Lights, camera, acti...wait power outage

I am a sucker for Hollywood gossip and celebrity sightings. I admit it reluctantly, the same way an alcoholic sheepishly admits to maybe drinking a little too much after wrapping their car around a pole. There was one staple (alright two if you count Pringles as a staple, which Leila and I very much did) that I desperately tried to pick up whenever we ventured close to some sort of organized village...trashy magazines. The folks in these countries seem to have bigger problems then knowing what the cast of Jersey Shore is up to - that is the only conclusion that I draw as none of these countries produce any gossip magazines. Instead we are making do an imported, dated, South African version of OK magazine...but it does the trick nicely and has provided some lovely photos of Lindsey Lohan drunk and stumbling into a ditch.

It also provides some perspective...Leila and I often wished that we could speak better Swahili so that we could go out and explain to the people just how lucky they are. "What - you have no clothes and your grass roof is leaking and your only goat died? Whatever; look at this poor girl (point to photo of passed out Miss Lohan) - she is going to be arrested for the 37th time for being a general public nuisance and coked out loser. She will have to go to some sort of jail/country club and they won't even let her get regular manicures!!! And to top it all off, it appears that she cannot even decide if she is a lesbian. So now, don't you feel like an idiot for whining about your goat?"

By the end of 5 weeks, the magazines were just not enough - we couldn't get our full entertainment fix from outdated, tattered magazines...we needed the real thing…and then we stumbled upon it...the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF).

A real film festival!!! Granted I had never heard of ZIFF but seriously, how different could it be from the other film festivals? I flashed back to the photos that I had seen of the beautiful people gliding down the red carpet at the festivals in Aspen, Toronto or Cannes...soon that would be Leila and I. We put on our cleanest clothes, secured tickets and made our way to the 'theater'. I wondered who we would run into - Julia Roberts or maybe Robert Pattinson or possibly even Brad Pitt. After arriving at the 'theater', I noted a startling lack of paparazzi (read none). We climbed up three flights of stairs in an old fort, now sort of a museum, to reach a small, dark room that had a few pieces of lawn furniture haphazardly strewn in front of a shabby white screen, listing to one side. I tripped over an extension cord that was snaking its way along the main aisle to reach a projector that I think may have been donated by my grade school. The realization that I wouldn't be bumping elbows with George Clooney sunk in as I sunk into my plastic chair.

The screen slowly flicked to life and we sat back to watch the quality of movies that you would expect at a third world film festival - not too bad but definitely not going to wow you with special effects. The AM intermission was impromptu and extended when the power unexpectedly went out for the island. (My guess is that Cannes never has had this problem). We wandered the alleys, had a cocktail and a nap during the spontaneous intermission before ZIFF resumed as suddenly as it ended.

The marquee of the festival was held at a very unique outdoor ancient stone amphitheatre in the city’s Old Fort. This cinematic pinnacle was a nighttime showing of “Twiga Stars” – a 90 min documentary about the women’s national Tanzania football/soccer team. It was an interesting look at the struggles that young, mainly Muslim girls have to face to pursue their dreams. A few of the players were actually in attendance at the showing and bashfully waved to the crowd when they were introduced – given the amount of respect that women’s sports have in Tanzania, the acknowledgment at this movie was the most they have ever received.

So I left ZIFF without catching a glimpse of next week’s cover of US Weekly but I did get to get to see something far more special; a few young East African girls fighting for their dreams…Lindsey Lohan could learn a thing or two from them.