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Africa without pity

A film professor at St. Joseph's wrestles into reality his middle-class detective drama set in "not-so-destitute" Ghana.

Destiny is a funny thing.

From Day 1 to Day 24 - and the months before and after a four-week shoot in Ghana - Deron Albright's first feature film, The Destiny of Lesser Animals, appeared doomed.

"It was just the relentlessness of the challenges," said Albright, 42, of Narberth, a director and associate professor of film at St. Joseph's University. "Any one given bad day is doable. This was day upon day. . . . It has been an exhausting process."

On more than one occasion, everyone involved - from the L.A. cameraman who slept on Albright's couch to the lead actor who paid his own airfare to Ghana - wondered whether the film four years in the making would ever see the big screen.

Of course, the film got made. You could say it was destiny - with a large dollop of perseverance.

On March 27, the well-received The Destiny of Lesser Animals is scheduled to screen at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. Since the final cut last spring, the movie has made the rounds of several A-list film festivals, including in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Last year, it had a world premiere at the prestigious New Directors New Films in New York, which credited Albright with crafting a "brilliant policiér that is also a poignant story of one man's journey to find and understand the value of his own culture."

The detective drama follows police inspector Boniface Koomsin, deported from the United States a decade earlier, as he struggles to retrieve his counterfeit passport, his only ticket out of Africa. Along the way, he begins to wrestle with his dream of escaping to America, and the possibilities in Ghana - a story seldom seen on the big screen.

"There is a world of Africa never pictured," said Moussa Sow, an assistant professor of French and Francophone literature and film at the College of New Jersey in Ewing.

Most African-set films that make it to America focus on the harsher side of life, overlooking other stories. Hotel Rwanda (2004) shows the impact of genocide. Desert Flower (2009) tackles genital mutilation in Somalia. The Last King of Scotland (2006) tells the story of Uganda's brutal dictator Idi Amin. And last year's An African Election, a political documentary that played at many of the same festivals as Destiny, explores the 2008 Ghanaian presidential elections and the danger that lurks behind the scenes.

"The continent is changing," Sow said. "It is not the Africa of AIDS and malaria. We do have a burgeoning middle class. There is something called not-so-destitute Africa. Albright's film is a window into that type of change. It has shifted the paradigm. You don't look at Africa with pity."

In 2006, Ghanaian expatriate Yao B. Nunoo, who had acted in an Albright short, approached his friend about directing the original screenplay. Albright agreed. The obstacles, though, mounted through 2008 and 2009, when shooting began in Ghana, where Albright had moved with his wife and sons, Jaspar and Dashiel, through a Fulbright Fellowship he won.

His budget was low, sub-basement low, at about $100,000; he was forced to borrow $50,000 against his house. He also put the $25,000 stipend from the fellowship toward the film. Fund-raisers and contributions from his parents, siblings, and friends of friends rounded out the budget.

"He's brave. That's what he is," sociologist Charles Gallagher, chairman of the sociology and criminal justice department at La Salle University, said of the self-funded project. (Gallagher attended a fund-raiser for the film.)

Albright said he thinks his money is recoupable in the long haul. "That being said, I have absolutely no wiggle room," he said. "I know I can't do another movie like that."

Money, though, was not his only worry.

Crew arrived late. Actors froze. Equipment failed. Electricity failed. Generators failed. One day's shoot ran from 5:30 a.m. until 3:30 a.m.

Even dogs nipped at him as he scouted locations.

"I think that everyone had a Lost in La Mancha moment on the shoot," said Nunoo, referring to the documentary about a Don Quixote film project where everything goes wrong. He plays Boniface and lives in University City while applying to graduate film schools.

The Ghanaian bureaucracy was especially formidable. "They jerk your chain," said Albright, a compact rugby player who favors a black beret and urban-smart hoop earrings.

To shoot an airport scene, he needed a permit. After spending hundreds in fees, he went to pick up the papers and was told to "come back, come back." Finally, he was directed to an office on the airport tarmac - but he could not walk the few yards there unless he had a safety vest. He asked for the vest. "No, you have to buy the safety vest," the official replied. No vests were available for sale. Albright eventually paid someone to borrow a vest.

"You get the vest on, go out to the building, and are told, 'We don't have the permits out here,' " he said, his voice still rising with frustration years later.

"The whole crew, Deron included, wore too many hats," said his wife, Lori, 43, a nurse. "They all came back from shooting exhausted, physically, emotionally, mentally. . . . I did have some panic times. I thought, 'Oh my God, we have invested quite a lot at this point.' "

Albright's and his team's commitment, though, was grounded in the subject matter, to avoid the usual "condescending First-World assumption that one wouldn't be happy in a world less than our own, and even worse, that our 'help' is necessary to give hope and happiness to Africa."

The movie's title is a Ghanaian aphorism loosely translated: "A leopard's destiny is different from that of lesser animals."

"Boniface thought the destiny of a leopard is to abandon Ghana," Albright said. "The film is really saying, 'Reconsider that choice.' "

Albright's early years belie his current vocation. He grew up in downstate Illinois, more farm boy than cinephile. He prominently displays a 4-H best steer trophy among the stacks of international DVDs at his office. For a stretch of several years as a child, he didn't have a functioning television at home.

At Oberlin College, he studied philosophy, and in his last year he took a European cinema course. Soon after graduation, he began dating a cinema studies doctoral student. "Then I was spending a lot of time with someone who was spending a lot of time watching movies and watching movies seriously," he said. "I started watching movies and watching movies seriously."

In 1995, Albright landed at Temple University, where he earned his master of fine arts degree in film and media arts. It was there that he took an intellectual interest in "how place affects everyday life," a thesis central to all his projects.

In his animated short "The Legend of Black Tom," Albright tells the story of freed American slave Tom Molineaux and his bare-knuckle boxing match in England. "He wants to be champion, but he gets tied up in what it means to be black and a foreigner," he said. 

Destiny was a natural extension. Albright helped rework Nunoo's script, inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, and suggested that the setting move from West Philadelphia to Ghana.

He takes pride in the fact that he did not helicopter in for a shoot and leave. He lived there for a year, enabling him to create in the film what the Hollywood Reporter describes as a "distinct sense of place."

Nowadays, as he builds the film's reputation at festivals, he has two goals: One is to recoup his investment, more than $100,000. He'd love to snag the interest of a major distributor. "Instead, it's going to be a slog," he said, one more obstacle along the way.

He'll have to interest the educational market, consider video on demand, and secure a spot on the schedule of features shown on flights to Africa.

His other goal? Make another movie.

After all, he has three scripts written and a fourth outlined.

Hear Deron Albright talk about his motivation to make "The Destiny of Lesser Animals" at www.philly.com/deron.EndText