T
his week: Africa’s Witch Children, Locked Up Abroad on NGC, Movie This Week: Splice, Ode to Victoria, and more…

Africa’s Witch Children. In some of the poorest parts of Nigeria, where evangelical religious fervor is combined with a belief in sorcery and black magic, many thousands of children are being blamed for catastrophes, death and famine. They are branded witches. Denounced as Satan made flesh by powerful pastors and prophetesses, these children are abandoned, tortured, starved and murdered.

Saving Africa’s Witch Children, a terrifying British documentary airing on HBO, is a horrific account of the plight of children designated as witches in parts of Nigeria, thanks to the rise of fundamentalist Pentecostal churches. The pastors in these churches get wealthy by promising parents that they will deliver their children from possession. In these rural communities, parents and neighbors often take matters into their own hands and mutilate, torture, abuse and kill, burn or bury alive children designated as witches. Once stigmatized, there is simply no hope for these children.

Located in southeastern Nigeria, Akwa Ibom State claims to have more churches per square mile than any other place on the planet. But a virulent strain of Christian Pentecostalism, blended with native beliefs, inspires hysteria when bad fortune or illness befalls the area, with preachers and families branding children witches.

The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that tens of thousands of innocent children have been targeted throughout Africa, including 15,000 in Akwa Ibom State alone.

Directed by Mags Gavan and Joost van der Valk, Saving Africa’s Witch Children exposes the grimly appalling treatment of children deemed witches. To the superstitious in Africa, no event has a natural, causal or scientific reason. Any tragedy—disease, miscarriage, unemployment or death in the family—is considered the work of witches.

And defenseless children, sometimes as young as three months, can be scapegoated and subjected to horrifying punishments. The lucky are merely ostracized by their families and left to fend for their own, while others—shown in the documentary—are tortured through a myriad of methods, from being set afire to having nails driven into their skulls, or simply murdered.

The filmmakers expose the work of “Bishop” Sunday Ulup-Aya, who charges families up to a year’s salary—in Nigeria, many survive on just a dollar a day—to “exorcise” children suspected of witchcraft, feeding them a toxin he calls a “poison destroyer,” which consists of alcohol, African mercury and his own blood. If families cannot pay his fee, he holds their children captive.

Guatemala City Sinkhole. Our last trip was to Central America: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. I loved Guatemala! Look at Guatemala’s newest Tourist attraction! Tropical Storm Agatha swept across Central America last week, bringing torrential rain that killed more than 100 people and opened a 60m-deep sinkhole in Guatemala City which reportedly swallowed up a three-story building.

The first storm of the 2010 Pacific season dumped more than a metre of rain in parts of Guatemala, also hitting El Salvador and Honduras.

The 30m-diameter sinkhole opened up in a northern district of Guatemala City, with residents blaming the rains and substandard drainage systems. Guatemala was the worst affected country, with a confirmed death toll of 92, although that is likely to rise when rescuers reach remote villages. Almost 100,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. Nine people were confirmed killed in El Salvador and 12 in Honduras.

Locked Up Abroad. My favorite show is back! I love this show! The new season of National Geographic Channel’s Critically Acclaimed Locked Up Abroad premieres Wednesday, June 30, 2010, at 10 PM ET/PT with Locked Up Abroad: The Real Midnight Express.

The 1978 film “Midnight Express” (Academy Award winner for best adapted screenplay, written by Oliver Stone) tells the story of Billy Hayes’ imprisonment for drug smuggling and his escape from a prison in Istanbul, Turkey. But the movie and book didn’t tell the whole story.

“In 1978 Hollywood made a film about my life, it was called Midnight Express and it told the story of my imprisonment and escape from a prison in Istanbul. The story itself was based upon the book I had written. In the book I could only say certain things for legal reasons. The movie itself changed even the book to a point where not all of it is valid and true to my story. Now I have a chance to tell my story.” Billy Hayes (pictured)

Movies This Week. Splice. Director Vincenzo Natali has created a menacing landscape and a fresh approach to the monster-maker genre.

Last week it was announced, with great fanfare, that science took a giant leap toward its main objective—becoming God—by making a new living organism. The team of Daniel Gibson, Hamilton Smith, and Craig Venter have created the first cell controlled by a purely synthetic genome. Dr Venter described the converted cell as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.” In 2003 Dr Venter synthesized the genome of virus, Phi-x174, which has a mere 11 genes. (See The Economist cover story, and Man Made Life)

The Human Genome Project was completed in April 2003 and the exact number of genes encoded by the genome is still unknown. The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium confirmed the existence of 19,599 protein-coding genes in the human genome and identified another 2,188 DNA segments that are predicted to be protein-coding genes.

