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In the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses, the Gene Siskel Film Center has canceled its two scheduled screenings of Bob Hercules and Keith Walker’s 53-minute video Senator Obama Goes to Africa, part of this month’s “Stranger Than Fiction” documentary series. Barbara Scharres, director of programming, says she thought the movie was a natural for the series when she chose it last year; back then Obama was still a long shot for the Democratic nomination and the movie was new work by a local filmmaker of note (Hercules codirected the highly regarded Forgiving Dr. Mengele). But now that Obama has the Big Mo, the Art Institute of Chicago, which runs the Film Center, has concluded that exhibiting the movie two weeks before the Illinois primary would be a partisan act that violated its nonprofit status. “Given the timing of the presentation of the film, it could be perceived as supportive of a particular candidate,” reads a statement from Maria Simon, the Art Institute’s legal counsel, “although I understand that was not GSFC’s intention when this was scheduled.”
The most dramatic sequence shows the senator taking a boat ride to Robben Island and inspecting its former maximum security prison with African National Congress leader Ahmed Kathrada, who was sentenced alongside Nelson Mandela in 1965 and spent 18 years there. The two men look at the tiny cell where Mandela once lived, and Obama recalls that his first political experience was participating in the antiapartheid movement in the U.S. during the late 70s and early 80s.
