Idrissou Mora Kpai. Si-Gueriki (The Queen Mother) . Benin, 2003. 62 minutes. In Bariba and French with English subtitles. Distributed by California Newsreel, 500 Third St., Suite 505, San Francisco, Calif. 94107: www.newsreel.org. VHS. $195.

Idrissou Mora Kpai. Si-Gueriki (The Queen Mother). Benin, 2003. 62 minutes. In Bariba and French with English subtitles. Distributed by California Newsreel, 500 Third St., Suite 505, San Francisco, Calif. 94107: www.newsreel.org. VHS. $195. In the 1950s, Camara Laye led a field of African authors who described how African children attending European schools became educated and increasingly assimilated into French or English culture and social mores. Eventually they became distant from home, mother, father, and siblings. The exodus led in one direction: from Africa to Europe. Thus when Djibril Diop Mambety made Touki Bouki in 1973, a film about alienated youth in Dakar, the musical refrain haunting the film and their lives was that of Josephine Baker singing "Paris, Paris." With Si-Gumki, as well as a host of other recent films like Ainsi meurent les anges (Moussa Sene Absa, Senegal, 2001) and Guelwaar (Sembene Ousmane, Senegal, 1992), the focus is now on those Africans seeking to return to Africa from Europe, a return that increasingly is marked by disillusionment, even a taste of bitterness. The postcolonial return is not a celebration, but a mark of defeat. In a sense, Mambety's Hyenas (Senegal, 1991) epitomizes this with the return of Ramatou, a "daughter" of the country, who is now a wealthy avenging angel bent on seeing the destruction of her former lover. While Si Gueriki is not as negative as that-indeed the protagonist-filmmaker ldrissou Mora Kpai is not returning in defeat-we learn early on that he is returning too late to see his father again. He describes his father as the greatest man he has ever known. Now, after ten years of schooling in Germany, he is finally on his way home, but his father has died, and he will never have the conversation, man to man, that he has so often dreamed about. Instead, he comes home to his mother and stepmother, to a compound marked by the absence of the great man. As a child he had never frequented the women's quarters, had never really come to know his mother or stepmother, had not developed close feelings for them. This is a film about a son reconnecting to a side of the family to which he had never been close and whose lives he had never understood. Kpai learns about who his mother is, what she experienced when he was a child, and her relationship with her cowife. Just when we think that this represents a new twist to the old story of the prodigal son's return, the focus shifts to Kpai's sister and her daughter who had been raised away from their home by a female relative, following customary practices. Kpai's mother explains that if the girls had stayed home they would have been spoiled, and that in being forced to leave as young children they were obliged to become independent. Eventually, this enables them to deal with the ultimate separation, which is death. But even as these lessons are being articulated, we see the traditional models of the patriarchal family being challenged by Kpai's mother and stepmother and by his other female relatives. He takes us through the lives of the women who now are deciding to chose their own spouses, rejecting inappropriate marriages, or refusing marriage-at-all-costs (which Kpai's mother insists is necessary and traditional). …