Scientists Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) are lovers and genetic researchers on the righteous path of recombining DNA from different animals to create life-saving proteins. There is always a highly touted life-affirming reason—it’s always about saving diseased people—for tinkering with DNA.

Clive and Elsa succeed producing two masses of living organisms and their funders are satisfied. Elsa wants to go further and continue manipulating life. Nicoli holds the moral high ground.

Before their lab is disbanded, Elsa goes forward creating a human-animal embryo with an incredibly fast aging process. She has created a new life form. Within weeks they have a toddler running around the lab. The half-human, half-animal female creature has a stinger tail, a weird face, chicken-like legs and cannot speak. But she is smart. The creature, kept hidden in the lab, horrifies Clive who wants to kill it, but Elsa gets a motherly attachment. They call their creature-baby Dren.

Dren is more animal than human and clearly prefers Elsa, though there is little mother-child bonding. Elsa becomes Dren’s caregiver, teacher, and disciplinarian.

Through egg nuclear transfer the genetic material from two sperm cells could create a biological child from two men. The technique, when perfected, would introduce sperm DNA into an enucleated egg, fertilize this “male egg” with another sperm and gestate the resulting embryo in a surrogate mother.

Scientists have already produced monkeys who have three biological parents.

Male-male babies and human-animal hybrids are inevitable.

So, it is clear that the premise of SPLICE is more than unlikely science fiction aided by CGI. It’s the future of mankind.

Soon Dren (Delphine Chaneac) starts puberty and Elsa doesn’t recognize that Clive may be repelled but attracted to the sexy creature. I assume Dren is house-broken, or if you prefer, potty-trained.

When Dren transforms into a winged avenging angel-like creature, her true nature emerges. She’s angry she is cooped up. Instead of seeing Dren as a marvel of their scientific brilliance, Clive and Elsa selfishly take her to an abandoned farmhouse. They give her stuffed animals and Barbie dolls to play with.

In this twist, Elsa is the Dr. Frankenstein and Clive the hapless waif, de-masculinized by his castrating partner. How does he respond? Of course and why not?

While SPLICE careens towards the standard ending, the entire storyline is intriguing. I understand the sexualizing of Dren—its cinematic foreshadowing—but it would have been more creepy and kinky if Dren was a horrific monster.

Brody’s Clive is a slacker-scientist while Polley’s Elsa is domineering and sexually comes alive by creating a bizarre creature. Polley is a terrific actress but also a very accomplished writer-director (AWAY FROM HER).

Written by Vincenzo Natali (who also directed), Antoinette Terry Bryant and Douglas Taylor, the real star is, of course, Dren. Natali has created a menacing landscape and a fresh approach to the monster-maker genre.


What I’m Reading. The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks by Nicole LaPorte. DreamWorks, created by three of the biggest egos and moguls in Hollywood—Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen—is all about one thing and only one thing: keeping Steven Spielberg happy.

It is also the story of Jeffery Katzenberg and his ugly push from Disney (he finally settled his bonus lawsuit with Disney for $280 million). Katzenberg, who headed the animation division at Disney, hated CEO Michael Eisner and did all he could to steal away Disney’s animators. His primary focus was beating Disney but he wanted to do live-action films, not animation!

Animation was considered the ugly step-child of Dreamworks.

Billionaire Geffen (and later financial savior Paul Allen) was not involved in the daily workings of Dreamworks—he was always on his yacht. LaPorte, a former film industry reporter for Variety, has thorough details but not much tabloid gossip. It is clear from her reporting that everyone at Dreamworks had only one stated goal—keep the greatest living artist in Hollywood—Steven Spielberg—content and happy. No one ever brought Steven bad news.

The Lonely Polygamist. I’m recommending to my ladies mini-book club The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall since Entertainment Weekly announced, “The novel you must read this summer...a riveting emotional tornado of a novel.”

I have a hard time reading fiction, but I am fascinated by polygamy. And, the author was born into a polygamist family. The Lonely Polygamist is about chubby, six-foot six Golden Richards, who, in GLADIATOR-speak, is husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children. He is having a midlife crisis since his construction business is failing (so he is building a brothel in Nevada), his family is overpopulated, there is sister-wives rivalry, and he is struggling with grief due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son. He is also bullied by Nazi Wife #1.

I don’t know if I like The Lonely Polygamist—I’m trying. If you want to join our book club group, pick up The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall.