Thierry Knauff ­ not "Knauf" as erroneously listed under his photo in the official festival catalogue ­ says he spent seven years making Wild Blue, and you have to believe him. Only Werner Herzog can compare with the dedication of this Belgian film-maker, who lived for months among the Pygmies to shoot his 1995 film Baka. A Belgian-French co-production, it won the Golden Conch at the 4th Mumbai (Bombay) International Film Festival for Documentary, Short And Animation Films in 1996.

Baka was shot over a period of several months in the equatorial rain-forests of southeast Cameroon, where mahogany and ebony trees are being exploited for commercial gain. In addition, this hour-long portrait of a primitive people describes in contrasting black-and-white images the daily rituals and struggle for existence of the Baka Pygmies. Although in one sense an ethnographic film, it contains dramatic and narrative elements that leave no doubt that the Pygmies may be a vanishing race if conditions continue as they are in the rain-forest.

Born in 1957 in Kinshasa and a graduate from the department for film directing at INSAS in Bruxelles, Thierry Knauff has been awarded a number of prizes for his short documentaries ­ Fin Octobre, Début Novembre (End Of October, Beginning Of November, 1983); Le Sphinx (1986); Abattoirs (1987); Seuls (Alone, 1989); Anton Webern (1991); Gbanga-Tita (1994); and Baka (1995). When not on the road to Africa and elsewhere, he has worked as a programmer at the Cinémathèque Royale in Bruxelles. "One of my favourite films is Fredi M Murer's Höhenfeuer (Alpine Fire, 1985)," he says, "a Swiss film about incest that's set high in the Alps and isolated from the communities below."

The musical motifs in black-and-white are the bits and pieces of life: Female voices and children, wind and trees, a babble of languages ­ French, German, English, Farsi, Kineruanda, Beti, Hindi, Serbo-Croat, and Arabic. Punctuated with gestures and silence, gazes and songs, Wild Blue unfolds as a statement on a world afflicted by civil disorders and religious atrocities. "It seems to me," says Knauff, "that there is a permanent tension between a world that we know to be rife with extremes of intolerance and violence and, at the same time, a world of profound beauty despite the prevailing horror."

Ron Holloway