Lessons From South Africa Offers a Lesson in the Need for Editing

The rationale behind Lessons From South Africa is something like this: Lots of people in both Miami and South Africa have AIDS, but in South Africa, people are doing a lot more to address the problem. True!

Producer Allan Richards, interim dean of Florida International University's journalism school, could probably have extracted some valuable lessons from South Africa to explicate in Lessons From South Africa. Unfortunately, he has not done so yet.

Instead, the film is a confused mess of what might as well be raw footage. Many side-by-side scenes lack any obvious thematic connection — certainly they seldom add up to anything so substantial as an argument — and often it's impossible to tell whether the scene we are watching is in South Africa or South Beach. Edit, edit, edit.