BY MULUGETA GUDETA
There are two annual festivals that take place inside and outside Africa. The first is FESPACO or the Pan-African Film and Television Festival based in the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou. One of the main objectives of FESPACO is to “offer African film professionals the chance to establish working relationships, exchange ideas, and to promote their work. FESPACO’s stated aim is to “contribute to the expansion and development of African cinema, education as means of expression and awareness-raising,”
The second annual festival takes place outside is known as the Cannes Film Festival and takes place every year in France in the city of Cannes from which it took its name. The Cannes Film Festival is one of the four major international and most prestigious film festivals; apart from those that take place in Berlin for instance. As far as their importance to the development of the art of filmmaking in the continent is concerned, FESPACO is indeed more important than Cannes which is a process of selecting the best movies in a given year and honoring them with awards. FESPACO is therefore broader in purpose and more Afro-centric in objective.
What is also remarkable about FESPACO is that it is also working to establish a market for African films and the chance for exposure to African industry professionals. Since it was established in 1969, FESPACO has invited festival attendees from across the continent and beyond Africa. Organizers at major international film festivals as well as the rising stars of African cinema had attended events in Ouagadougou. FESPACO is also the first pan–African organization of its kind that was established by some of the pioneers of African cinema such as Sembene Ousman and others.
Historically, the establishment of the festival coincided with what is known in Africa as “the independence decade” of the 1960s when most African nations got independence from their former colonizers. It was a time of hope and great expectations and the festival was impacted by the subsequent historic events. The first festival in 1969 best expresses the main objective of the festival as it was undertaken under the theme of “the cinema, people and liberation”.
FESPACO was thus born in the fire of the early years of the post-colonial political process and reflected what the founders wanted to do with it. For The founding countries of FESPACO were Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Niger and Senegal. France and the Netherlands that were also represented at the festival and a total of 23 films were shown. Nine African countries were represented at the second FESPACO while 40 films were shown. The festival has shown steady increase in the number of participating countries and the films that were shown at different stages of development. Different themes were selected for every annual festival and the main theme for the 2007 festival was for instance “the actor in the creation and promotion of African films”.
The Cannes Film Festival was established many decades ago and the 76th edition recently took place in the French film capital. Its objective was to honor the best films selected by the juries every years and the first participants were all Europeans African participation at the Cannes festival is a relatively recent phenomena as African films were for a long time considered unworthy of European audiences due to political and ideological biases. Many Western educated African filmmakers and intellectuals were marginalized because of the racism and prejudices that were rampant at that time.
This year alone, no less than 12 African films have been honored at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, According to Africa Report magazine, “The 76th edition of the Cannes film Festival promises to be a promising one for Africa. The continent is not only represented in its territorial and narrative diversity, but also in terms of gender.
Two women were vying for the Palme D’or, The first was Ramata Toulaye Sy who is 36 and came forward with her film entitled Banel e Adama, which is “the story of a young couple living in a remote, Northern Senegalese village where their romance comes up against the village’s traditional constraints.” According to the same article in the African Report, “Sy is a graduate of the Ecole Superieure des Metiers de l’Image et du Son(Femis) and born is in Paris to Senegalese parents. Sy present a film shot entirely in Pulaar (one of the national languages of Senegal), including casts of actors and a team of technicians exclusively from Senegal.
According to the Africa Report analysis, Moroccan and Tunisian films were on the spotlight at Cannes. Les Filles d’Olfa (The Daughters of Olfa) by Ben Hanin is a “documentary film that tells the intimate story of a Tunisian mother of four daughters who suddenly discovers that two of them have disappeared. In order to fill their absence on screen, the filmmaker called two actresses to fill the veil on the personal story of his family, which touches on the themes of hope, rebellion, transmission and sisterhood. This is the first time in 50 years that a Tunisian film has been included in the official competition.”
According to the same report, North African cinema has also made its presence felt with documentary and feature films that stood out among those presented for competition within the North African cinematic competition. Besides that, there were two historical entries from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Sudan has made its first appearance at the Cannes. The film Goodbye Julia by Sudanese director Mohamed Kordofani “has made an impression. It is the story of Mona, a retired singer from Northern Sudan who is ravaged by guilt after covering up a murder.”
To make a longer story shorter, North African films presented by Tunisian and Moroccan filmmakers and Sub-Saharan films by Sudanese and DRC’s filmmakers and directors have dominated the Cannes events as far as African films were concerned. Africa is obviously underrepresented and the much-vaunted Nigerian film industry the biggest multi-billion dollar operation on the continent and around the world, has not produced a single film that could make it at Cannes. What went wrong and what needs to be done so that African cinema would emerge as a powerful cultural tool that would reflect and defend Africa’s cultural and traditional heritages or identities and hand them over to posterity through the medium of cinema.
From the performance of African film makers at Cannes, we may deduct the following thoughts. First Africa is really underrepresented at such an international event. Either African filmmakers considered Cannes too Western to cater for the aspirations and objectives of African cinema or too biased to have a balanced view of the state of cinema in the continent and thought it useless to go through the grilling of the selections by the juries or endure the process itself. Some African filmmakers, those whose attitudes are more to the Left of the intellectual spectrum, may consider Cannes as the festival of European cinematic dominance and the imposition of its stereotypes on African traditions.
For that matter European film festivals have never been enthusiastic about or welcoming towards African filmmakers who are critical of the Western cinema establishments and hardly encouraged them to express their ideas starting from Sembene Ousman and going through Ethiopian filmmakers Haile Gerima and Solomon Bekele Weya who solicited help from European film institutions for the production of their works and failed to get endorsement simply because of their ideological positions on the debate between Western versus third World cinema that has survived to this day.
The second take from the Cannes 2023 performance by African filmmakers their disinterest to keep fighting for African cinema even if the going is tough and opinions might have been biased. By doing so, they have incurred their own self-defeat without even going into the real fight or coming up with worthy films that could overwhelm prejudices and gain recognition from the juries. As a corollary of such an attitude aspiring and young African filmmakers might have been discouraged to fight the right fight at least to show the movie world that there are upcoming and promising movie makers who might one day changed the landscape of not only African cinema if not the movie world in general.
The third point that could serve as lesson to future African filmmakers might be the lesson this year’s winners can teach to their forthcoming successors. As we saw from the above information, the films that won prizes or were considered successful are not blockbusters or multimillion dollar productions with international stars and directors. Neither are the stories complicated in their plots or demanding super imagination to understand by the audience, These are simply stories most of which set in rural environments and village lives that have the power to teach the audience a thing or two about African wisdom, character and identity.
Young and upcoming African filmmakers should therefore present works that emerge from their natural environments and not technologically explosive shows akin to those displayed in recent Hollywood productions of films about Africa like Black Panther. There are so many untold stories within the continent that are potentially more powerful in reflecting African traditions and lives than multimillion blockbusters that rather manipulate technology to create shockingly awful effects in the audience.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION 14 MAY 2023
