Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals

Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals

Framing Film Festivals The Framing Film Festivals series offers a platform for exciting research on film festivals and global film cultures. The international film festival circuit is made up of a diverse range of bigger and smaller, general and specialized festival events. Next to the international festivals that feature markets, funds and training opportunities, stand identity-based festivals that build on the local community’s sense of belonging, and specialized festivals, dedicated to a genre or regional production. The publications in the series will highlight the various faces of festivals, trace their impact on global film cultures and set the agenda concerning topical debates.

Series editors: Marijke de Valck, Associate Professor at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam Tamara Falicov, Associate Professor at the Department of Film and Media Studies, University of Kansas Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals By Lindiwe Dovey

Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals Lindiwe Dovey

curating africa in the age of film festivals Copyright © Lindiwe Dovey, 2015. All rights reserved.

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First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

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Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-1-137-40413-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dovey, Lindiwe, author. Curating Africa in the age of film festivals / Lindiwe Dovey. pages cm. — (Framing film festivals) ISBN 978-1-137-40413-8 1. Film festivals—Africa. 2. Film festivals—Europe. 3. Motion pictures—Africa—History and criticism. 4. Motion pictures, African— Europe. I. Title. II. Series: Framing film festivals. PN1993.42.A47D68 2015 791.43096'074—dc23 2014036080 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Amnet. First edition: March 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my father, Ken Dovey

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Prefacexi Acknowledgmentsxv

Introduction: Film Festivals and/in Theory

1

1

Early Curatorial Practices, European Colonialism, and the Rise of “A-list” Film Festivals

29

2

Afri-Cannes? African Film and Filmmakers at the World’s Most Prestigious Film Festival

45

3

“Where is Africa?” at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam

59

4

African Film Festivals in Africa: Curating “African Audiences” for “African Films”

87

5

Moving Africa: African Film Festivals Outside of Africa

111

6

The Rise of “International” Film Festivals in Africa

131

7

Festive Excitement and (Dis)sensus Communis in Action at Two Film Festivals in Africa

159

Conclusion

177

Appendix 1: Film Festivals in Africa

181

Appendix 2: African Film Festivals Outside of Africa

193

Appendix 3: Major International Film Festivals that Support African Filmmaking

201

Appendix 4: Black Film Festivals

207

Notes213 Bibliography231 Index259

List of Illustrations 1.1

“Cinéma de la Plage” at the Cannes Film Festival

41

2.1

“Village International” at the Cannes Film Festival

55

3.1

Introduction to Soul Boy at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam65

4.1

Man on stilts welcomes FESPACO guests to the Ciné Burkina

5.1

Participants at Film Africa 2011

117

5.2

View of Morocco from Tarifa, Spain

121

99

6.1 A dhow (sailing boat), the icon of the Zanzibar International Film Festival147 6.2

The Old Fort, Stone Town, Zanzibar, the main venue of the Zanzibar International Film Festival

149

6.3

The former Cine Afrique in Stone Town, Zanzibar, now used as office space

150

7.1

SADR Minister of Culture Khadija Hamdi welcomes South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile to the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival

170

7.2 A jaima in Dakhla

172

7.3

Sahrawi participants at the opening ceremony of the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival wave an SADR flag

174

7.4

A white camel symbolizes peace at the closing ceremony of the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival

175

Preface

It was a warm day in central Kampala, Uganda, and the whole city seemed to be moving to the infectious rhythms of “You want another rap?,” Yoweri Museveni’s presidential campaign hit. In a cool building beside jackfruit trees, I was in the midst of final deliberations with my two fellow jury members of the 2010 Amakula Kampala International Film Festival. Nine short films, made by directors from all over East Africa, were competing for our attention and, ultimately, for the one festival prize, the Golden Impala, for best short film. The jury was composed of two people with African nationality and one person with European nationality; two “white” people and one “black” person; two men and one woman; one film director, one theatre director/painter, and one academic/curator. We had been given no guidelines, and the journey to consensus about the winning film was thus a difficult but enlightening one. Two of the jury members strongly supported the film Lezare (2009), by Zelalem Woldemariam from Ethiopia, drawing perhaps on what have become established criteria of judgment by festival juries: technical and aesthetic quality, and a certain degree of narrative ambiguity so that a viewer can compose her own interpretation of the film rather than feeling that she is being told what to think. The third jury member, however, felt that the film was morally compromised by its ending, in which a little girl steals a loaf of bread from her mother to give to her friend, a young homeless boy who is hungry. This same jury member expressed fear that the fact that such an act of theft went unpunished in the film’s narrative might have a negative influence on viewers of the film. Various rebuttals of this idea by the other jury members—that one cannot measure the moral impact of a film, and that a film that has a more subtle message is inherently better than one that has too much ethical clarity— did not convince the opposing jury member. What finally convinced this jurist to agree to awarding Lezare the Golden Impala was not simply the film’s gripping storyline, beautiful images, and music, but a different, ethical interpretation of the little girl’s act by one of the other jurists, who said: “I actually like the idea that this kid is doing this behind her mother’s back for her friend. Because that’s also a way of asserting herself, in terms of what she wants to do for friendship. And so she’s willing to take risks to help her friend. We could see it as a negative action that she steals from her mother, but we can also see it as a very positive action because she does it for someone she cares for.” In this way, consensus was finally reached, with an ethical criterion activated. It was an exciting and demanding process to work our way to agreement out of dissent, to find a way of communicating our thoughts and feelings to build common ground.

xii Preface

This jury experience was entirely different from an experience I had in a graduate seminar in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge several years previously. In the seminar we were required to take turns bringing in an excerpt from one of the literary texts on which we were doing research, but with the title and author of the text obscured. We would then analyze the formal aspects of the writing and, eventually, attempt to guess the title and author. When it was my turn, I brought in an excerpt from the novella A Walk in the Night (1962), by the South African writer and activist Alex la Guma. After reading the excerpt, the lecturer who was running the graduate seminar exclaimed, “But this is terrible writing!” The rest of the seminar was a painful experience of having to listen to Alex la Guma’s writing being ridiculed. That night, I reflected on what I found so troubling about what had happened: it was the implication that you could take a text completely out of its context of writing, of publication, of reception, of adaptation to new uses—blanking out its title and author—and assume that you (the “expert” critic) would understand it, be able to produce a universally “true” and complete analysis of it, and—worst of all—proclaim final judgment on it. I am not suggesting here—via the contrasting example of my jury experience in Uganda—that reaching consensus on cultural worth is the ideal situation; I am far more interested in how we can acknowledge and live with dissent. Nor do I mean to take issue with the practice of close textual analysis, which can offer an important means of knowledge construction. What I found problematic was the assumption that that particular judgment—that particular exercise of taste—was indisputably the correct judgment. There was, ultimately, no space given to alternate points of view. I was given no chance to explain the relationship between Alex la Guma’s writing and his political activism, his experiences in South Africa and in exile, the ways different people had appreciated or critiqued his work, the reasons that his work was—in post-apartheid South Africa—being considered suitable for film adaptation. Out of the discomfort I felt in that graduate seminar, I developed an abiding interest in the practices of reading and interpretation, the exercise of taste and aesthetic judgment, and the contextual and dynamic nature of these practices. This is what inspired me to do the kind of research that has led to this book. I did not want to look specifically at individual films, and apply to each the precise hermeneutic skills that have been developed in the academy, but rather at how diverse people—including professional curators, scholars, filmmakers, and ordinary spectators—work with films, and at how contingent the paths and processes may be through which certain films gain credibility and others do not. A closely related motivation for the creation of this book was my growing frustration with the inevitable straitjacket of having to teach the subject of “African film.” Facing the fact that all of my courses on the history of filmmaking by Africans tended to close with discussions about how the sheer diversity of the films we had studied actually made it impossible to talk about “African film” as a category with any integrity, I sought a new way of approaching the topic altogether. I wanted to get away from the terms “African film” and even “African cinemas” and move towards the more neutral idea of “films by Africans” as a starting point for discussion. The result was not only the writing of this book—an attempt, in part, to look at the ways that the category of “African film” is curated into being—but also my

Preface xiii

design of an MA course called “Curating Africa: African Film and Video in the Age of Festivals,” which starts with no preconceived ideas about what an African film is. It begins with an experiment, in which I as the teacher play no role but rather leave the students—who have to imagine themselves as a jury—to decide amongst themselves their own criteria for judging the “best” of eight short films by directors from different parts of Africa. This experiment reveals how the students’ distinct cultural, social, and academic backgrounds shape their definitions of value, and how difficult it can be to negotiate a path towards consensus around aesthetic judgment. It sets the tone for a course that asks students, as this book attempts to do, to consider not only their own or other scholars’ responses to films, but also to look at how films by Africans have been framed and understood in distinct ways, in diverse contexts, by different curators and audiences. And, in turn, the course encourages students to think of themselves as curators, as people building their knowledge of films by Africans and with the responsibility of making decisions about how they, in turn, would curate and frame these films for a particular public. Students are also trained in the practical dimensions of film festival organization and curation and, by the end of the course, present their own film festival, or a program for a film festival, as the outcome of their intellectual, creative, and practical endeavors throughout the term. The idea underpinning both my course “Curating Africa,” and this book, then, is that the most democratic aesthetic judgment arises not simply out of healthy debate in academic circles, but across different professional and cultural spheres. “Curating Africa” is designed with a sense that teaching students to be skeptical thinkers and guerilla researchers1 is as important as teaching them a body of knowledge. The design of the course responds also to curator-scholar Elizabeth Harney’s concern with “the suspect manner in which art-world institutions look to an authentic voice to speak ‘for’ Africa” (2008: 161). No scholar, teacher, or curator—even if she is African—can, or should, claim to speak “for” Africa or “for” African film. Using the concept of curation as a heuristic device allows the teacher to engage students in a dynamic, dialogical, and more democratic process of knowledge construction, rather than policing the definition of “Africa,” or of what constitutes “quality” cinema or “African cinema.” Such a curatorial approach, as I argue in this book, deserves to be at the core of scholarly and pedagogical attempts to revitalize the ways we understand and discuss the rich and heterogeneous field of filmmaking, by Africans and by others, in the future.

Acknowledgments

An Ewe proverb says, “Knowledge is a bird in a forest. No one on his or her own can ever catch it.” More people than I am able to mention here have inspired and contributed to the fruition of this project. With such a broad and transnational scope, this book would not have seen the light of day without the immensely generous support of The Leverhulme Trust; a Philip Leverhulme Prize allowed me to pursue my ideas across the world, unfettered by administrative or financial constraints. My deepest gratitude goes to David Trotter, Ato Quayson, and Pascal Nicklas— wonderful intellectual mentors without whose ongoing support I would not have had this privilege and opportunity. For their friendship, constant engagement with my work, intellectual camaraderie, and insightful comments on an earlier version of this book, very special thanks to Joel Cabrita and Carli Coetzee. The tremendous generosity of so many of my colleagues at SOAS, University of London, has been touching and is much appreciated. In particular, thanks to Carli Coetzee, Christine Singer, Kate Bolgar Smith, Joshua McNamara, Piotr Cieplak, Graham Furniss, Phil Jaggar, Nadje Al-Ali, Rachel Harrison, Rachel Dwyer, Friederike Lüpke, Alena Rettová, Martin Orwin, Akin Oyètádé, Angela Impey, Alexandra Leduc-Pagel, Anna Greedharee, Anne Pauwels, Dina Matar, Karima Laachir, Isolde Standish, and all of my colleagues in the Department of African Languages and Cultures. SOAS also generously provided the seed funding that allowed me to explore the feasibility of this project. In the process of bringing the book to publication, it has been a pleasure to work with Robyn Curtis, Shaun Vigil and the team at Palgrave Macmillan; thanks in particular to Erica Buchman and Mark Rinaldi for their help. Thank you, too, to the journals that have allowed me to draw on previously published articles, to the editors who have worked closely with parts of this material, and to Joan Shapiro for indexing. Many film festivals have facilitated my research by granting me accreditations and/or special access: Amakula Kampala; the Durban International Film Festival; the FCAT (Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival); the Kenya International Film Festival; and the Toronto International Film Festival. I am very grateful to Tony Jones and the Cambridge Film Trust for their support at Cannes 2008 and 2009. The Killie Campbell Archives at the University of KwaZulu-Natal made accessible rare materials. For making film festivals such an exciting and enlightening address to inhabit for so many years, and for generously granting me interviews and/or contributing to my research in other ways, my affection and gratitude goes to all my festival friends and colleagues (filmmakers, curators, festival directors, fellow

xvi Acknowledgments

jurors, and participants), including: Moussa Sene Absa, Afolabi Adesanya, Newton Aduaka, Kunle Afolayan, Rubén Andeme, Christa Aretz, Justine Atkinson, Ariane Atodji, Akosua Owusu, Moses Babatope, Cameron Bailey, Jérôme Baron, JeanPierre Bekolo, Marion Berger, Lizelle Bisschoff, Nadir Bouhmouch, Fyzal Boulifa, Simon Bright, Wim Brouwer, Edwin Carels, Javier Corcuera, Daouda Coulibaly, Guy Davidi, Claire Diao, Carlos Dominguez, Galia Ebdadi, Eitel Ebelle, Jordache Ellapen, Lee Ellickson, Jihan el-Tahri, Hawa Essuman, Jean-Pierre García, Haile Gerima, Berni Goldblatt, Alain Gomis, Joel Haikali, Katarina Hedrén, Oshosheni Hiveluah, Tim Huebschle, Eimi Imanishi, Alessandro Jedlowski, Gaston Kaboré, Wanuri Kahiu, Balufu-Bakupa Kanyinda, Abeid Karume, Abdul Kassim, Perivi Katjavivi, Dara Kell, Philippe Lacôte, Arya Lalloo, Safia Lehbib, Fabian Lojede, Takiyo Luali, Hans-Christian Mahnke, Robert Manondolo, Mane Cisneros Manrique, Steve Markovitz, Jean Meeran, Martin Mhando, Edmund Mhlongo, Jyoti Mistry, Nashen Moodley, Vivian Moodley, AB Moosa, Kamau wa Ndungu, Marc Neikatar, Bob Nyanja, Dominique Olier, Akin Omotoso, Lazare Sié Palé, Raoul Peck, Pedro Pimenta, Elizabeth Radshaw, Nick Reding, Monica and Peter Rorvik, Karl Roessel, Kivu Ruhorahoza, Alimata Salembéré, Amadou Seck, Ingrid Sinclair, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Alice Smits, Ramadan Suleman, Wafa and Amirah Tajdin, Jean-Marie Teno, Momar Thiam, Romeo Umulisa, Alla Verlotsky, Victor Viyuoh, Chris Vourlias, Dorothee Wenner, Zelalem Woldemariam, Eléonore Yameogo, and Khulekani Zondi. In particular, thanks to Sara Blecher, Sarah Ping Nie Jones, Judy Kibinge, Julie MacArthur, Federico Olivieri, and Rasha Salti for their dear friendship and support. For wonderful times in Durban, thanks to the Witthuhn family, and for happy moments in Ouagadougou, thanks to the Bayala family. It was an honor to meet Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile at the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival. The research in this book draws greatly on my own experiences of cofounding, directing, and curating two African film festivals in the UK—the Cambridge African Film Festival and Film Africa. While it is impossible to mention everyone who has contributed so passionately and selflessly to these projects, I want to highlight here several colleagues who have given voluntarily of their time and energy at these festivals, and with little public recognition, to support filmmakers from Africa: Angelica Baschiera, Paula Beegan, Michael Boyd, Chris Brown, Joel Cabrita, Rosie Chacon, Dominique Chadwick, Piotr Cieplak, Regina Dundelova, Sebastiana Etzo, James Figueroa, Tony Jones, Jean Khalfa, Julie MacArthur, Fadhili Maghiya, Joyce Nicholls, Jacqueline Nsiah, Helen Pik-Yan French, Sarah Ping Nie Jones, Estrella Sendra Fernandez, Christine Singer, Robin Steedman, Jonathan Taitt, and Emma Wilson. Thank you to my cofounders of the Cambridge African Film Festival (Rachel Giraudo, Georgina Horrell, Mark Mathuray, and James Suzman) for inspiring me to become involved with festivals; and thank you to everyone who was involved in the creation of Film Africa, and particularly Namvula Rennie, with whom I codirected the first two editions in 2011 and 2012, for her wonderful friendship and support. The idea of turning my work with film festivals into a scholarly project was inspired by a meeting with Faye Ginsburg. Dina Iordanova’s pioneering conference on film festivals at St Andrews University in 2009 provided further motivation.

