Black Jesus film creates buzz

Son of Man being filmed

The South African film, which premiered on Sunday at the Sundance festival in Utah, transports the life and death of Christ from first century Palestine to a contemporary African state racked by war and poverty.

Jesus is born in a shantytown shed, a far cry from a manger in a Bethlehem stable. His mother Mary is a virgin, though feisty enough to argue with the angels. Gun-wielding authorities fear his message of equality and he ends up hanging on a cross.

"We wanted to look at the gospels as if they were written by spin doctors and to strip that away and look at the truth," director Mark Dornford-May told Reuters in an interview.

"The truth is that Christ was born in an occupied state and preached equality at a time when that wasn't very acceptable."

By portraying Jesus as a black African, Dornford-May hopes to sharpen the political context of the gospels, when Israel was under Roman occupation, and challenge Western perceptions of Christ as meek, mild and European.

"We have to accept that Christ has been hijacked a bit -- he's gone very blond-haired and blue-eyed," he said. "The important thing about the message of Christ was that it is universal. It doesn't matter what he looked like."

In fact, there was a film called Black Jesus made in 1968 and starring Woody Strode, but it is described as a political commentary rather than an interpretation of the life of Christ.

Made by the same theatre company behind last year's award-winning U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, Son of Man is in the tongue-clicking Xhosa African language and English and was filmed in the sprawling black townships near Cape Town.

Jesus begins his public ministry after an encounter with Satan -- who appears cloaked in black leather -- during his traditional Xhosa circumcision rite.

In the film, Jesus' resurrection is meant to signal hope for Africa, the world's poorest continent that is sometimes dismissed by foreigners as a hopeless mess of conflict and corruption.