Madonna's Malawi Movie Premiers

Pop superstar Madonna has returned to Michigan where she grew up to introduce her own documentary.
The Traverse City Film Festival was used to launch the movie 'I Am Because We Are' and drew hundreds of fans to cheer on Madonna, who appeared wearing a black dress, high heels and sunglasses, as she stepped out of a 4x4 vehicle in front of the State Theatre.
This was the first screening of the movie, which deals with the orphans of Malawi, the African nation where she and husband Guy Ritchie adopted a son.
"It's great bringing my movie to a place that I feel familiar," Madonna told the audience. "Not like the Cannes Film Festival, where nobody's speaking English, or the Tribeca Film Festival, where no one sits down.
"There's something poetic about coming back to the place where I used to come for holidays - camping trips with my dad and stepmother and my very large family," said the 49-year-old singer, who was born to the southeast in Bay City and raised in the Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills.
Madonna was also accompanied by her 11-year-old daughter, Lourdes, and the film's director, Nathan Rissman, though her husband, Guy Ritchie was absent.
Michael Moore, who runs the film festival won an Oscar for his 2002 documentary Bowling For Columbine, and said he was humbled to be able to call Madonna a friend.
Madonna too had praise of her own for Moore, 54, a native of the economically downtrodden Flint, Michigan, who also has a home near Traverse City.
"There aren't a lot of role models for us in the world, or people we can look up to," she said. "People who are not afraid to stick their neck out, people who are not afraid to stand up for things and be unpopular, to go against the grain, think outside the box.
"And we need, and I need, Moore in my life."
(BMcC)