The second annual African Diaspora Film Festival, which debuted in Chicago last year after more than a decade in New York City, runs Friday through Thursday, June 11 through 17, at Facets Cinematheque. Tickets are $9, $5 for Facets members; for more information call 773-281-4114 or consult www.facets.org. Films marked with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended.

  • The Journey of the Lion

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At the top of this 1992 travelogue, Jamaican sculptor Howard Anthony Trott ruminates on the meaning of his English “slave name,” phonetically translating it into “How hard and stony I trod”; it’s an appropriate beginning for the story of a man searching for himself through language. From a hardscrabble life raising two teenagers, Trott travels to wintry London to visit a half-sister who emigrated there decades earlier, and he sees how his life might have turned out had he been willing to assimilate into the white world. But he’s always dreamed of Africa, and a sudden opportunity brings him to Ghana, his ancestral “land of the lions.” Fritz Baumann directed this German video about an indomitable man whose openness and intuition are greatly attractive. In English patois with subtitles. 90 min. (AG) (Monday, June 14, 7:00)

Richard Olivier met Marvin Gaye in 1981 when the singer moved to Ostend, Belgium, to escape the IRS, and a few years later Olivier assembled his footage of Gaye performing and wandering around the city in Marvin Gaye: Transit Ostend. This second portrait (2002) uses much of the same material, tied together by Gaye’s ruminations on life and love, read by an actor in stilted voice-over, and by clips of Ostend in the 30s and 40s from the documentaries of Henri Storck. But Olivier has captured at least ten minutes of magic: Gaye loses himself in an a cappella version of “The Lord’s Prayer” and jams on a Steinway in an empty theater, swinging hard on “Come Get to This” and ascending heavenward on “Distant Lover.” 56 min. (JJ) Also on the program: Elizabeth She, Mal Sharpe, and Sandra Sharpe’s 27-minute Alma’s Jazzy Marriage. (Tuesday, June 15, 7:00)

ALSO SCREENING

The Forgotten Roots

(Friday, June 11, 9:00; Thursday, June 17, 6:30)