My review was written in April 1993 after a Lincoln Center screening.
A one-note film about high school grads having their pipe dreams dispelled, "Laafi" from Burkino Faso doesn't travel well. It's unlikely to have a commercial future beyond inclusion in African film series.
Joe (Elie Yameogo) has just graduated from high school in Ouagadougou with honors in mathematics; his heart is set on going to med school in France. But at registration he is told there are no spots reserved in medical school, only law school, secretarial school, etc. His only recourse is to get special permission from a government minister.
Debuting filmmaker S. Pierre Yameogo follows Joe's uninteresting battles with bureaucracy with plenty of filler scenes involving a sandwich man named Man of the People, who dispenses folk wisdom and gets to sum up the film in a particularly anticlimactic final reel.
Naive Joe is shocked to find out that pull is what matters; film dwells redundantly on this truism and then inserts a deus ex machina climax in which Joe gets into a French medical school.
Acting is weak and the film's tech qualities are minimal.
