A new age of African film dawned at Fespaco this year, reports ALEXA DALBY
BURKINA FASO is one of the world’s poorest countries, but it has still co-financed 25 feature films and is the only country that thinks film-makers important enough to merit their own public monument. Two weeks ago, its capital, Ouagadougou, hosted the 15th two-yearly pan-African film festival (Fespaco), an event that attracted nearly 5000 people from 79 countries.
A crowd of 50 000 packed the football stadium for the opening ceremony, broadcast live on television and radio. A giant screen turned the Place de la Revolution into a free outdoor cinema. Over 200 films from Africa and its diaspora were screened for 400 000 people in 20 cinemas. Films from 16 African countries were in competition.
In the 1980s, one film from Burkina Faso, Idrissa Ouedraogo’s Yaaba (Grandmother), defined African cinema for Western audiences. Beautifully and simply filmed in a traditional village, Yaaba was the story of a boy befriending an outcast old woman. Through Western eyes, African films were set in a timeless Africa before colonialism. They were exotic, in the oral tradition. Westerners appropriated them because they felt they embodied truth and purity. Since the rural 85% of Africa’s population have no chance of seeing any films, let alone African ones, what was shown in Europe, funded by France, had been made with Western audiences in mind.
Inevitably a new industry goes through growing pains and redefines itself. After a few years’ hiatus, there have been revolutionary changes in attitude. “It is not in crisis. It is developing,” says Ouedraogo.
Directors are moving from auteurism to a commercial approach. Students were rioting during the festival about their grants – and film directors also became militant. The congress of African film-makers (Fepaci) decided to change its 1975 constitution to address the crucial problem of lack of distribution, without which African cinema is “a castle without foundations”, according to Ouedraogo. Francophone film-makers want to reach out to a global, English-speaking audience, and can now re-route themselves through South Africa. Ouedraogo’s new film, which opened the festival, was in English, made in Zimbabwe with South African actors. In Kini & Adams, Ouedraogo’s theme of friendship recurs in the story of two friends who build a car but become rivals when one is promoted at work.
“Kini & Adams is what I was looking for,” says Ouedraogo. “It’s taken me years to find this voice. It’s the turning point of my career, another vision of things, a discovery of new actors and type of production. After four or five films, you have nothing to say because you’ve said it all. But God gave me a second wind. Now I have to do three or four films this way.”
Reactions were mixed. The local press praised its mix of humour and tragedy, and beautiful images. Europeans asked if he had sold out by imitating Hollywood. Ouedraogo’s compassion and visual sense remained, but the psychology, particularly of women, was unconvincing. Some thought that its message was the reactionary “it’s better to be poor and happy”.
A new wave of directors is making different films. Notable are two Paris-based Cameroonians, Jean-Marie Teno (Clando) and Jean-Pierre Bckolo (Aristotle’s Plot). No longer mainly about the anti-colonial struggle or village life, recent films have diverse subjects – contemporary urban life in Africa, political involvement, the immigrant experience in Europe.
Surprisingly, among new films, Tableau Ferraille is the first to exploit African popular music as part of the plot: Senegalese pop singer Ismael Lo stars as a politician in Moussa Sene Absa’s social comedy. Zairean Balufu Bakupa Kanyinda’s short, The Draughts Player, was a satire on the absolute power of a president. Tunisian Mohamed Zran’s Essaida combines realism and poetry.
Women’s inequality was a central issue in films by an increasing number of women directors, like Everyone’s Child by Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga. The top award, the Etalon of Yennenga, went to the traditional Buud Yam (Faith in Family Ties) by Gaston Kabore. Audiences loved its depiction of Burkinabe landscape and heritage.
African cinema is seen as a defence against the colonisation of youth by Western media. “The independent film-makers in Britain are fighting, like us, to communicate how they see the world,” says Kabore. “We are happy in Britain if there is one guy named Ken Loach – his battle is the same as ours.”