Acknowledgments xvii

The festival panels organized at conferences around the world by the Film Festival Research Network (founded and run by Marijke De Valck and Skadi Loist) have provided a stimulating and enjoyable intellectual home for the development of my ideas. Of these colleagues, I am grateful in particular to Marijke De Valck and Tamara Falicov—the coeditors of this book series—for their belief and interest in my work, and to Dorota Ostrowska for her encouragement. My colleagues in the field of African screen media have also provided immense intellectual inspiration and nourishment. I am especially appreciative of the chance to share some of the ideas in this book with them at the conference organized at Princeton University in 2013 by Wendy Belcher, Beatriz Leal Riesco, and Kofi Agawu. Keyan Tomaselli has provided a great deal of practical help in many ways. Moradewun Adejunmobi, Carmela Garritano, Lindsey Green-Simms, Jon Haynes, Jyoti Mistry, David Murphy, Aboubakar Sanogo, and Alexie Tcheuyap have been very supportive. To my new colleagues in the field of African festival studies who participated in the ASAUK 2014 conference, I look forward to further collaborations. Equally important to my thinking about festivals have been my students at SOAS, University of London. My sincerest thanks to my brilliant research assistant, Michael Thomas. Thank you to Benedetta Lanfranchi for making me aware of Kant’s concept of sensus communis and for inspiring me to read more about it. To my wonderful students of “Curating Africa,” thank you for patiently allowing me to test out my ideas on you, and for challenging me in exciting ways: Nouria Bah, Kate Bolgar Smith, Estrella Sendra Fernandez, Sophie Harrison, Sterre Lodders, Olufunsho Nwabuzor, Nicole Parr, Caitlin Pearson, Daniel Perry, Lauren Siegel, Robin Steedman, and Sarah Swanson. As festival research collaborators, I am very grateful to Federico Olivieri and Joshua McNamara. Thanks also to Estrella Sendra Fernandez, Danica Hansen, Treasure Ndlovu, and Ayanda Mabanga for their research assistance in London and Durban respectively. This book would not have been possible without my family—Robert Mayes, Chiara Dovey-Mayes, Ken, Teresa, and Ceridwen Dovey, Blake Munting, and Gethin Dovey-Munting—who support me in immeasurable ways. Special thanks to my mother, Teresa, for painting the beautiful cover and for being my first and most cherished academic mentor. Robert and Chiara, I owe my festive heart to you. This book is dedicated to my father, Ken Dovey, for inspiring me to constantly seek ways of making academia as engaged as possible with the wider world.

Introduction: Film Festivals and/in Theory

Filmmaking by Africans and Film Festivals Egypt is the stark exception in Africa when it comes to the history of the production and exhibition of films. This is due to Egypt’s quite distinct experience of European rule, which meant that from the early days of British occupation (1882–1922), locals still had resources and power that people within other African countries did not at the time. While Egyptians started to make films from the early twentieth century, soon after the invention of the medium, for much of Africa the possibility of Africans making their own films arose only in the decolonization period, from the 1960s onwards. Similarly, unlike in Egypt, where cinemas played local films to local audiences, in most African countries local films—when they started to be made—were not screened in local cinemas or on television. The cinemas tended to be owned by foreign companies or people with commercial interests seeking to make a profit. For them, it was far more lucrative to play B-grade Hollywood films, which had already made financial returns on the international market, than it was to screen films by Africans that had yet to establish an overseas market or recoup their costs. Neither were these films by Africans welcomed by local television stations, which, until the liberalization of the media across Africa in the 1990s, were state-owned and usually operated within nationalist frameworks favoring government propaganda or cheap foreign content. Initially, film festivals—both international and African-focused—tried to fill the gap. The first film festival in the world, the Venice Film Festival, was founded in 1932, and was followed by a wave of other such festivals in Europe, such as Cannes (1939), Locarno (1946), Edinburgh (1946), Karlovy Vary (1946), and Berlin (1950). It took until the 1960s, during decolonization, for African countries to start hosting their own arts festivals, among which there was a strong film presence. The first regularly held film festivals were the Festival International du Film Amateur de Kelibia (FIFAK), founded in Tunisia in 1964; the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC), also created in Tunisia, in 1966; the Festival Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), which originated in Burkina Faso in 1969; the Cairo International Film Festival, founded in Egypt in 1976; and the Durban Film Festival, created in South Africa in 1979. Festivals focusing on African film but from outside of the African continent were initiated in 1979, beginning with the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France.

2 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals

In the late 1990s, a new wave of these African film festivals began flourishing, particularly in Western Europe, while in Africa, a flowering of new international film festivals took place, the first of which was the Zanzibar International Film Festival, founded in 1998. Around the same time, “A-list” international film festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival, began to introduce curators and/ or programs dedicated to films by Africans. These film festivals and their directors, curators, and audiences, insofar as they have engaged with the filmmaking and film cultures of Africans, are the focus of this book. Alongside the rise of film festivals, another movement has sought to connect African-made films with audiences in Africa. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a revolution in filmmaking on the African continent started in Ghana, fully took off in Nigeria and then spread to other parts of the continent. This revolution is now popularly known under the umbrella term “Nollywood,” which technically refers only to the industry in southern Nigeria. Two decades after the continent’s first film festivals attempted to put African-made films in contact with African audiences, here was a movement in which entrepreneurial individuals, often selftrained in filmmaking, were using new, cheap, digital technology to make films on video formats, and then distribute them via VHS and VCD. These films are locally funded, often through the profits gained from a filmmaker’s previous works, and are viewed in people’s homes or in the makeshift video halls that exist across the African continent, in lieu of more formal cinemas (which have generally been in decline since the 1990s, for reasons I will explore later). This video movie revolution and the groundbreaking scholarship around it has provided common ground for those interested in a whole range of screen media in Africa and their relationship to cultural, social, political, and economic contexts (see Haynes 2010); it has inspired and challenged scholars who study films by Africans to think much more about the “different material conditions of creation, circulation, and consumption” (Garritano 2013: 7) of audiovisual cultural products, and about the political economies of production, distribution and exhibition of films by Africans. The impulse behind much of the African video movie scholarship is the same as the impulse behind the study of film festivals, a relatively new academic sub-field, and one that seeks to rematerialize film studies, albeit from an entirely different angle to video movie scholarship.1 At the intersection of African screen media studies and film festival studies, this book—the first to focus on the relationships among film festivals, curators, filmmakers, and audiences who have some link to Africa—aims to take up the gauntlet presented by African video movie scholars by looking not at the video movie industries themselves but at those entities—film festivals—that, because of their assumed investment in concepts such as “high art” and “quality film,” have frequently been positioned as their polar opposite. While most contemporary scholarship on African screen media acknowledges outright that there have been, and continue to be, many trends and cultures of filmmaking across the continent and in the African diaspora, many scholars have advanced this argument through the analysis of films (Pfaff 2004), genres (Adesokan 2011, Green-Simms 2012), nationally located cinemas (Vieyra 1983, Haynes 2000, Garritano 2013), particular filmmakers (Murphy and Williams 2007), or critical concepts such as “tradition” and “modernity” (Akudinobi 2014). When the

Introduction: Film Festivals and/in Theory 3

Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Sene Absa said to me in an interview, “Without festivals, African Cinema wouldn’t exist,” he was referring to that broad group (although not a genre) of films made by Africans that—because of their sheer diversity—can only be defined through the distribution, exhibition, and reception architecture of film festivals. Furthermore, the ambiguous nature of Absa’s statement, which can be read as either an endorsement or critique of the role festivals have played in producing a certain kind of “African film” over the years, makes for a fascinating departure point for research. It raises the question not solely of why specific films have been selected and/or lauded at festivals, but also the specters, shadows, and exclusions of festivals’ curatorial and canon-making processes—what Arjun Appadurai resonantly calls the “traffic in criteria” (quoted in Nuttall 2006: 13). Where film festivals globally have been seen by some as an “alternate distribution circuit” for a certain kind of film (Iordanova 2013a: 109, my emphasis), I will show that, in their relationship to a particular group of films made by Africans, they can generally be seen more as a discrete exhibition outlet and as symptomatic of the lack of formal and robust distribution opportunities for many films by Africans, both in and beyond the continent. Although many feel that Africa as a region comes off worst in the international image economy,2 this is impossible to verify and, through my focus on this region, marginalized in the audiovisual sector, I do not intend to imply that Africa is somehow an exception to the rest of the world. The arguments I will make about Africa’s (lack of a) place in the international film festival circuit should thus be read firmly within the context of the positioning of marginalized cinemas of all kinds (e.g., Latin American film, Asian film, women’s filmmaking, LGBT filmmaking, and black filmmaking), which have much in common (see Ross 2011, Lee and Stringer 2012, Hennefeld 2011, Loist 2011, Givanni 2004). A focus on film festivals means centering questions of distribution and exhibition and, accordingly, the economic aspects of filmmaking. As Marijke De Valck says, “Cinema can never exist solely in the cultural realm. A film needs to be produced and distributed before audiences can enjoy the aesthetic experience of watching it, and this presupposes some form of economic activity” (2014: 45). If we accept that the value and meaning of films are contingent on their contexts of distribution, exhibition, and reception, as African popular culture scholars (Barber 1997) and media ethnographers (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002) have shown, then it becomes apparent that it is impossible to make a dichotomy of culture and commerce.3 Even the oft-used phrase “non-commercial cinema” presupposes certain commercial relationships. Art historian Jeannine Tang in fact suggests, via Pierre Bourdieu, that the suppression of economic value is completely imbricated with the definition and reification (even fetishization) of the concept of “art” itself: According to Pierre Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production . . . the work of art requires the misrecognition—often through active suppression—of its material and financial value, for it to attain symbolic value as art, before this can be rendered as financial value in the long term. The literary or fine work of art must initiate itself as anti-economic for it to be valued as a unique, auratic object or gesture, apparently divorced from crude forces of instrumentalization and mass culture. (2011: 75)4


Despite Bourdieu’s convincing argument, numerous scholars and critics have attempted to argue that the category of “art” is something that can be assessed independently of the consideration of the fields of cultural production and circulation, and the production and circulation of different varieties of capital—symbolic, social, cultural, and economic. In 1979, David Bordwell, for example, argued that “art” films were marked by “the psychological complexity of their characters, their episodic and open-ended narratives, and their pursuit of ambiguity” (Gabara 2010: 321). The focus on attempting to define “art” has recently shifted to attempts to understand how, when, by, and for whom the category of “art” is produced (Goodman 1978). Bordwell later (2002) partially updated his earlier work to focus on “art cinema as a mode of practice,” in which he saw the filmmaker-as-author as a constitutive factor (De Valck 2014: 43). More recently, Latin American film scholar Tamara Falicov draws on the work of Neal (1981) to argue that art cinema and festival films are relatively interchangeable, and are claimed to feature “universal” values (De Valck 2014: 43, Falicov 2010: 5). From long familiarity with discourses at major international film festivals, De Valck argues that terms of appreciation consistently used to praise films selected for screenings include “authentic,” “personal voice,” “talent,” “auteur,” “innovative,” “original,” “topical,” “urgent,” “local roots,” “poetic,” “creation,” and “universal” (2014: 43–44). These criteria have not been meticulously upheld, however, even at the most elite festivals. An evocative example of the volatility of taste is found in Wong’s account of the reception of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, where audiences jeered, bellowed, and walked out in protest at what they called the film’s “incoherence,” despite the film fulfilling all of the typical criteria of “art” cinema (2011: 107). More comparative analysis of the production of the categories of “art cinema” and the “visual arts” in the future would help to illuminate the similarities and differences between these areas, and their relative integration into capitalist economies. The British artist Grayson Perry, for example, has critiqued the visual arts world in particular for its “aspirations to be subversive when in fact it’s part of the capitalist system”—much more fully embedded in the capitalist system, one might argue, than “art cinema,” which—reliant on the “democratic vote” of audiences—is not mystified and fetishized to the same extent. The visual arts also operate within a different market, one that offers investors far safer and longer-term returns. Perry notes that the words most commonly associated with venerated items in the world of the visual arts are: “cutting edge,” “radical,” “mould-breaking,” “ground-breaking,” “game-changing,” and “revolutionary.”5 In other words, the “open sesame” to being considered artistic in this context is novelty. And novelty is a criterion that implicates not only the artists themselves, but also the curators. As will become apparent throughout this book, the idea of “discovery” remains a potent criterion within film festivals, too, and in the highly competitive world of the most prestigious film festivals, curators need to develop a mystique, an attitude, that suggests that they—above all other candidates—are best placed to “find” what others cannot. Many film festivals’ existence is founded on the desire to screen films that, for whatever reason, would not normally be shown in a particular context. The most logical definition of “festival” cinema is, then, in the most fundamental


economic sense, films that have not had, or are unlikely to have, access to a mainstream market. It follows that film festivals as institutions need to be studied within the sub-field of “small media” rather than “mass media,” particularly since they are held on rare (usually annual) occasions, and thus do not constitute part of everyday life. In the Euro-American context, however, as Wong and De Valck have persuasively argued, the intimate relationship between Hollywood and European filmmaking at European film festivals led, very early on, to the development of “crossover” films, and has made it notoriously difficult as a result to define a “festival” film as solely “non-commercial” (Wong 2011: 71). In her recent study of the relationship between the ideology of “art for art’s sake” and commercial cultures, De Valck insists: “Although festivals are very successful in (partially) removing themselves from the regular market economy, there has never been a completely separate sphere; complex interrelations between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ exist” (2014: 44–45). Similarly, in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (2010), Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonhover accordingly adopt a far more flexible definition of “art” films, recognizing that “[i]n many cases, art films are simply those films shown in art-house theaters, or at film festivals, so that their very existence is dependent on certain critics, programmers, or distribution models” (2010a: 7). In other words, the only way to define these films is to study, and continue to study, their curators, the particular spaces in which they are exhibited and viewed, and the kinds of capital the events and institutions create. According to De Valck, “[w]hen applying a Bourdieuian framework to the world of art cinema, one can argue that it belongs to the autonomous pole of the field of cultural production—displaying a high level of symbolic capital (e.g., prestige) and a low level of economic capital” (2014: 41). This is a productive definition, because it refuses to categorize “art” films reductively as “non-commercial.” But what happens when we apply such a definition to the films by Africans shown at the most prestigious film festivals? Many of them do not fit easily within the Bourdieuian framework either because they do not attract the same level of symbolic capital as European and North American films, or they struggle to convert symbolic capital into other kinds of capital—in other words, to make that symbolic capital operative. Many of these filmmakers express an interest in all kinds of c apital—not solely cultural and symbolic (the kind of capital associated with “art,” or Bourdieu’s autonomous pole of cultural production), but also economic (the kind of capital associated with the “commercial” market, or Bourdieu’s heteronomous pole of cultural production). The typical “festival” filmmakers from Africa—such as Jean-Pierre Bekolo (from Cameroon), Jihan el-Tahri (from Egypt), and Sara Blecher (from South Africa)—are just as concerned as Nigerian and Ghanaian video makers about making a living, and the need to accrue more economic capital if they are to sustain their filmmaking practice. After traveling the international festival circuit with her films and seeing their emotional impact on hundreds of people, Blecher says: The thing I’ve realized is that there are so many audiences, and reaching them is so difficult. Nobody has worked out how to reach those audiences in an organized

6 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals way that makes money yet, in my opinion. And that’s the challenge. The challenge is how to get these films that people are incredibly moved by [to make money]. (pers. comm.)

And yet, in African screen media scholarship, a dichotomy between the “commercial video film industries” (Garritano 2013: 23) and “non-commercial African filmmaking” (Haynes and Okome 1998: 106) persists. This dichotomy, while it may reflect some of the realities of the market, also mimics the willing suppression of the (potential) economic value of what is reified as “art,” thereby masking the marginalization of all kinds of screen media by Africans globally. But who are these typical “festival” filmmakers from Africa, and what tends to distinguish them from those filmmakers from Africa whose work is not usually selected for and lauded at festivals? While I will provide examples throughout this book of the ways this distinction is currently being eroded by a new generation of curators (such as Martin Mhando, who regularly features “Bongowood” video movies at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, and Romeo Umulisa, who incorporates popular Hollywood films into the Rwanda Film Festival), historically there have been some significant differences between the two categories of filmmakers, which are important to bear in mind. The major difference relates to economic value and the related issues of class, education, and mobility. While there are, of course, exceptions, many filmmakers from Africa whose work is regularly featured in festivals come from middle class or upwardly mobile social environments, have had access to professional film training, and have traveled widely. Many have also come from politicized family environments, as in the case of filmmaker Rehad Desai (director of Miners Shot Down [2014]), the son of antiapartheid activists. In some ways, the class issue seems to be more pronounced today than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, during a Cold War–era in which there was sponsorship for filmmakers (for example, Ousmane Sembene from Senegal and Martin Mhando from Tanzania) to study filmmaking in the former Soviet Union. While there has been a dramatic increase recently in the creation of film schools on the African continent, from Gaston Kaboré’s IMAGINE institute in Ouagadougou, to Eric Kabera’s Rwanda Film Institute, to AFDA in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg in South Africa, very few scholarships are available to aspiring filmmakers who cannot afford the fees. Inspiring stories, such as that of Khulekani Zondi, a South African who trained himself to become a cinematographer by watching YouTube clips and went on to win Africa’s top cinematography award at the AMAA (African Movie Academy Awards) in Lagos for the film Uhlanga (2012), are rare. In terms of mobility, whereas the makers of video movies in Africa tend to be based exclusively on the African continent, “festival” filmmakers are split among those based on the continent (often for personal reasons, such as political solidarity, as in the case of Zimbabwean filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga), those who live outside of the continent (usually in Western Europe or North America), and those who spend their lives moving between their homes in Africa and elsewhere (the majority). The mobility of “festival” filmmakers from Africa may also be suggestive and symptomatic, however, of the point made above—these filmmakers’


inability to convert symbolic capital accrued outside of the continent into other kinds of capital, particularly back home in Africa. As journalist Claire Diao notes: I remember one actress from Congo—Rachel Mwanza—she won an award in Berlin—the Silver Award as Best Actress, which is really good. And she played in the Canadian movie Rebelle [War Witch (2012)] by Kim Nguyen. So she was really proud of it. But she came back to Congo and no one was there! She was expecting journalists at the airport, and people saying “we have a big star,” but she was walking in the streets and no one knew her . . . Even in Burkina Faso, one of the main young filmmakers, he’s been traveling in all the festivals, getting awards everywhere, and he was not selected for FESPACO. (pers. comm.)

The mobility of “festival” filmmakers from Africa also raises questions about their potential to relate emotionally and intellectually to local audiences in Africa. Jihan el-Tahri (originally from Egypt, but who has also lived in France and South Africa) notes the resulting implications for film audiences who live on the African continent: Most of the filmmakers [from Africa] are in the diaspora—for very specific and very clear reasons—I’m not condemning at all. That space for us to do what we do unfortunately doesn’t exist here [in Africa]—but if you’re committing to changing that there are few spaces where you can commit . . . All of these filmmakers in the diaspora are partially committing outside, but it’s not translating. So we are speaking in an African diaspora language. (pers. comm.)

When I asked el-Tahri where this “African diaspora language” has been created, she immediately responded: “At film festivals!” This “African diaspora language” is what most distinguishes the filmmakers who tend to be featured in large international film festivals from those who have access only to local audiences and markets, as is the case of many video filmmakers across the continent, whether they are making films in Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, or South Africa. Nollywood expert Jonathan Haynes, for example, points out that “Nigerian video movies throw into startling relief how much the African cinema that reaches European or American shores is mediated in ways that make it comprehensible to foreign audiences” (2000a: 5). While often marked by local contexts in Africa, then, one could argue that these “festival” films are also marked by the international perspectives of their makers, and by the filmmakers’ desires for their films to travel beyond their local contexts. Haynes (2014) offers a fascinating perspective on the “New Nollywood” filmmakers who are moving in just this direction, from a film language that they know speaks to their own local audiences, to that of an “African diaspora language” that will see their films selected at international film festivals and appeal to global audiences. In many cases, directors attempt to speak both to the local and global audiences within the same film. These “New Nollywood” films accordingly offer a rich opportunity to understand the interface between the “local” and the “global” as these concepts are understood by particular filmmakers from Africa. Haynes takes the leading figure of this movement, Kunle Afolayan, as his case study. The most


obvious point to be made about the differences relates to budget. Unlike the average Nollywood film, which costs around $10,000 to produce, Afolayan’s film The Figurine (2009) boasted a budget of $350,000 (Haynes 2014: 63). Its appeal to local as well as diasporan audiences no doubt stems from its star-studded Nigerian cast, with popular local actors such as Ramsey Nouah in lead roles. In many ways, however, The Figurine—despite its high production values—rolls out as a typical Nollywood story, concerning itself with familiar Nollywood themes of love triangles, family drama, and misfortune that can be interpreted as having an otherworldly provenance. It deals both with aspiration and anxiety about that aspiration, as many video movies tend to do (Garritano 2013). The key difference comes at the very end of the film, when Afolayan offers spectators two possible readings of the preceding horrors: a magical/spiritual reading and a secular reading. The film asks the audience, in a final intertitle: “What do you believe?” As Haynes astutely notes: The movie’s refusal to answer the question appears to be a bicultural strategy—a strategy to appeal simultaneously to two different audiences, one of which believes implicitly in the power of indigenous deities or at least is thoroughly used to accepting such power as a premise of the films they watch, and another audience, perhaps better educated, living abroad, or foreign, that might enjoy playing with the notion of exotic spiritual forces but would distance itself from actual belief. The strategy could also be bicultural in aiming at an audience of bicultural people, who are themselves in an unclear relationship to this polarized choice. (2014: 65)

Haynes predicts, however, that the “New Nollywood” wave will remain a minor practice, serving only to allow “a few directors to integrate themselves into the international circuits of African cinema,” including film festivals (2014: 69). At the same time, he is optimistic that this wave will have an impact on the kinds of films that are made by Nigerians and viewed within Nigeria in the future, suggesting that these directors’ experiments with an “African diaspora language” may not be at odds with the demands of audiences on the African continent itself. Another way that it is possible to distinguish “festival” filmmakers, from Africa and elsewhere, is that they tend to fit quite easily into the category of those who “believe in the value of art, culture and creativity in itself, for itself and as something essentially not correlated with money” (De Valck 2014: 41). Looked at from this perspective, we can see that certain filmmakers choose film festivals just as much as film festivals choose certain filmmakers. Film festivals hold four distinct yet sometimes overlapping opportunities for filmmakers: they can bring modest economic returns, in the form of screening fees, through possible sales to distributors, sales agents, and television channels, and through access to funds for future projects; they can offer prestige and symbolic capital in the development of the filmmaker’s career; they can facilitate expressions of political activism and solidarity around particular causes; and they can furnish experiences and interpersonal connections in diverse parts of the globe, including the opportunity to share the screening of one’s film with live audiences. For filmmakers only interested in financial returns, though, film festivals hold little charm. When trying to understand the importance of film festivals, one has to acknowledge that the driving motivation here has not been solely, or even mainly, to bring


financial returns to “niche” films. Most crucially, within Africa, film festivals remain one of the few venues through which filmmakers can actually meet African audiences. As Sambolgo Bangré has pointed out, however idealistically, “the idea of creating [African] film festivals . . . came about with the birth of African cinema as a solution that would enable the cinema to go forth and meet its public” (1994: 51, my emphasis). The Habermasian idea of a “public sphere” exceeds the notion of the “market,” which is focused on the exchange of goods for money. The “public sphere,” in contrast, concerns the sharing not of money, but of ideas, ideals, and experiences—in Habermas’s terms, “rational debate” (1989). At the same time, the goal of many film festivals is to create publics that could also develop into markets—in other words, audiences willing to pay to watch the kinds of films by Africans these festivals screen. The State of the Scholarship Despite the historical centrality of festivals in the cultural life of many peoples in Africa (see, for example, Opoku 1970, Onyeke 1990, Olaniyan 2012, Awofeso 2013), as well as the recent proliferation of arts festivals on the continent (Mensah 2008), surprisingly little scholarly research has been published on festivals in and about and featuring Africa in any disciplinary field.6 Even less research has been conducted specifically on film festivals as they relate in any way to diverse African contexts, peoples, and themes.7 The scholarly works in the field of African screen media studies that have paid attention to festivals in their own right are few, and only two offer booklength critical analysis (Bikales 1997, Dupré 2012). Alongside these, there is some journalism—of the kind that has characterized writing on film festivals until recently, before an academic field on the subject began to develop (Rich 2013: 162–3)—covering film festivals in Africa (Turan 2002; Vourlias 2011, 2012, 2012a, 2012b). While there has long been a concern in African screen media scholarship with the ways in which the artistic freedom of “African filmmakers” has been curtailed by institutions that finance film production (see, for example, Diawara 1992, Andrade-Watkins 1996), this work has not scrutinized film festivals and other organizations centrally involved in the transnational distribution and exhibition of certain kinds of films by Africans (see, however, Diawara 1992a, 1993, 1994, 2010). The absence of sustained reflection on film festivals in African screen media scholarship, journalism, and—until recently—among film industry practitioners8 signals a much greater lack of attention to political and economic questions of film distribution and exhibition and to the related issues of audience, spectatorship, and access. Media scholar Ramon Lobato, who has studied the distribution success of Nollywood alongside other global examples of what he calls the informal “shadow economies of cinema”—those illegal, “grey” markets through which the majority of the world’s film content circulates and is shared—emphasizes the imbrication of any study of distribution/exhibition and audiences when he says: A distribution-centred model of film studies asks: who is the audience? How are they constructed as such? What are the material limits that determine which texts are available to which audiences? (2012: 6)


Putting the contexts of distribution and exhibition ahead of “textual politics” (ibid.), and also ahead of contexts of production, means that we are able to start replacing the often abstract, hypothetical, and quantitatively-determined “audience” or “market” that has dominated African screen media studies with actual spectators (or lack of spectators, in cases where there is no access to or interest in particular films), qualitatively drawn out. The lack of sustained attention to film festivals in African screen media studies is thus symptomatic of a broader disregard for the material contexts, social lives, and diverse spectators of films. As African video scholar Carmela Garritano points out, “Whether adopting the theoretical language of Marxism, feminism, cultural nationalism, or psychoanalysis, critics of African film, in the main, have practiced what Julianne Burton (1997) has called an immanent criticism, a critical methodology that locates meaning within the world of the film text” (2013: 8, my emphasis). This kind of methodology often overlooks or downplays the contexts of production, distribution, curation, exhibition, and reception of films. Through the ways they convene and produce a variety of public (as well as private) spheres, film festivals by their nature demand attention to such contexts, and that is the value of making them one of the sites of our research. Although the earliest books on “African Cinema” largely examined African films in context, from the perspective of broader film “industries” (Vieyra 1969 and 1983, Diawara 1992, Ukadike 1994), there has been too much of a drift in the field toward the close analysis of individual films alone (Garritano 2013: 8). Although such interpretation is a vital element of film studies, it has to be recognized as an esoteric activity, mostly limited to discursive practices within academic institutions. The material conditions of knowledge production itself should not escape our scrutiny, and it needs to be pointed out that, due to inequalities in resources, the overwhelming majority of the scholarship on African screen media has been produced outside the African continent, particularly in the United States and Europe. This has contributed to its de-materialization over time, where texts have been divorced from their contexts of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Foundational to attempts to try to unsettle this influence is Karin Barber’s work on popular culture in Africa, which explores the porous boundaries between production and reception. A special issue of the journal Africa (67.3, 1997), edited by Barber, clearly sets out the terms of new agendas for audience research, and includes several articles dealing specifically with spectators of screen media such as video and television, and studies looking into both historical and contemporary audiences. While some contributors, such as Stephanie Newell (1997), have observed or interviewed actual people, others fall back on analyzing audiences through readings of genre (another kind of immanent criticism). Barber concludes that much work remains to be done to understand audiences in diverse contexts in Africa, and that, in particular, “We need to ask how audiences do their work of interpretation” (1997: 357)—in other words, we need to study spectators’ intellectual, emotional, and affective engagements with texts and performances. A survey of recent audience research in African screen media studies suggests that, almost two decades later, we still lack understanding of such interpretive


repertoires and practices, those defined by audience members themselves rather than assumed by scholars through other means, and—in particular—readings of genre. For example, the one oversight in Garritano’s otherwise brilliant and groundbreaking book African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (2013) is its lack of description of Ghanaian spectators’ own interpretations of the video movies. While Garritano mentions in the introduction that the book draws on her conversations with spectators, these are glossed over in the text and not brought to the surface. Similarly, while Lindsey Green-Simms’ fascinating article on the genre of occult melodrama in Ghanaian video movies (2012) is partly based on research she conducted with Ghanaian women spectators, these spectators are not mentioned in the article. The reading of the genre of occult melodrama, in her article, comes to determine what it is that all viewers desire from the videos. A drawing together of these scholars’ insightful analyses with those of actual, individual spectators would be illuminating. Laura Fair’s historical research reconstructing cinema-going culture and film reception in Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania from the 1950s to the 1980s offers an alternate model, where actual spectators are brought to the fore. Drawing on archival research and box office records, as well as interviews with hundreds of people about their memories of “going to the show” during this period (before cinemas began to close in the 1990s), Fair’s research reveals that—contrary to expectations—it was not Hollywood movies but rather Indian films that were most popular with Tanzanians (2010a, 2010b). Fair also points to an interesting split across Africa in terms of the relative popularity of Hollywood and Bollywood films requiring further research: American genre films, such as westerns and gangster films, have historically been more popular than Indian films in southern African (see Ambler 2001, Dovey and Impey 2010, Glaser 2000, Powdermaker 1962), whereas Indian films have—in Fair’s words—“stolen the show” in Tanzania, coastal Kenya (Fuglesang 1994), northern Nigeria (Larkin 1997), Cameroon (Teno 1992), and Sierra Leone (Richards 1996) (Fair 2010a: 92). This suggests fascinating cross-cultural, and in particular religious, affiliations that might allow us to remap popular film tastes across Africa in the future, while also undermining the persistence of such (post)colonial cartographies of Africa as Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and Arabophone. We need understandings of communities of taste in different contexts to complement the ethnographic work of Fair, Fuglesang (1994), Larkin (1997), and Abu-Lughod (2004). However, we also need the grassroots conflicts around the value of particular films documented in order to better understand the meanings of films not only as social texts but also as sites around and through which diverse individual identities are asserted and established. Given my specific interest in the phenomenon of film festivals, this book is not an attempt to do an in-depth study of audiences in one particular locale. My invocation of audiences will be both abstract (in terms of how they are imagined by festivals and curators) and grounded (in terms of fieldwork I have conducted at different film festivals in distinct locations with specific spectators). In this way, I am attempting to fill a gap within not only African screen media studies but also film festival studies, where there has been a lack of attention to “ordinary” festival participants in lieu of an industrial focus on the so-called “experts” at festivals (the


curators, filmmakers, producers, sales agents, media lawyers, distributors, and juries). As Wong points out, “among writings on festivals, audiences often have been overlooked or read simply as reliable sources of income and abstract statistics or groups to boost attendance numbers” (2011: 10). This has compromised scholars’ ability to focus on what makes film festivals unique: the very particular public (and private) spheres they occasion and how they are authored equally by organizers/curators and “ordinary” participants. Film Festivals: The Mechanically Reproduced Work of Art in the Context of Liveness As one of the 114 bodies ensconced in The Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London, on a chilly, November afternoon in 2011, watching the amber-toned, slightly scratched images of Sarah Maldoror’s film Sambizanga (1972) flicker on the screen, I felt an acute sense of relief. It had taken great effort for our Film Africa festival team to track down the (reportedly) lone 35mm print of Sambizanga to hold this screening, part of our 10-day African film festival. And, because the print was not subtitled, we were obliged to project English subtitles live onto it during the screening. Maldoror—originally from Guadeloupe, raised in France, and considered the matriarch of filmmaking in Africa—was one of the spectators in the darkened cinema, watching the images that she had shot 40 years previously. At the age of 34 she had traveled to Angola to make a film about the war of liberation, at the height of the conflict. Sambizanga immediately entered the annals of history, as the first feature film to be made in Africa by a female director, and won the Tanit d’Or (the grand prize) at the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage in Tunisia. It is the tale of Maria, a passionate young woman who walks from her village to the capital Luanda in search of Domingos, her activist husband who has been arrested by the Portuguese authorities. A sense of excitement accompanied the screening due to the film’s rarity and Maldoror’s presence amongst us. Two months later, on January 12, 2012, Sambizanga appeared on YouTube. After all the stress of locating the print, transporting it to London, and subtitling it into English, here the film was, free of charge, with English subtitles, and instantly available to anyone anywhere in the world with access to the internet and a relatively fast bandwidth.9 To date (June 1, 2014) it has collected 44,361 views (with 134 “likes” and only 7 “dislikes”), suggesting that—even if the film disappears from YouTube, as many films are wont to do (Iordanova 2013b)—perhaps more people have viewed Sambizanga online in the space of a few years than in the 40 years between when it was made and when it first appeared on the web. The comments about the film on YouTube (mostly in Portuguese) would seem to suggest that it has also reached Angolans, who had no idea of its existence before stumbling across it on the site. Thanks to the Internet, this film is no longer burdened by the aura of the “original” object (as a sole print); its mechanically reproducible form as film has been harnessed to make it available to thousands of people. Of course, this is an audience-centered argument. One could argue, from Maldoror’s perspective, that after many years of struggle to make the film more broadly available and in


ways that would also recognize her authorship, this piracy has compromised her intellectual property.10 The distribution/exhibition of films from Africa, as with all film, is at a crossroads between analog and digital, the resolution of which will have a profound impact on the role of film festivals that invest in films by Africans. In the past few years, the African media landscape has been transformed, not only by YouTube, but by the arrival of a range of African-oriented television channels, such as the US- and UK-based channels Ben TV, OHTV, and The Africa Channel; Africabased companies such as M-Net and Zuku, as well as companies such as Côte Ouest, packaging African content and distribution rights for television channels around the world, and CCTV (China’s state television channel), which has invested $7 billion in an African news hub in Nairobi; and several video-on-demand (VOD) platforms, available both within and beyond Africa, such as AfricaFilms.tv, BuniTV, and iROKOtv. Complementing these are specific apps for mobile devices with African content, such as Afrinolly, a free app with feature films, short films, television shows, trailers, and music videos from Africa. An Economist article on Internet and mobile phone usage in Kenya speaks to the situation across much of sub-Saharan Africa when it notes that “Kenya is still a poor country; few of its people own laptops. But there are 74 mobile phones for every 100 Kenyans . . . And nearly 99% of internet subscriptions in Kenya are on mobile phones” (Economist 2012). In other words, people in Africa are increasingly watching media content on their mobile devices. At the same time, as Marie Lora-Mungai, CEO of Kenyabased VOD platform BuniTV, notes: “In a market like Africa, there is still a very strong connection to physical stuff . . . I’m even talking about TVs as physical objects—people watching together . . . And even though we’re now proposing other options, the power of television will stay on for a very long time” (2013). Nevertheless, the organizers of film festivals—“physical” events—are having to reconsider their value in light of these new ventures to emphasize what it is they can offer that the broadcast and online organizations cannot. Film scholar Dina Iordanova argues that: Current developments may see the dominant mode of viewing shift away from film as a collectively experienced art. Increasingly, watching films happens in isolation, on an individual screen, via streaming or DVD viewing . . . [V]iewing in isolation and communal online discussion (e.g., via Internet relay chat) forms a recognizable pattern that may soon become the norm. (2013b: 49)

Setting aside for the time being the assumption that people everywhere have equal access to online material, there is a great deal of evidence that just as the digitization and streaming of films is proliferating, so too are cultural festivals of all kinds. Numerous scholars have used the term “festivalization” to refer to the rapid increase in the number of festivals over the past fifty years.11 Film festivals are part of this phenomenon; some estimate that there are currently more than 3,500 worldwide (Moeran and Pederson 2011a: 4),12 and that their presence has increased around 400 percent over the past decade (Gore 2010). Phillip Knatchbull, the CEO of Curzon Cinemas in the UK (which also owns distribution


company Artificial Eye and VOD platform Curzon on Demand), says: “We’ve seen the coming of television, the coming of VHS, all these things that were going to spell the death-knell of cinema, and we just don’t believe that video on demand is going to do that either. We think cinema has something special to offer” (quoted in Grant 2012). Ruoff notes that festivalization has occurred in concert with the phenomenon of digitalization: “Since the advent of the internet in the 1990s and the proliferation of mobile viewing devices in the past decade, film festivals have only grown, in size, in number and in variety” (2012a: 18). The optimism with which the digital era is frequently heralded tends to ignore its more problematic aspects. One of these is discussed powerfully in Jesse Weaver Shipley’s research into the changing norms of Ghanaian music production, circulation, and reception. Shipley’s work focuses on the contemporary music and dance form called “Azonto” which, he argues, is a “technologically mediated style” and the “embodiment of being Ghanaian in a mobile, digital world” (2013: 362). While digital technology and sampling enables Azonto to be made and to travel quickly and easily around the world, thereby allowing diasporan Ghanaians to consume what to them feels like a little bit of “home,” Shipley also argues that the ease of this circulation can lead to a kind of fatigue and to a loss rather than an accumulation of value. This fatigue is the opposite of the energy created through live concerts: “For older popular genres like highlife, live performances are central locales where music’s emotional power forges publics through shared, repetitive experience” (2013: 365). Shipley goes on to argue that the shift from the live to the digital production of music can destroy the value of the latter. This digital art form’s neutralized repetitions come to replace the “emotional connections” forged through the “uniqueness” of live instruments and “place-based culture” (2013: 376). Shipley’s work is exemplary, however, in the way that it refuses to privilege the live over the digital, or vice versa. Rather, it keeps the tension and contradiction between these two realms in view, recognizing that “[w]hile live music creates community through face-to-face experience, digital music forges affective, embodied connections through multimodal, dispersed participation” (2013: 365). Digitized music can reach vast numbers of new listeners, however fragmented; live music, in its attachment to a particular place and audience, cannot. Music and film are very different media, however. Music is capable of being produced live or digitally, whereas film is by nature a mechanically reproduced form. Unlike Shipley’s focus on reading the different modes of musical production (live and digital) against one another, I am interested not in the mechanically reproduced form of film per se, but rather in how film—as prerecorded medium—comes to life in festival contexts. One of the primary claims in this book is that it is the “liveness” of festivals—the coming together, in person, of audiences, filmmakers, curators, and festival organizers—that attracts enthusiastic support and participation. Janet Harbord defines film festivals as spontaneous, live moments within planned events by contextualizing them within the history of the film medium (as a medium of mechanical reproduction) more broadly: Where an early form of cinema sought to embed film as a pre-recorded medium into a live theatrical context, the film festival approaches the same task, although moving


from the direction of an established cinematic programme towards a live event. The film festival re-appropriates the time of contingency but does so within a rigid temporal structure, the short duration of the festival programme. Contingency is rooted in a ritual practice that is both known in advance, and open to the forces of chance, a contingency produced by the act of staging. (2009: 42, my emphasis)

Similarly, but from the perspective of festivals in Africa, Odile Goerg argues that “[w]e can speak of two kinds of festival time—the one official and planned, the other unofficial and spontaneous” (1999a: 8–9).13 It is this expectation of contingency within consistency—of the possibility of spontaneity—that, Harbord and Goerg suggest, is a significant part of the enduring appeal and popularity of festivals and, Harbord warns, “the festival would cease to be a live event if its mechanical smoothness were not disrupted” (2009: 43–44). Harbord thus links the disruptive potential of film festivals specifically to their live elements. Similarly, Goerg refers to the importance of the liveness of the festival participants, saying: “No celebration in effect can occur without its public” (ibid., my emphasis). The form of disruption the liveness of film festivals potentially generates has its source, then, in the festival’s participants, and particularly its audiences. It is the liveness of audiences that distinguishes film festivals from what Nick Couldry calls “media events,” which are “large-scale public events which connect actions across multiple locations within an overall action-frame that is focused on a central, broadcast ‘event’” (2003: 60). Couldry gives as an example the media event surrounding Princess Diana’s funeral, which was watched on television by millions of people across the world. What made this a media event, Couldry argues, was a huge, fragmented audience—spread out across multiple sites—made to feel as though they were part of something because of a “shared viewing situation” (2003: 61). Dayan and Katz, whose work on media events has become the standard text in this field, call this kind of viewing situation “festive viewing” (quoted in Couldry 2003: 60–61); Couldry simply calls it “social watching” (2003: 61), suggesting that the “festive” is of a different order. As performance theorist Philip Auslander has shown, it is such live broadcasting that has defined the “essence of the televisual”; “from television’s earliest appearances,” he writes, it has revealed “an ontology of liveness more akin to the ontology of theatre than to that of film” (2008: 12). What distinguishes media events from film festivals, then, is that the former pride themselves on the liveness (or “real time” transmission) of the content, whereas the latter pride themselves on the live togetherness, rather than dispersion, of the viewing participants. The fundamental elements of film festivals—the films—are not live, but prerecorded. It is the participants at film festivals who bring the possibility of the contingent with them, and with this human contingency and face-to-face collectivity also comes the possibility of disruption and, thus, perhaps some kind of change to the status quo. Of course, as De Valck has shown, certain kinds of highly controlled, celebrity-oriented film festivals can be both live event and media event, given that they are aimed at both local and global audiences (2007: 118–121). A key argument in this book is that the potential disruption that can occur through the spontaneous liveness of festivals can manifest as either conflict or consensus, or sometimes both at once. One of my earliest, personal experiences of


an arts festival is a constant reminder to me of the sense of camaraderie that can be created through such events, even in their most disrupted form. It was a chilly, July evening in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1994. Thousands of people had descended on the little town to attend the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, the second largest arts festival in the world. Founded in 1974, the festival in 1994 was much more than a twentieth anniversary celebration. It was a reclamation, the first edition of the festival run in a democratic South Africa. The air was rich with the smell of woodfires and electrified by live music, the streets full of people. I was at the 1820 Settlers’ Monument for a performance by one of South Africa’s most renowned dance companies. The audience’s anticipation was palpable as the lights dimmed in the main auditorium. We waited for the show to begin. But nothing happened. The auditorium remained in darkness. It dawned on us before the official announcement: there had been a citywide power failure. The mood in the theatre changed then—the disappointment at missing the show turned into something daring. I couldn’t see clearly, but I felt bodies brushing past me. Somebody took my hand and I gave in and followed, down the aisle of the auditorium and up onto the stage. There were bodies everywhere—invisible, real bodies. And then—prompted by some unknown source—the singing began, the human voices swelling together in the darkness, and I heard my voice melt into the chorus. Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika, Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo, Yizwa imithandazo yethu, Nkosi sikelela, Thina lusapho lwayo . . . There was no dance performance that night. The power failure disrupted the possibility of that. But it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. That moment was extraordinary for me, personally, in terms of the political transition in South Africa. On no other occasion did I feel so intimately swept up in, and a part of, the “change” that politicians were talking about on television every night. Whatever that moment was, I experienced it as an affirmation of the “new South Africa.” And the liveness of the moment—the sensation of physically inhabiting the same space as others in the audience—was essential to that experience, however brief. In this book, I have tried to keep in balance both the coming together and the conflict, the embodied sensations and the intellectual analysis, that take place at and arise out of film festivals. Given this is a project developed from almost 15 years’ experience of occupying dual roles—as a film festival founder, director, and curator on the one hand, and a researcher of film festivals on the other—it is impossible for me to disentangle my practical experiences and my scholarly analysis. I hope that whatever blind spots might emerge from this overlap are somewhat tempered by Chinua Achebe and Karin Barber’s plea to researchers that we “move with the masquerade in the village square as we ponder the complexity of its performance” (quoted in Okome and Newell 2012a: XVIII). Of course, if one is also an organizer of the masquerade then the shifting of perspectives is that much more complicated. Given my practice-based involvement with my “object” of study, I cannot fully adhere to Couldry’s advice that “We need to be skeptical bystanders, not celebrants, at contemporary media’s ritual feast” (2003: 11). Considering both the consensus and conflict to which festivals give rise, Leslie Witz defines them as ““multisensory, multifocus” moments when struggles over


symbolism are increasingly evident, when signs become ambiguous and contests emerge over their adaptation, adoption, or rejection” (2003: 9). He calls these moments “festive excitement” or “festive excess,” and he suggests that it is only through these moments that a festival can be read: [T]he ultimate success of a festival is in its ability to generate “festive excitement.” This kind of excitement does not emerge when spectators and participants merely succumb to the official version of the event; rather, it is “the transgression of prohibitions . . . the excess authorized by the festival” that exhilarates the participants and spectators. Paradoxically, these unofficial encounters and violations of the festival program are precisely what evoke the spontaneity the organizers desperately seek. No matter how much the festival is engineered or organized, in certain ways it is always an open forum, where everyone can derive “knowledge and skill” through “pleasurable, sensual experiences,” a place that has the ability to generate festive excesses. (2003: 10)

Festivals, made up of people as well as programs of films, are not texts and cannot be analyzed as coherent, one-dimensional entities. They are complex, multiauthored events, experienced in myriad ways by their many participants and stakeholders. We might borrow the double-rod pendulum from physics to visualize the divergent trajectory of each festival participant through the event: the movement of the double-rod pendulum is circumscribed by the length, mass, and motion of its limbs, but within this circumscribed space, entirely different routes and images materialize. Film critic, curator, and filmmaker Mark Cousins argues that it is only through acknowledging the creativity and authorship of organizers and curators that film festivals will emerge from what he calls their current “formal torpor” (2013: 171). He writes: There’s a simple way of shaking film festivals out of this torpor: we should think of them as authored, just as films are authored. We should think of them as narratives— stories lasting ten days or two weeks, just as films are narratives . . . The people who run film festivals must think of themselves as storytellers and stylists. They must ask themselves what the narrative structure of their event is, and its aesthetic. (2013: 171)

While, as I have noted, curators might clothe themselves in mystique and attitude in order to establish their preeminence over their competitors, having human authors of film festivals is infinitely preferable to the current “aggregation” approach of many online VOD platforms. It is cheaper for these platforms to buy bundles of films from companies that “aggregate” such packages than adopt a curatorial approach. Like many of my curator colleagues, I have battled with the funders of film festivals over working conditions; many such funders do not understand the amount of time and creativity curating requires, and seem to think that the practice simply involves selecting some films and throwing them together. What is missing in Cousins’s conceptualization of curatorial authorship and aesthetics, however, is recognition of the audiences, whose behavior and tastes contribute just as much to festivals’ meanings as those of their organizers, and


whose presence thereby raises the question of whose taste is to be prioritized in curatorial work. Many thinkers have theorized the diversity of taste existing between different communities and distinct individuals. One of the most enduring of such theorizations is Immanuel Kant’s concept of sensus communis in his third Critique, which suggests “that beauty and sublimity refer to the viewer’s subjective experience of an object, not properties that can be objectively determined to inhere in the object itself ” (Hicks 2012: p. 124n8). If, as Kant says, taste is subjective, it follows that there can be no such thing as good judgment or taste—only particular judgment or taste. Fundamental to understanding Kant’s notion of sensus communis is the intellectual context within which it was developed: as a critique of the British “sensibility school” of the mid-eighteenth century, composed of thinkers such as Burke, Hume, and Shaftesbury (ibid.: 107). These philosophers were concerned with defining taste within the very limited context of the shared values of people within the environment of the academy. Kant’s chief contribution to theories of aesthetic judgment at this time was in seeking to expand the field of consideration beyond the hallowed halls of universities and to the world in its entirety. In an article that is both sympathetic to and critical of Kant’s project in the third Critique, John Hicks argues that much of what Kant writes about sensus communis in the third Critique shows signs of a double legacy. On the one hand, Kant maintains an anthropological or educational interest in describing the multiplicity of aesthetic experiences as well as differences in taste among people of different nationalities and races . . . But on the other hand, Kant has an interest in aesthetic judgment for systematic or critical reasons, that is, for how aesthetic judgment fits and functions in the larger critical system. In this line of inquiry, the wide variety of aesthetic experiences and standards of taste becomes abstracted and universalized as a capacity for judgment that is shared by all humans. (2012: 107)

It is remarkable that Kant persevered in his critical-philosophical attempt to theorize the sensus communis as an abstract form of “universal assent” when his anthropological work had already clearly invalidated the possibility of finding such consensus in any real, empirical setting. Yet Kant persisted with his exploration of sensus communis as a “virtual phenomenon,” an abstract idea that when we judge something to be aesthetically “beautiful,” we do so “as if we had the right to expect the agreement of everyone to our individual judgment of taste” (Hicks 2012: 107). What is most interesting in Hicks’s critique of Kant’s notion of sensus communis, however, is that, as he says, it “does not allow for aesthetic judgments to be both valid and subject to dissent, debate, or discussion at the same time” (2012: 107–8). The fault line with the concept of sensus communis, then, rests not so much in its method—in its transcendental abstractions from empirical reality—but in its implicit elevation of the value of assent above that of dissent. Hicks argues: When considering aesthetic judgments by empirical subjects, the possibility for disagreement often enhances rather than endangers what could be said to be shared in common by the community that is brought together around any particular claim that x is beautiful. It is not immediately clear why Kant would want to close off the


possibility of disagreement, or even critically interesting hesitation, so definitively in his descriptions of a model aesthetic judgment. (2012: 109)

In this way, and although he does not explicitly alter Kant’s phrase, Hicks implies that the most revelatory understandings of the exercise of aesthetic judgment will come from a focus not on sensus communis but rather on a kind of dissensus communis. Terry Eagleton’s argument in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) is similar to that of Hicks. While his stated aim is “to find in the category of the aesthetic a way of gaining access to certain central questions of modern European thought” (1990: 1), it is at least as much an inquiry into the impossibility of securing consensus around aesthetic taste. He considers the concept of consensus as it has been theorized by a range of European thinkers and critiques the abstract idealism not only of Kant’s sensus communis but also, for example, of Schiller’s concept of hegemony (defined as a form of non-coercive consensus) and Habermas’s theory of the “public sphere,” which, Eagleton argues, places “too sanguine a trust in a normative collective wisdom” (1990: 354). Eagleton points out, in a similar vein to Hicks, the contradictions of any idealist theorization of consensus, in which “we are all united at that sublime point where absolutely nothing is at stake, . . . uncontaminated by any potentially divisive content” (1990: 137). What is revolutionary about Eagleton’s approach to aesthetic judgment, however, and what I thus use as a guide throughout this book, is his ability to entertain the idea of dissent while simultaneously refusing to banish the possibility of consensus, a theoretical position that, as I have argued through Witz’s concept of “festive excitement,” is vital to understanding the work performed by festivals (Eagleton 1990: 192). Eagleton offers a caustic critique of the post-structuralist theoretical project insofar as it “can conceive of consensus or collectivity only as oppressive” (1990: 354); for, as he emphasizes, “no significant social change is even conceivable” without “the notion of solidarity” (ibid.). Taking my cue from Hicks’s specific critique of Kant, yet inflecting it with Eagleton’s dialectical approach, I want to offer a new term for the consideration of aesthetic judgment: (dis)sensus communis. As I will show through examples of (dis)sensus communis in action at film festivals, this term approximates the dynamic way both consensus and dissent arise in aesthetic and other judgments, and—furthermore—reflects how deeply they are related to one another in that dissent usually leads to new kinds of temporary consensus. Film festivals thus need to be situated on a continuum, from highly controlled events through which authorities attempt to delimit festive excitement, on through to sites of extreme dissent, with the concomitant anarchism, politics, conflict, and debate introduced by people’s live participation in otherwise planned, authored, and authorized events. And when contestations do play out in festivals—ideally with people from a range of different cultural, professional, and class backgrounds—they are frequently far more interesting and democratic than the live, yet typically abstruse contestations that take place in the academy. Indeed, as I will show, the transgressions that occur at certain festivals might be so radical that they cannot even be thought of as authorized by the festival, as Witz claims, but are better described as appropriations of the festival.


Film Festivals as Heuristic Device Beyond my focus on film festivals as a phenomenon in their own right, I am also interested, then, in how they can be used as a heuristic device for approaching the study of films in a new light. More so than looking just at particular films or filmmakers, or the history of African film criticism, exploring film festivals provides a dynamic and participatory way of conjuring the aesthetic, social, cultural, political, and economic contours that make up a certain kind of filmmaking in and by Africans, both in historical and contemporary times. Indeed, I hope to show that what transpires at film festivals remains one of the most productive ways of making sense of one version of “African film,” not as a genre (which it is not) but as a conflicted terrain of “unresolved antagonism” (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: xvi). The festive excitement and (dis)sensus communis that can arise at festivals are extremely productive for scholars, since they lend a legibility to latent, underlying issues that may not be addressed directly. The examples of such conflict and consensus in this book reveal just how contested the concepts of “Africa,” “African film,” “African filmmakers,” and “African audiences” are, and how such conceptions are continuously shifting in practice. I make no attempt to provide my own definitions of these terms; I am interested in how others invoke them. As a heuristic device, film festivals can help scholars and teachers to keep the dynamism and heterogeneity of African filmmaking practices alive and, in this way, to avoid reductive and faddish theorizing that attempts to make some final statement about what African film is or is not, and how it is to be interpreted. Some recent scholarly work on “African film” suggests, for example, that it is no longer in vogue or appropriate to seek out the political values or subtexts of films by Africans. Heavily indebted to the interventions of African popular culture studies, African screen media critics now tend to look at genre (Adesokan 2011), and particularly comedy (Adejunmobi 2014a, Tcheuyap 2010) and melodrama (Green-Simms 2012); experiences of pleasure rather than of violence (compare Dovey 2009 and 2010a); trash in lieu of art (Harrow 2013); and embodied performances, involving dance, love, and sexuality (Tcheuyap 2011). As Tcheuyap (2011) and Harrow (2013) correctly note, these things—comedy, melodrama, pleasure, trash, dance, love, sex—were present in films by Africans from the beginning; the problem has been that critics of these films, perhaps taking their cue from the dogmatic liberationist ideologies espoused by FEPACI (the Federation of African filmmakers) in the 1960s, initially turned a blind eye to the diversity of film expression by Africans, reading only for the political. However, these blind spots in the histories and theorizing of films by Africans do not mean that we should now altogether jettison political interpretation. Rather, we need to be attentive to the very specific contexts in which films are made, exhibited, and viewed, in order to devise appropriate frameworks for understanding them in their uniqueness. It is undeniable, for example, that—even considering their contemporary energy and new visual forms—many recent films by Africans continue to be political to their core. Judy Kibinge’s Something Necessary (2013) may be a meditative, first-person narrative that offers no definitive answers to the problems it poses, but it is deeply engaged with the politics of everyday life in Kenya after the 2007–2008


election violence. Sara Blecher’s documentary Surfing Soweto (2010) and fiction film Otelo Burning (2012) may encourage discussion about popular youth cultures in contemporary South Africa, but they also compel viewers to reflect on the scars and legacies of apartheid, particularly as they manifest themselves in the lives of young men. Microphone (2010), directed by Ahmad Abdalla, may celebrate “hip” youth cultures in Egypt involving graffiti, rap, and skateboarding, but in its fullest sense it is concerned with political confrontation and the dictatorial structures of a society that has curtailed free expression. Grey Matter (2011) may exhibit the metafictional devices of a global, postmodern culture and the international films that have influenced its young director, Kivu Ruhorahoza, but it is at the same time a trenchant contemplation of the psychological effects of the Rwandan genocide. Indeed, the film can even be read as a critique of those who would seek representations of Africa that focus only on the positive aspects of the continent; the protagonist of the film, a filmmaker called Balthazar, can find no funding to tell his version of the grisly, depressing story of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. The banning of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le President (2013), in Cameroon—both by the Cameroonian government and the French Ambassador to Cameroon—is a result of its acerbic political critique of President Paul Biya’s regime in the country. Filmmakers across the continent are also increasingly working within political collectives to create films that double up as “citizen journalism.” Examples are many: the Mosireen Collective in Egypt, which makes experimental films not only challenging the status quo in the country but asking difficult questions about what will come after the revolution; filmmakers within the antigovernment, February 20 movement in Morocco, who have produced films such as My Makhzen and Me (2012, Nadir Bouhmouch), which went viral among young Moroccans and was an audience hit at the 2013 FiSahara International Film Festival; the Occupy Nigeria movement, sparked by young Nigerian filmmaker Ishaya Bako’s Fuelling Poverty (2012), a documentary about the Nigerian government’s withdrawal of its fuel subsidy to citizens that went viral in Nigeria and has, to date, more than 70,000 views on YouTube (Egbunike 2013); and the work of The Cultural Video Foundation in Kenya, whose members believe in the power of participatory filmmaking to open up new public and democratic spaces to citizens. It is not, then, that filmmaking in Africa and by Africans has become any less politicized than it was in the 1960s; the younger generation simply has new political concerns, and new ways of distributing those concerns. Filmmakers will engage with the particular political issues of their historical moments, with the specific material contexts they inhabit, and with their own, unique experiences of life. As I hope to show throughout this book, what is “political,” or otherwise of value, about any film can only, finally, be judged in context, through the (dis)sensus communis that arises through particular screenings of, and discussions around, that film. While rejecting the strictures of the term “Third Cinema,” I will agree with Teshome Gabriel’s understanding of aesthetics as a contract between a filmmaker and spectators, and as entirely contingent on context (1979). As many of my examples reveal, because of their liveness film festivals are a maze of surprises, and what transpires can have unanticipated, and in some ways contradictory, consequences for any particular film or filmmaker’s career.


Methodology and Structure of the Book Much emphasis has been given in film festival scholarship to the liveness of festivals (see, for example, Iordanova and Rhyne 2009), and less to the ways that liveness—through the possibility of festive excitement—allows for a different way of approaching the object of study itself. Festivals are, to some extent, public events that invite us to position ourselves in the midst of other bodies—of curators, spectators, jury members, filmmakers—introducing, watching, laughing at, commenting on, judging, rejecting, and discussing those films. Sara Ahmed makes the point in her book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000) that “identity does not simply happen in the privatized realm of the subject’s relation to itself . . . the work of identity formation is never over, but can be understood as the sliding across of subjects in their meetings with others” (2000: 7). A research process that incorporates more rather than less of the “live” allows us—as the philosopher Edouard Glissant would say—to tremble with the world.14 And in this process, we are compelled to recognize, too, that we (the researchers) may also bring about change, and be changed, and that our object of study is, for this reason, never unproblematically fixed, stable, or entirely knowable. But to see festivals simply as public events—as inaugurating a kind of utopian, Habermasian “public sphere”—would be naïve. In the first place, the monochrome nature of Habermas’s “public sphere,” which was conceived to describe increasing civilian power to influence the state in eighteenth-century bourgeois Europe, has been critiqued and expanded to include far more diverse historical, geographical, and transnational examples (Modisane 2012, Fraser et al 2014). Furthermore, many contemporary scholars, following Warner (2005), have argued that rather than expecting the circulation of discourses to result in only one, concentrated “public sphere,” we should, rather, recognize that there are multiple “publics” and “counter-publics.” While this work is instructive to a study of festivals, the specific issues of access that festivals raise has led me away from the idea of “publics” and towards Foucault’s more complicated concept of the “heterotopia,” as defined in his 1967 talk/essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1998). While Foucault outlines six different aspects to the heterotopia, most useful to my analysis of film festivals is his emphasis on how the heterotopia is experienced differently by distinct people, as opposed to the idea of a utopian “public sphere” (or multiple, utopian “publics”) to which all have access: Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable . . . To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. (1998: 235)

This description perfectly captures the functioning of many film festivals, where even the most public of festivals (for example, the Toronto International Film Festival) have exclusive, private events, including certain people who perform the correct “gestures,” and excluding others for whom festival spaces are not penetrable. The concept of the heterotopia has inspired me to keep in sight both the public and private realms brought into being by any film festival in my analyses.


This is a transnational, multisited, and practice-based study that draws on ethnographic methods. I have attempted to participate in and follow “live” the multiple sites wherein the world of film festivals and Africa, films by Africans, and filmmakers from Africa intersect, over a period of about 15 years. My fieldwork has taken me to film festivals in Algeria, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the US, and Canada. I specifically chose to explore the relationships between Africa and Western Europe, and to a lesser extent North America, because these have been, historically and until recently, the main regions in which films by Africans have circulated through festivals. The much more recent African film festivals and African film programs in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Eastern Europe—while briefly touched upon—are unfortunately beyond the scope of this project, but they promise scholars a great deal of material to explore in the future. The insights presented in this book also draw significantly on my professional experiences in cofounding, directing, and curating African film festivals in the United Kingdom since 2001. To try to avoid the problems associated with my identity as both festival practitioner and analyst (Ostrowska 2010), I have also engaged at times with a collaborative research methodology (see Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri 2013; and Dovey and Olivieri 2015). The main problem I have encountered with practice-based research, however, is that I have felt bound by both explicit and unspoken rules of confidentiality, and alternately by a sense of propriety as well as loyalty, which have prevented me from reflecting on some of the most controversial and interesting things I have experienced firsthand. It is also difficult to achieve the necessary critical distance when evaluating one’s own work, making it all too easy to adopt an inappropriately self-congratulatory tone. As a result, I have included less reflection on my work with the Cambridge African Film Festival, the London African Film Festival, and the Film Africa festival in London than I had previously anticipated. I have attempted, nevertheless, to distil some of the more challenging and inspiring experiences I have had into more generalized, abstract principles and ideas, guiding my views and analysis in the book. While I have attempted, by following films by Africans around the world and by attending film festivals across the African continent, to contribute to the increasing transnationalization of film studies (see, e.g., Chan 2011 and Archibald and Miller 2011), I also saw it as indispensable to my study to combine ethnographic and historical methodologies in an attempt to provide deep, diachronic analyses of festivals and their relationships to actual places, rather than merely superficial reports on single editions. What I find most productive about Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia is its methodological invitation to scholars in this sense. By defining all material spaces as heterotopias rather than utopias, Foucault calls on scholars to take the necessary time to fully explore the entanglement of space and time (1998: 229). It is not acceptable, then, to resort to utopian platitudes, as French filmmaker Jean Cocteau did when describing the Cannes Film Festival thus: “The Festival is an apolitical no-man’s land, a microcosm of what the world would be like if people could make direct contact with one another and speak the same language.”15 Neither is it sufficient, as Chris Fujiwara does (2013), to simply complain about the utopianization of contemporary film festivals. Because they


are irregular, seasonal events, festivals encourage people to move swiftly and easily through them—as though they were utopias—without necessarily engaging with the particular location in which the festival is based, or the relationship between its location and the festival over time. Foucault encourages us to look beneath these seeming utopias for the inevitable heterotopias (hierarchies, boundaries, and disjuncts) that lie beneath the sheen, the incompatible spaces and groups of people whose reaction to festivals may lead to festive excitement and (dis)sensus communis. My research methods have included participant observation, interviews,16 surveys (of festival directors, audiences, and filmmakers),17 and control group discussions.18 While it was physically impossible for me to attend every festival more than once, I have attempted to revisit as many as possible to deepen my understanding of them over time, such as FESPACO (every edition from 2003 to 2013); the Durban International Film Festival (2008, 2012, 2013); the Zanzibar International Film Festival (2007, 2013); the Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival in Spain (2010, 2011, 2013); the New York African Film Festival (2008, 2009); and the Cannes Film Festival (2008, 2009, 2013). Where I have not been able to attend more than one edition of a particular festival, such as the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, I have relied heavily on the work of other scholars to help contextualize and historicize my analysis. I have seen a historical plotting of film festivals’ relationships to “Africa,” “African film,” “African filmmakers,” and “African audiences” as necessary to provide a kind of scaffolding within which to work. Along with relying on the historical work of other scholars, I have delved into certain archives to flesh out my understanding of particular festivals; for example, my historical reconstruction of the Durban International Film Festival in Chapter 6 is based on research at the Killie Campbell Archives in Durban. I want to make it clear, however, that I am not a historian and that this book is not an attempt to construct a complete historical genealogy of film festivals. I hope to show that the creation of such a genealogy would inevitably be contested, precisely because of the multifaceted, live elements inherent in the festivals and the people who create and experience them. For the sake of establishing some kind of framework or typology within which to work, I have loosely divided festivals into four groupings: “A-list” international film festivals outside of Africa (discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 3); African film festivals based in Africa (discussed in Chapter 4); African film festivals outside of the continent (discussed in Chapter 5); and international film festivals based in Africa (discussed in Chapters 6 and 7). Appendixes with lists of and information about the different kinds of festivals appear at the end of the book, including one on “Black Film Festivals.” Even though the latter are beyond the scope of this project, which focuses on festivals that claim to curate “African” rather than “black” films and identities, as I show, race remains an important category for analysis at “African” film festivals. Although some significant similarities can be drawn along both geographical (inside/outside Africa) and conceptual lines (international/Africanfocused content), I suggest other festival typologies that cut across this mapping, and also argue that because new forms of mobility and media are eroding and


redefining global cartographies, we have to see “Africa” as a series of “intellectual and cultural infrastructures” that are not simply confined to the continent (Enwezor 2008: 163). Chapters 1, 2, and 3 explore the representation of “Africa,” and films and filmmakers from Africa, within the context of “A-list” film festivals—those that are considered the global gold standard—focusing, in particular, on Cannes and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR). I attempt to identify certain precursors and forerunners to these festivals, which began in 1932 with the Venice Film Festival, so as to situate them not as something entirely new, but within a continuum of European ideas and practices of curation and colonialism. While I am generally critical of the modes of curation I see dominating at festivals such as Cannes and the IFFR, I draw on historical and ethnographic methodologies to uncover the heterotopias, festive excitement, and (dis)sensus communis evident since their inception, and through which different stakeholder groups have redefined their functions in particular moments, signaling shifting political and social allegiances. At the end of Chapter 3, I look at a new generation of African film curators at “A-list” festivals who are attempting to disrupt some of the problematic, elitist modes of curation that have operated in the past. This also provides the opportunity to dwell on the meanings of curation in a rapidly changing world in which there is sometimes little distinction among curators, critics, and audiences. Taking the history of FESPACO (Festival Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou) as its case study, Chapter 4 explores the origins of film festivals on the African continent in the 1960s, and looks at how such festivals were founded as statements of independence in response to prior curation of “Africa” from outside of the continent. I focus, in particular, on FESPACO’s attempts to curate “African audiences” for “African films” and explore, in this way, the complicated, contextual factors behind curatorial tastemaking and audience-building. Chapter 5 analyzes the meanings and values of those dedicated African film festivals founded outside the African continent from the late 1970s to the present day. I contextualize the development of these festivals within the broader post-WWII landscape of increased migration by Africans, particularly to Western Europe, interpreting these festivals in two broad ways: first, as relating to representational politics around the concept of “Africa” (particularly as curated through “A-list” film festivals and mainstream media); and, second, as relating to the increasing presence of diverse African diasporas in the post-WWII era. In the latter sense, I also read these festivals alternately as responses to, and expressions of, African immigrant minorities in Europe. I take as my main case study the Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival in Spain and the conflicts that have arisen through and around it, thereby underlining the situated and dynamic nature of every festival. Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 focus on the proliferation of “international” film festivals in Africa from the late 1990s. I analyze, in particular, the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa and the Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania, and—to a lesser extent—the Rwanda Film Festival, Dockanema in Mozambique, and Amakula Kampala in Uganda. I argue that many festival director-curators based in Africa have been motivated by the structural and


institutional barriers to a certain kind of “international” film being accessible to local audiences, but have also found ways of incorporating local participant perspectives into their curatorial principles. At the same time, I reveal participants’ sense of ownership over the festivals. Chapter 7 delves more deeply into an analysis of two specific editions of two very different international film festivals that take place on the African continent—the Durban International Film Festival and the FiSahara Film Festival in the Sahrawi refugee camp of Dakhla in Algeria—as a way of exploring festive excitement and (dis)sensus communis in action, revealing that ultimately no final statements can be made about the “nature” of film festivals or the meanings of particular films, on the African continent or elsewhere, because these will always be defined in situ. Film festival scholars have argued that, in a globalizing world, network theory is a productive way of analyzing festivals (Elsaesser 2005, De Valck 2007, Wong 2011). However, as I will show, what undeniably makes the network of people involved with films by Africans distinct from the broader international festival networks is the limited size of the African network, and the relative lack of support for African films and filmmakers of all kinds. This means that rather than conceptualizing this network in conventional terms, it might rather be thought of as one filled with the kind of instability and precariousness that media ethnographer Brian Larkin sees as underwriting media technologies and mediated experiences in Africa in general (2008). This, in turn, means that much more pressure is put on the individual, human elements of this particular network, perhaps in a way not unrelated to the compression, in Nigerian video movies, of “politics, wider social conflict, and material inequities into relations between people” that is the hallmark of precarious economic conditions (Larkin 2008: 171). Many of the initiatives supporting films and filmmakers from Africa today are acts of personal sacrifice and identity-creation by committed, eccentric individuals in the absence of strong, robust institutions. This goes for Nollywood films, too, which—according to Moradewun Adejunmobi—have relied on “individual entrepreneurs rather than global corporations” for placement within “global networks” (2014: 88). This is one of the reasons that Adejunmobi refers to Nigerian filmmaking as a “minor transnational practice,” in spite of UNESCO hailing it as the second largest film industry in the world (Adejunmobi 2007, 2014). The fates of trained and self-taught filmmakers from Africa are linked in many ways. Both kinds of filmmaker—however different—suffer from lack of resources, and from marginalization within a global neoliberal capitalist economy. The human endeavor, sweat, labor, and passion that continues to go into the production, distribution, curation, and exhibition of African films of all kinds thus makes it more difficult to apply Latour’s “actor network theory” (ANT)—with his “rejection of any conceptual distinction between human and non-human actors” (De Valck 2007: 30)—to the African film world. This is the reason I have chosen to focus not on films in this book, but on human actors—and particularly on the relationship between curators and participants as coauthors of festivals. As Anthony Giddens has said: “One can sometimes speak of collectivities as if they were agents, but this is only metaphorical . . . [T]he only true agents in history are human individuals” (quoted in Rosenau 2003: 18). I hope to show, through my


focus on some very unusual film festivals and some unorthodox curators, filmmakers, and spectators, that while film festivals in Africa and films and filmmakers from Africa may continue to be marginalized within the global circuit, certain people are challenging the current “dismal world hegemony” that has been legitimized by “elite” festivals (Fujiwara 2013: 220).

1

Early Curatorial Practices, European Colonialism, and the Rise of “A-list” Film Festivals

A Species of Origin: Proto Film Festivals If one situates the earliest film festivals within a two-millennia history of practices of collecting, curating, and displaying objects in Europe, their participation in “the writing of specific colonial and national histories” and the “universalizing of bourgeois views and visions” (Morgan 2013: 23) becomes overwhelmingly apparent. In his history of the museum, Jeffrey Abt locates its etymology in mouseion, an ancient Greek word referencing cult sites dedicated to muses. The early museum was a site imbued with aura, the home of original objects that could not be found elsewhere. Aristotle was the first on record to start collecting specimens and, in this practice, he “formulated an empirical methodology requiring social and physical structures to bring into contiguity learned inquiry and the evidence necessary to pursue it” (Abt 2011: 116). This is an important point, conjuring as it does the will to create knowledge that was also one of the foundational motivations behind the construction of museums. However, collecting and curating practices have always exceeded the desire to pass on knowledge to others through the content of the exhibits themselves; they have at the same time been invested in teaching “curated ways of seeing and behaving” (Morgan 2013: 23), forms of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion. Whereas the world’s first known public museum—the Museum of Alexandria (founded circa 280 BCE)—initially venerated objects as religious or spiritual items, with the shift from Hellenic to Roman civilization the new emphasis was on the display of “looted statuary and paintings from conquered lands” as a way of signifying power, status, and military might (Abt 2011: 117). It was in this new context of empire and conquest that the word “curator” was first used in Latin, referring to people tasked with looking after statues displayed in public (ibid.); “cura” in Latin means to “care.” Later, this Latin word was adopted into Middle English to signify those people in the clergy who acted as assistants to vicars and priests, and whose main responsibility was the pastoral care of people in the parish. While


today the words “curator” and “programmer” are often used interchangeably for the work performed by the people who select and present the films at festivals, “programmer” used to be far more prevalent. It seems to have been adopted from radio and television broadcasting language and gestures towards the handling of mechanically reproduced material. The word “program” is derived from the Greek “programma,” which originally referred to giving “written notice”—in other words, to publicize something. Besides these early connotations of marketing, the word “program” today summons the idea of computer programming and tasks that are technical and coded. It is for this reason that I prefer the word “curate” to describe the work of people involved in the shaping of film festival content. This work demands a different kind of “care”—not usually of original objects, since film is a mechanically reproduced medium,1 but of people and the presentation of their creations, a point to which I will return later. The distinction between “auratic objects” and “art” began a long time before the age of mechanical reproduction. A new way of looking at objects was cultivated during the Roman Empire, developing citizens into observers of “art” rather than participants in worship. Bassett suggests that “[e]mphasis on the aesthetic appeal of cult images neutralized their sacred qualities and in so doing made them legitimate objects of profane aesthetic contemplation of the Christian viewer” (quoted in Abt 2011: 119, my emphasis). This paved the way for the proliferation of the practices of collecting and displaying objects in the Renaissance, when explorers and traders returned to Europe with plundered or bartered goods that they wished to show off in cabinets and cases (ibid.). These goods included a mixture of natural specimens (naturalia), human-made pieces such as coins and medals (artificialia), and paintings and statues (ibid.: 121). Again, all of this activity went hand in glove with the will to create and document knowledge, evidenced by “an outpouring of books that catalogued, classified, and illustrated the findings” (ibid.: 120). The study of the natural specimens would develop into the field of the natural sciences; the study of artificialia into the field of antiquarian studies and later history; and the study of paintings and statues into the rise of theories of the aesthetic. With the shift from the Roman imperial era to the Renaissance, these objects moved from public to private domains. As Abt points out, “Whereas statuary and painting were displayed in outdoor or readily accessible settings during the Roman and Byzantine eras, during the Renaissance the presentation of such works moved indoors or to less approachable locations” (2011: 121). The theme of conquest also reasserted itself, with regents using collections, or their patronage of collections, as ways of expressing their “symbolic mastery of the greater world” (Kaufmann, quoted in Abt 2011: 123). The movement towards the creation of public museums and galleries and related kinds of experience erupted out of the English, North American, and French revolutions, with their insistence on social equality. This resulted in many previously private collections being opened to the public in the 1700s. A particularly dramatic example of this is embodied in an exhibition held in August 1793 at the Museum Français, the new name given to the Grand Gallery of the Louvre Palace that had recently been appropriated by the French revolutionaries. The revolutionaries showed off the sumptuous paintings and objects they had taken from the monarchy at this

Early Curatorial Practices 31

exhibition, which formed part of a Festival of National Unity to celebrate the achievements of the revolution in bringing power to the people (Abt 2011: 128). Rejecting religion, the revolutionaries carefully ensured that their curation of the works incorporated viewers into a world where a certain level of distance would encourage an appreciation not of the “spiritual” values of the works, but of the historical development of aesthetic styles over time. In this way, an individuation of both viewers and the makers of the goods contributed to a new sense of democratic equality and participation. But museums, given their owners’ interest not only in imparting education but in the status and prestige of spectacular display, have long been bedfellows of conquest. It did not take long before France’s proliferating public museums in the early nineteenth century were filled with the spoils of Napoleon’s expeditions. Similarly, the world fairs that originated in London in 1851 and then spread like wildfire to the rest of Europe, Asia, Australia, the United States, and North Africa were not innocent events but spectacular imperial strategies, in light of what Robert Rydell calls a “crisis of confidence” that was sweeping the Victorian world at the time (2011: 149). The race was to possess the entire world and to prove that possession by putting it on display. The world fairs, also known as the Colonial and Universal Exhibitions, had close relationships with museums in many cases, but they were, like film festivals, relatively short-lived events that, nonetheless, brought many people together in one concentrated space and time. They were extremely popular, with the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition attracting over 50 million people across its six months. Rydell thus argues that it is no exaggeration to claim that the world fairs “shaped both the form and substance of the modern world” (2011: 136). Again, what was important to organizers here was not simply relaying the content of these exhibitions to visitors, but training them in new ways of looking at, thinking about, and behaving in the world. The version of “worldliness” curated and cultivated at the fairs is described as follows by Rydell, through the compilation of the work of a range of scholars: The world fairs created a highly mediated and constructed version of reality intended to make exhibition-goers self-regulating and to outfit them with “an encyclopedic urge” to possess the world through knowledge of its component parts (Corbey 1993: 360–2). . . . What Mitchell adds to this analysis is an insistence that exhibitions were not merely “representations of the world, but the world itself being ordered up as an endless exhibition.” Exhibitionary representations, in other words, are “part of a method of order and truth essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world” that gives them primary importance in defining modernity (Mitchell 1992: 290, 314). (2011: 141, my emphasis)

These fairs put the world on show. As with the recently constructed category of “world cinema,” which asks viewers to prepare themselves for a particular kind of global address and to tap into worldly desire (Andrew 2010, Betz 2010),2 presenting the particularities of distinct cultures and experiences was not the point of the world fairs so much as imparting to visitors a sense that the world was—quite literally—at their fingertips.


What was fundamentally different about the world fairs compared to museums was that they involved the display not simply of objects but of real, living human beings, through their construction of large-scale “villages” claiming to display “life” in different parts of the planet. As Catherine Hodeir says of the way the different races were represented at the 1931 Universal Exhibition in Paris, “the ‘white’ European was culture personified, the ‘yellow’ Asian in an upper middle range between nature and culture, the ‘Arab from North Africa’ in a lower middle range, and the ‘black’ African was closest to nature” (2002: 238). Black Africans were shown as being “representative of a former stage of human development” (ibid.: 234), as not being fully human. Made to dress in “leopard-skin loin-cloths” and act in “primitive” ways, they fascinated journalists of the time and their photographs appeared in thousands of publications (ibid.: 237). As Hodeir points out: A representative photo in Paris Soir depicts the African “native” alongside zebras and monkeys from the Vincennes zoo. This association between African “natives” and African animals related not only to their mode of display, but to the evolutionary narrative of the civilizing process. (ibid.)

In reality, however, the African people appearing in the Exhibitions led very different lives outside of their performance time, wearing “Western” clothes, eating European food, and attempting to learn about their surroundings on the tiny salaries they were provided (Hodeir 2002, Rydell 2011). The evidence shows that the “traditional” activities they performed during the fairs were fabricated for the benefit of visitors. As Armstrong argues, the colonial villages were deliberately curated as chaotic and disorganized to make the official fair sites seem that much more civilized.3 Scholars, performance artists, and curators have in recent years attempted to deal with this schism between appearance and experience at the world fairs by suggesting that the colonized participants were, in different ways, able to return or subvert the gazes that attempted to fix them. This was the point, for example, of Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia’s film The Couple in the Cage (1993), and of a show organized by anthropologists Kevin and Michelle Smith about John Tevi, an African man who helped to organize African participation at the 1893 and 1901 Chicago fairs (see Smith and Smith 2001). Rydell cautions us, however, against “pushing this line of argumentation too far,” and he relates the tragic story of Ota Benga, a so-called “pygmy” who was brought along with 20 of his people to be put on display at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair as part of an anthropological exhibit. After Ota threw a chair at a woman at a fundraising dinner at the American Museum, he was confined first to New York’s Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, then sent to a seminary in Virginia where one day he went out into the forests and shot himself dead (2011: 148).4 Black Africans were often treated brutally by the curators of the world fairs. Still, the fairs can be interpreted as forerunners of the world’s first film festivals, which strategically conflated the interest in live gatherings that the fairs sparked with curiosity in the relatively new technological medium of film.


The First Film Festivals The world’s first film festival—the Venice Film Festival (Mostra Cinematographica di Venezia)—was founded by Benito Mussolini in 1932, as part of the Venice Art Biennale, at the midpoint of the “Ventennio” or Fascist period in Italy that lasted from roughly 1922 to 1943. As SooJeong Ahn suggests, this festival—founded in the inter-war period—needs to be distinguished from the European film festivals that were established after World War II, in part as urban regeneration projects, such as Cannes (which was due to begin on September 1, 1939, the day Hitler marched on Poland, but had to be postponed until after the war, in 1946); Locarno (1946); Edinburgh (1947); and Berlin (1950) (2012: 6–7). Similarly, Marla Stone has argued that the Venice Film Festival cannot be analyzed in isolation from Mussolini’s particular vision for Italy, and his attendant Fascist cultural experiments (1999: 184). The secretary general of the Venice Biennale in 1932, Antonio Maraini, prided Italy on being “the first to place cinema alongside the other major arts,” suggesting the elevation of cinema to the status of “art” (quoted in Stone 1999: 184). At the same time, the festival was inaugurated on a Fascist platform of “aesthetic pluralism” and the democratization of audiences—the desire to forge larger publics, greater audiences, and more fervent support for Fascism, through the erosion of elitist “high” cultures and the validation of popular cultures (ibid.: 185). This represented a significant break between the early days of the Biennale (founded in 1895), when it was orchestrated by Venetian elites, and its transformations in the late 1920s, when it was taken over by the Fascist government (ibid.: 185–6). These transformations provide a fascinating example of how the arrival of the mass, mechanical medium of film onto the international stage disrupted previous curatorial approaches to art. The idea of “aesthetic pluralism” and the mixing of people of different social classes occasioned a shock to the upper classes, who had curated the Biennale on the basis of the “isolation of the fine arts from the pressures of mass society and politics” (ibid.: 186). One can only imagine their reaction to the inclusion, in the 1932 festival, of Hollywood musicals, as well as to the 25,000 spectators the festival attracted (ibid.: 187, 191).5 In such a way, the Fascist regime facilitated changing norms of participation in such events, as people were encouraged to think of themselves not as connoisseurs with expertise, but as cultural consumers open to experience (ibid.: 187). Nevertheless, “the dictatorship at once pursued the legitimacy and continuity it found in elite culture and the cultural consensus possible in a successful mobilization of mass culture” (ibid., my emphasis); the venues chosen and ticket prices ensured a predominantly middleand upper-class audience (ibid.: 194) until “growing gestures toward working-class attendance during the course of the 1930s” (ibid.: 202). The Fascist government’s cultivation of new audiences for the arts cannot be read innocently. This work was part of an elaborate strategy to secure support for the ruling ideology. In the early years of the Venice Film Festival, the organizing team adopted an extremely open and diverse curatorial approach to draw large audiences (ibid.: 192). Over the course of the 1930s, however, the nationalist and propagandist elements of the festival grew as the Fascist government sought


to secure funding and prestige for Italian filmmaking which, after flourishing in the pre-WWI era, had become almost nonexistent by the early 1930s (ibid.: 194). Along with the desire to stimulate commercial success for Italian films came Mussolini’s new imperialistic endeavors and, most notably, the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. These two goals—the promotion of Italian film, and colonial conquests— increasingly coincided in the films programmed for and prized at the festival. As Stone says, After 1935, with the conquest of Ethiopia and the declaration of empire, Fascism’s foregrounding of “empire” as a way to convey messages about the nation and race was reflected in the prizes given: in this period, the Biennale introduced a prize for best colonial film, and films of bombastic propaganda received the bulk of the prizes. (2002: 295)

Sorlin agrees that “by 1935, with the institution of awards reserved for Italian films only, the festival was used to promote Italian films” (quoted in Wong 2011: 38). The content of many of those films engaged in the glorification of Italians, past and present. Three such films were: Scipione L’Africano (dir. Carmine Gallone, 1937), which won the Mussolini Cup at the festival in 1937 (Wong 2011: 39); Luciano Serra Pilota (dir. Goffredo Alessandrini, 1938), which shared the same prize at the 1938 festival (Wong 2011: 39); and Bengasi (dir. Augusto Genina, 1942), w inner of the Mussolini Cup at the 1942 edition of the festival.6 These films were produced by national film organizations—the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and La Cineteca Nazionale—during a time in which the government made huge investments in film as a medium of nationalist propaganda (Hay 1987, Landy 1998, Ricci 2008). Scipione L’Africano is a film that tells the story of the Second Punic War (218– 201 BC), idealizing the defeat of the Carthaginian (African) hero Hannibal at the hands of the Roman general Scipio during the battle of Zama in 202 BC. It was, at the time, the most expensive film ever made in Italy, costing 12.6 million lira (Hay 1987: 155), and it involved, in addition to its main cast and lavish sets, thousands of extras and hundreds of elephants (many of which were butchered to death in the making of the film) (Ricci 2008: 102). Despite the film’s historical setting, however, Ricci argues that it can clearly “be read in relationship to Italy’s current military campaign in Africa,” and he even draws on essays about the film by Italian third- and fourth-graders in 1935 to prove his point (ibid.: 97). The film, he argues, “invites audiences to (re)live their imperialist present as a figurative return to their imagined historical roots in Roman antiquity” (ibid.: 98). Even the Minister of Corporations at the time, Giuseppe Bottai, explicitly encouraged people to read Scipio as Mussolini (ibid.: 99–100). The blurring of film fiction and reality was heightened through Mussolini’s visit to the film set, where he was greeted with thunderous chanting of “Duce, Duce” (Hay 1987: 155). Many of the chanting extras, acting as Roman soldiers, had been drafted to fight in the Ethiopian campaign of 1935 (ibid.). Luciano Serra Pilota, in contrast to Scipione L’Africano, is set in the era contemporary to its making, the 1930s. Nevertheless, although the temporal setting of these films differs by more than 2,000 years, the imperialist impulse behind their


production and their prizing was identical. In Luciano Serra Pilota the eponymous hero is a celebrated WWI pilot who fights in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (October 1935 to May 1936), which is romanticized in the film. Italy’s victory in this war was jubilantly celebrated by Italians, exactly forty years after the Ethiopians had defeated the Italians in the First Italo-Ethiopian War (1895–1896). Italy’s aggressive invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s contravened Article X of the League of Nations, of which it was a member nation, but it suffered no consequences until the liberation of Ethiopia during WWII. What is most striking about Bengasi (1942), in turn, is that it omits the Africans altogether and focuses on the story of the Italian settlers of contemporaneous Libya and the British against whom they fought in WWII. Just as the makers of Scipione L’Africano contrasted Italians and Africans according to the tropes of “order and disorder, discipline and rebellion, duty and desire” (Landy 1998: 119), in this film the Italians were glorified and the British (and the Allies in general) demonized. While suggesting that Africans were entirely irrelevant to the story, the directors did not erase the theme of imperialism, but rather made an argument of it: The film stresses the hypocrisy and corruption of British imperialism, comparing it to the civilizing nature of Italian imperialism. According to this reading, Italian imperialism in North Africa was creative: it built cities that made the desert fertile. British imperialism was destructive, dependent upon raping the land and abusing the natives. As the Italian troops retreated and promised to return, the natives thanked them and bade them a sad farewell. (Stone 2002: 304)

According to some scholars, the period between WWI and WWII was characterized by European anxiety about their colonies and a gradual winding down of imperialistic adventures. Conklin, for example, sees the post-WWI era as bringing about a major turning point in the French attitude towards its West African colonies, from one of believing in its “civilizing mission” to one of skepticism and opportunistic exploitation (1997). As Conklin shows, colonialism was an expensive undertaking, and in the traumatic and impoverished aftermath of WWI European nations began to reassess the costs of their overseas “possessions.” Mussolini’s belated imperial adventures in Africa thus need to be understood in relation to the Berlin Conference of 1885–1886, at which European (and certain other) nations gathered to divide up amongst themselves the as yet uncolonized parts of the African continent. At that time, the major players with the most substantial colonies in Africa were Britain, France, Portugal, and Germany. Italy came away from the conference with a small portion of current-day Ethiopia and a small fraction of current-day Somalia (then called “Italian Somaliland”). The power Mussolini wielded over the imaginations of many Italians was completely enmeshed with the way he attempted to claim a renewed standing for Italy on the European stage, and his invasion of Ethiopia in the mid-1930s was just one method he used in an effort to “restore” Italy to its former imperial (Roman) glory. His creation of the Venice Film Festival can be interpreted in the same light. The founding of the second-oldest film festival in the world, Cannes, in 1939 thus has to be considered in part a response to new Italian conquests in Africa at a


time of French unease about France’s own African colonies. Why, for example, would the French have censored Africans from making their own films during this period if they were not anxious about what the African perspectives would reveal? In 1934, the government introduced the Laval Decree in West Africa, which stipulated that any would-be African filmmaker had to submit his or her script to the French authorities for prior vetting (Diawara 1992: 22–24). No script made the grade, and it was only in the early 1960s, during decolonization, that Africans living in former French colonies such as Momar Thiam (Senegal), Mustapha Alassane (Niger), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (Senegal), Sebastien Kamba (CongoBrazzaville), Timité Bassori (Ivory Coast), and Ousmane Sembene (Senegal) were able to start making films.7 Furthermore, as I will show, France’s conflict with its prize colonial possession in Africa—Algeria—brought out extreme acts of censorship, exercised through the Cannes Film Festival. While scholars acknowledge that the first film festivals were deeply imbricated with enterprises of nation building (De Valck 2007: 88ff; Wong 2011: 11, 159), they have largely explained these festivals’ origins not as exercises in colonialism and colonial rivalry, but as acts of resistance against Hollywood’s growing dominance in the inter-war era. As De Valck points out, film manufacturers in the US first created a monopoly in 1908 with the initiation of the Motion Picture Patent Company (MPPC) (2007: 88–89). But it was in the 1920s, in the inter-war period, that the “Big Five” studios in Hollywood (Warner, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and RKO) achieved real ascendancy, by vertically integrating all aspects of filmmaking—production, distribution, and exhibition (ibid.). A stand-off occurred, particularly between the US and France. Already in the early 1900s, the United States—in an act of savvy protectionism—ratified the Dingley Bill to stop any French films from being shown in its country. The paranoia about the potential popularity of French films and their threat to the United States’ own film export market returned in the post-WWII period, with the French-American Blum-Byrnes trade agreement of 1945 (part of the Marshall Plan), which restricted the screening of French films in France to four weeks in every quarter year. The subsequent protests of 10,000 people in Paris resulted in the US changing the agreement, but only slightly, to five weeks per quarter year (Dovey 2011). Britain had also been at loggerheads with Hollywood; in 1927 it created The Cinematograph Act (or Quota Act) to promote “British films against Hollywood’s prevalence in the domestic British market and the colonies” (Garritano 2013: 203n6). And, as Wong notes, “By 1938, in a desperate measure to compete with Hollywood, the importation of American films [in Italy] was banned” (2011: 38). These conflicts, which De Valck calls the “film wars between Hollywood and Europe” (2007: 88), continued throughout the twentieth century and have reemerged in the twenty-first. At Cannes 2013, almost 5,500 European film professionals signed a petition to preserve Europe’s “cultural exception” in its trade talks and agreements with the US. To the relief of many, the European Parliament voted in favor of excluding “audiovisual services from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership ‘in order to protect the cultural and linguistic diversity of EU countries’” (Rosser 2013).


