Alice Smits and Lee Ellickson
When asked ‘Where is Africa?’, the answer might be ‘Which Africa?’ It goes without saying that this vast continent embodies a plurality of Africas with a wide diversity of peoples, cultures, histories, languages. It has always been difficult to generalize about Africa yet the term Africa is often offered to conjure something specific: namely Sub-Saharan or black Africa.
At an international film festival, the question can be taken to mean ‘Where is Africa in the programme?’ Year after year, Africa is the most underrepresented region. But we can also interpret the question as ‘Where can African cinema be found in Africa these days; where is it at?’ The ironic answer is that by and large African cinema is not found in Africa. Many African countries do not have an operating cinema at all and those that did often have seen them transformed into more lucrative churches, while the few remaining theatres mainly screen Hollywood blockbusters. Even in countries with film festivals, one discovers few screenings of African films outside those events. On the production side much of African cinema today is made by film makers who have been trained and live abroad, while on the continent their work faces a lack of exhibitors and distribution. In much of Africa, film makers confront television stations and theatres that expect them to pay for showing their films, governments who give increasingly less support, and a docile public now well indoctrinated in the aesthetics of Nigerian video soaps and sensational action films.
Genuine African cinema manifested itself in the early sixties, during those early years of independence when film makers returned to their home countries, equipped with skills learned abroad and determined to create a new independent and critical cinema which had never existed before. This early African cinema is distinguished by a revisiting of basic cinematic premises in order to question what an African cinema could be. This time, it was the Africans asking ‘Where is Africa?’. But with the lack of adequate support systems, this highly idealistic project went bust within two decades.
In the early eighties an enormous influx of international, largely French, support provided the temporary means for a n African cinema renaissance. African films now could be seen more regularly in the world's art house cinemas. But at home the African audience felt increasingly alienated with these Europeanized productions. This second burst of creativity seemed to dissolve even sooner than the first, together with foreign financial support.
While African cinema was reinvented as the international world cinema we know today, the success of the home grown video market from Nigeria known as Nollywood, with its cheaply produced video soaps, had an enormous appeal to local Anglophone audiences. This competitive production model has provided an inspiring blueprint for communities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, but also seemed to signal the death knell of the more ambitious African cinema as we knew it.
However, throughout Africa something is brewing. With the appearance of digital technology came a wider variety of forms and distribution approaches, also in countries where there never was a cinema before. A new digital cinema, less dependent on large production companies and available to many, would represent and appeal to the myriad languages and cultures that attest to Africa's complexity, as much created by the demand of local audiences as the result of international exchange and influence. This is the African cinema we can see appearing, one uniquely local and global at the same time. If we are to see Africa as Africa does, then where would we be?
The Screening Programme
The search for Africa is carried out in three distinct time frames. Representative Africas? assembles new features and featurettes which all reverberate something specific in our pursuit of contemporary African film. Many centre on the friction between traditional culture and modern times. Often, they demonstrate an idiosyncratically African manner in which narrative is organized and presented. These films also bear witness to personal and cultural breakdowns within a rigidly encoded social structure. For Africans, so disoriented by a history of post colonial re-adaptation, the old traditions are among the most prominent challenges to the contemporary contextual premises of cinema. With Other Africas: Short Films West, East, South and Southeast four programmes sample short work from all directions of Sub-Saharan Africa to suggest unique regional trends and tendencies.
With Back to the Drawing Board: When the Cinema Began Again---Tributes and Memorials for African Pioneers we return to the beginning of the African Cinema saga, a long and woefully under-documented story. It began in the early sixties, through the pioneering efforts of several francophone directors, working in different countries. While the late Ousmane Sembene is generally revered as the Father of African cinema, there were in fact several African film makers working at the same moment. Moustapha Alassane’s accomplished first work Aure was completed well in advance of Sembene's maiden effort. We have sought out, significantly still living on the continent, four survivors of this remarkable period, most of whose works have been consigned to anonymity. Moustapha Alassane of Niger (known for his animations, pop art inspired satires and attempts to capture African storytelling approaches cinematically), Momar Thiam of Senegal (known for his unique stylistic approaches to traditional storytelling and attempts to draw critical portrayals of contemporary African life), Timité Bassori of Cote d'Ivoire (known for combining African traditional narrative with European advances such as Freudian analysis), and Sebastien Kamba of Congo Brazzaville (known for his attempts to capture contemporary youth as well as ancient tribal history) will be in attendance to describe the unique escapade of inventing a new cinema in their respective countries from scratch. Among the other important pioneers represented are Edouard Sailly of Chad, the late Paulin Semanou Vieyra and three important masters who passed away in the last couple of years: Gadalla Gubara of Sudan, documentary maker for the Colonial film unit in the early fifties and at the end of his life still producing feature films in 35mm in spite of the onset of blindness; Samba Felix N'Diaye of Senegal, who died just weeks after being invited to attend this festival, latter day pioneer of personal and artful approaches to the documentary genre and Tidiane Aw of Senegal, who created a brief series of outstanding films in disparate genres in those dramatic early years.
Recycling Another Africa:
Music and Narrative Performance with Silent Films
For long the only Africa we could know was seen through the eyes of outsiders. If the African Cinema was brought about for Africans to provide their own perspective, can this cinema actually recycle its own past and its own image? In a dynamic collaboration African musicians review this celluloid African history and make their commentary through music and in some cases, live storytelling approaches. Most films in the programme are silent, produced between 1908 and 1930; some have been recently rediscovered. A number of works from the other two aspects of our programme will be included, illustrating the silent film technique found in some films of the sixties and unique musical approaches to more recent work. Performers include Percussion Discussion Afrika of Uganda, Lamin Kouyateh of The Gambia, as well as Kinobe & Company and Momo Toure and African Reed Thicket, ensembles combining musicians from throughout Africa. Specially commissioned for this programme is a newly created live storytelling film performance resulting from collaboration between film makers Cesar and Marie Clemence Paes, storyteller Jean-Luc Raharimanana and musician Tao Ravao of Madagascar.