his allies were awaiting trial. Under the guise of making a cheerful travelogue, he shot—in secret, on the fly—a tragic drama centering on the quest of one Zulu husband to land a job in a Johannesburg bizarrely set against him. Two legacies: The film made Miriam Makeba an international star, and the theater Rogosin bought to exhibit it—the Bleecker Street—became a forerunner of the Film Forum.
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