What De Valck and many other film festival scholars have not addressed to the same extent, however, is the fractured and competitive identity of Europe at the time film festivals began, as well as the ways in which the sense of “colonization” Europeans felt at the hands of the North Americans in the first half of the twentieth century translated into intense domination of their own colonies. As Mamdani (2001) has illustrated, in a very different context, a sense of victimization often leads to the need to assert power, and this is precisely what seems to have happened in Europe’s relationships with Africa in the 1930s, the decade in which film festivals were initiated. Of course, the connections between film and imperialism started much earlier than that, as Robert Stam points out: The beginnings of cinema [in the late nineteenth century] . . . coincided precisely with the very height of imperialism. (Of all the celebrated “coincidences”—of the beginnings of cinema with the beginnings of psychoanalysis, with the rise of nationalism, with the emergence of consumerism—it is this coincidence with imperialism that has been least studied.) (2000: 19)

In terms of cinema at this time, North Americans and Europeans were often brothers in arms, ensuring the production, distribution, and exhibition of racist films across the world (ibid.: 20). Black Africans were depicted as barbaric, while whites were framed as heroes, bringing civilization to the “heart of darkness” (Dovey 2009: 28).8 It is impossible to understand the rise of film festivals, initially a European phenomenon, in isolation from colonialism and white supremacy as well as the relationships and conflicts between colonial European metropoles. All of the early “A-list” European film festivals—Venice (founded 1932), Cannes (founded in 1946 after its false start in 1939), Locarno (founded 1946), Edinburgh (founded 1947), and Berlin (initiated in 1950, at the beginning of the Cold War, with the support of the US, as an anti-communist event)—were created on a European continent that was not only at war with itself, but that felt the need (partly as a result of these wars, and the sense of threat the US posed) to assert its superiority over other parts of the world, particularly its colonies in “darkest” Africa. It is strange that references to Africa have been so sparse (and inaccurate) in the field of film festival studies, given that scholars have shown that many of the world’s most important festivals in Europe have been fundamentally related to—even symptomatic of—issues of power, patronage, control, and censorship (De Valck 2007, Wong 2011). Cannes and the IFFR in the Context of the “A-List” Film Festivals It would be unproductive and, in fact, impossible, to group together all the major “A-list” film festivals in any discussion of their representation of Africa, African filmmakers, and African film.9 According to a 2013 survey I conducted of African filmmakers,10 it was consistently these “A-list” festivals that respondents said they would be most delighted to have their films screened at, because of the prestige (symbolic capital) and the economic capital that might flow from this


recognition.11 Despite the fact that African film is considered by many to be the most marginalized regional cinema within the international film festival circuit (De Valck 2007, Wong 2011, Cousins 2013), and many black Africans continue to experience racism or paternalism on the circuit, filmmakers from all over the continent and the diaspora still aspire to be included within these prestigious, global events. In the words of Carmela Garritano, to dismiss such ambitions would be to disregard Africans’ “efforts to overcome their marginalization and participate fully as producers of their own cultural forms in the field of global culture” (2013: 14). Aspiration to this global standard, and the attempt to “transcend the materiality” of one’s local context, is the criterion, she argues (via James Ferguson), for defining a certain kind of global professionalism (ibid.: 102). And why should Africans not aspire to the global professional standards in filmmaking that would see their films achieve both local and international success? While Nigerians, for example, are proud of their achievements through Nollywood, they also have their sights set on attracting broader international audiences beyond the Nigerian diaspora and Nigeria was, accordingly, one of the first African countries to establish an independent presence at the Cannes Film Festival. De Valck (2007) argues that global geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural shifts have resulted in the major, “A-list” film festivals moving through three distinct phases. The first phase began in 1932 (with the founding of the Venice Film Festival) and ended in the late 1960s; the second began in the late 1960s and ran to the early 1990s; and the third started in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The main way that De Valck distinguishes these phases is through the nature of their programming or curatorial approaches. In the first phase, festivals were established in Europe as showcases of national cinemas, through which certain countries were invited to submit their best annual films. As De Valck emphasizes, this focus on national European cinemas was a strategic commercial tactic. This was the era of the first “talkies,” or sound movies, and the immediate impulse in the industry was towards standardization through the use of English dialogue. Movies in diverse languages, needing to be subtitled or dubbed—the kind the European film industries were producing—did not present a very strong business model in the face of the American (and English-language) onslaught. Festivals, with their celebration of national cinemas in a variety of different national languages, thus acted to protect the European film industries against the English-language dominance of Hollywood. At the same time, however, the most prestigious festivals established in this period—Venice, Cannes, Locarno, and Berlin—tended to allow some collaboration with Hollywood, in order to benefit from the American industry’s glamour and economic muscle and thus attract more press and media attention. The idea of film programming or curation as an artistic practice in its own right first arose out of global, left-wing political protest and dissent in the late 1960s, which brought several film festivals to a standstill (discussed in detail later in this chapter). These disruptions marked the beginnings of an entirely new approach to festival programming. No longer did festivals simply accept films that national cinema offices submitted; the programs now began to be actively and carefully shaped—to be properly curated.12 De Valck calls this second phase of film festival


development the “age of the programmer” (2007: 167). It was primarily a response to two things—the nationalism and geopolitical diplomacy of previous festivals, and the festivals’ commercially-oriented courting of Hollywood to add glamour to their events. Now, De Valck says, “cultural value was no longer tied to the idea of film as national accomplishment, but generated for the films and their filmmakers themselves, as art and artists” (ibid.). The rise of the European film festival programmer— in concert with the European film “auteur”—thus took place at a time in which national, colonial, and bureaucratic orthodoxies were being questioned and undermined. The value placed on individual, subjective vision at this moment in world history is not to be interpreted as individualistic, perhaps, but rather as a response to the didactic and authoritarian nationalism that preceded it. Finally, the third phase of film festivals, according to De Valck, can be called the “age of festival directors,” an era of growing professionalization, institutionalization, and internationalization of festivals that began in the early 1990s and continues today (2007: 191ff). Many scholars have argued that “A-list” festivals have worked both in collaboration and competition with one another (Iordanova 2013). To maintain their status as members of the circuit, “A-list” festivals, which have the pressure of being expected to screen a large number of world premieres and attract leading filmmakers, need to prove that they are similar enough to one another to meet global standards, but sufficiently different from one another to have their own unique raison d’être. De Valck (2007) uses Latour’s theory of ANT (actor network theory) to make sense, particularly, of the collaborations,13 while Wong “reads the interconnections of film festivals as both a system and a dynamic process” in which they form part of a network but at the same time constantly compete with one another (2011: 20). Ruoff adds that “We could create a genealogy of film festivals—to go alongside critic and programmer Quintín’s delightful ‘festival galaxy’ (2009)—Venice begat its rebel son Cannes, Cannes begat its antithesis, the Festival du Film Maudit, and so on” (2012a: 7). Director of the Edinburgh Film Festival Chris Fujiwara takes a more critical stance, calling attention to “the role of film festivals—including, and especially including, the good festivals—in stabilizing and legitimizing a dismal world hegemony” (2013: 220). Similarly, Asian film specialist Abé Markus Nornes characterizes the international “A-list” festival circuit as a “short circuit,” for its “indifference to” and “ignorance of ” those alternative festivals deemed of little industry importance and which do not “grant Europe the status of subject” (2013: 151). The festivals on which I largely focus in this book are part of just such an alternative field of festivals that “may never sit comfortably on that ‘A-List’ of festivals” but which “have helped transform the film cultures both locally and regionally” (ibid.: 153). But before I come to explore them, it is important to show whether, and how, the “A-list” is indeed a “short circuit” when it comes to African film, and to understand what festival organizers in Africa were responding to when they created events such as FESPACO. In the following two chapters, I explore and analyze the representation of African film and filmmakers at two very different “A-list” film festivals—Cannes and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR)—as a way of approaching this question. First, however, I need to briefly contextualize the divergent positions of these two festivals within the history of “A-list” film festivals.


Of the “A-list” festivals, Cannes is widely acknowledged to be the most celebrated, prestigious, and frequented in the world (Latil 2005: 7). It is known for its veneration of the medium of cinema as an art form, the heady mix of its glamorous Côte d’Azur location with the bling world of Hollywood (resulting in its nickname, “Velvet Vice”), and a serious focus on the business of filmmaking, particularly through its Marché du Cinéma, which was founded in 1959 and incorporated fully within the festival in 1983 (De Valck 2007: 113). Founded in the exuberant postWWII period, after a false start in September 1939, the festival constructed its origins as divergent from the fascism of the Venice Film Festival by initially calling itself the festival of the “free world” (Latil 2005: 83).14 This self-awarded label was, however, somewhat hypocritical, given that France was, at the time, emerging from the shame of Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler during WWII, and was also still clinging to its colonial “possessions” in Asia and Africa. As will become apparent in the following analysis, political tensions within France asserted themselves, particularly throughout the early editions of Cannes, sometimes in violent ways. Cannes was initiated a few years after the Cinémathèque Française was founded, in 1936, demanding “special treatment for cinema in France” (Wong 2011: 39). As French curator and festival director Jérôme Baron says, “I think that the cinephilic tradition in France is something very particular. Because for us cinema isn’t something entertaining, it’s already something serious” (pers. comm.). He points out that there are, today, 400 film festivals in France and that it is only during Cannes that the French film industry migrates south. General Delegate of the Cannes Film Festival from 1978, and its president from 2001 to 2014, Gilles Jacob goes as far as to say: “The Cannes Film Festival, that’s to say cinema itself ” (quoted in Latil 2005: 5). France has consistently worked to make its national identity synonymous with the idea of cinema, and—as we will see—this has had very particular effects on its relationships with its former African colonies, too. As many have noted, Cannes is characteristic of those film festivals that operate as touristic sites of luxury and leisure (Frodon 2013: 205, Ostrowska 2012). The choice of Cannes as the location of the festival was not automatic, however. The French government considered the possibilities for extending the tourism season through holding the festival in a range of different French cities, including Biarritz, Vichy, Deauville, and even Algiers (then part of France’s overseas colonies) (Latil 2005: 37). Eventually it boiled down to a competition between the seaside towns of Biarritz and Cannes, and when Biarritz was not chosen, a group of well-known filmmakers and film critics ran their own counter-festival there, in 1949 and 1950, called “Le Festival du Film Maudit” (The Festival of Spurned Films), with the aim of screening films rejected by Cannes and Venice (Latil 2005: 38–9). Today “Cannes” is a byword for glitz, glamour, and exclusivity. This exclusivity has two sides. On the one side are the rich and famous celebrities who descend on Cannes during the festival, not to engage with cinema so much as to exploit the festival’s prestige. On the other side are the people (some of them also rich and famous) who come to Cannes to work and to take cinema seriously (if such a distinction can be made, since this “labor” and “seriousness” involves a hearty dose of leisure and frivolity in itself). The festival specifically calls itself “an event for film industry professionals,”15 and has a rainbow of differently colored accreditations


relating to people’s profession (as filmmakers, sales agents, media lawyers) as well as status.16 The official screenings of the (usually) 20 films in competition take place in the Théâtre Lumière in the Palais des Festivals (built in 1983, as the festival expanded), and one needs an invitation or ticket as well as one’s own accreditation in order to attend them. The process of acquiring the tickets is difficult and not transparent; even accredited festivaliers have to log on to the Cannes website a few days in advance to apply for tickets, only to find that, usually, all of the tickets have mysteriously disappeared by that time. Although people daily besiege the Palais des Festivals with placards requesting tickets, the festival makes it clear that invitations are “personal and non-transferable and legal action may be taken against persons transferring tickets even when no monetary exchange is involved.”17 Parties and events are just as difficult to attend, also usually relying on invitations. The only public screenings that are offered by the festival take place at the “Cinéma de la Plage” (Cinema on the Beach). Cannes is thus exemplary of the exclusive, hierarchical aspects of Foucault’s heterotopia, and a world away from film festivals such as the “A-list” Toronto International Film Festival, which prides itself on taking the business of cinema seriously while also being an audience festival, accessible to the public. But Cannes has not been immune to change over time and its elitism and exclusivity have inspired protest at specific moments, particularly in May 1968, heralding what De Valck calls the second phase of film festivals. This was a time in which young filmmakers, inspired by the broader leftist revolutionary movements sweeping the globe (many of which were inspired, in turn, by the decolonization movements in Africa and Asia), sought to challenge the conservatism of film festivals, and their collusion with Hollywood. The twenty-first Cannes Film Festival, scheduled for May 10–24, 1968, was doomed even before it began. Earlier that year, in February, the French Minister of Culture, André Malraux, was confronted by

Figure 1.1 “Cinéma de la Plage” at the Cannes Film Festival


widespread public opposition when he attempted to fire Henri Langlois, cofounder and director of the Cinémathèque Française. As De Valck notes, “The dismissal of Langlois was seen as a repressive act of the state, meant to restrict artistic freedom” (2007: 61). In response, some of the French New Wave filmmakers, whom Langlois had nurtured and educated at the Cinémathèque (such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut), created the Committee for the Defense of the Cinémathèque and staged protest marches in Paris. A few months later, other citizens began to engage in open confrontation with the French government in response to its repressive tactics. This refreshed round of confrontations began on May 2, when the administration at the University of Paris at Nanterre closed down the campus because of the soaring tensions between students and authorities. On May 6, there was a 20,000-strong protest march by students and teachers, and a week later, on May 13, the crowd swelled to more than a million. At that point, it seemed inevitable that Cannes would not remain untouched by the protests. Indeed, at Cannes, after a screening of the film Rocky Road to Dublin (dir. Peter Lennon) midway through the festival, members of the Committee for the Defense of the Cinémathèque spoke out, demanding the festival be shut down in solidarity with the protestors. Some footage of this event exists, appearing in Scout Tafoya’s video essay There’s Something in the Air—Cannes 1968 (Part 1), in which one of the filmmakers angrily shouts: “We’re talking solidarity with students and workers, and you’re talking dolly shots and close-ups. You’re assholes!” The appeal was to participate in the political urgency of “real life,” to embrace a certain “liveness,” which was contrasted with cinema’s more distant, aestheticized stance. The second part of Tafoya’s video essay documents one of the Cannes organizers reading the press release that officially cancelled the festival, saying: “With circumstances making it impossible to ensure viewing under normal conditions, the board of directors of the International Film Festival [of Cannes] has decided to close the festival and apologizes to foreign participants for this situation.” The disruption of Cannes 1968 had significant impact on the shape of the “A-list” film festivals. For example, as a result the Quinzaine des Realisateurs (Directors’ Fortnight), a separate program curated by filmmakers and dedicated to unorthodox films by young directors, was inaugurated at Cannes in 1969. Similarly, political protests over the Vietnam War in 1970 at the Berlin Film Festival, and controversy around the jury’s attempt to jettison the antiwar film O.K., resulted in the creation of a new, parallel festival called Das Internationales Forum des Jungen Film (the Forum of Young Films), where experimental films by younger directors could be screened (De Valck 2007: 78). This represented the beginning of what De Valck calls the “age of the programmer.” It should be noted, however, that the “A-list” festivals are by no means uniform in the ways they represent their curators. While the protests at Cannes 1968 forced the festival into a new position of curatorial accountability, it still tends to hide its curators from public view (Thorpe 2014). It does provide quite extensive visibility and publicity to its jurors, though, particularly in the lead-up to the festival. In contrast, the younger, more accessible Toronto International Film Festival (founded 1976), which does not have a competition section, foregrounds its programmers through the prominent display of their images, narratives, and curatorial mottos.18


The IFFR—the youngest of the so-called “Big Five” festivals—was created in the second historical phase of international film festivals.19 Founded in 1972, and first called Film International Rotterdam, the IFFR can be thought of as the enfant terrible of the “A-list” festivals. It marked a deliberate attempt—along with other festivals started at this time—to reject the red-carpet glamour of events such as Cannes and focus more on film as a significant form of contemporary art. For, even though the older festivals had been shaken by the events of the 1960s and 1970s into diversifying their approach, their programming largely remained conservative, and they did not rupture their ties with Hollywood. As De Valck notes, this “left the way open for more, new film festivals to fill the demand for thematic programming” (2007: 167). Arguably the two most important of these new “thematic” festivals were the IFFR in the Netherlands and the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy, the latter founded in 1965. Experimental films and works from so-called “developing” countries were high on these festivals’ programming agendas, paving the way for newfound interest in African film and filmmakers (Willemen 2013). De Valck frames the situation as follows: The intentions of the new generation of festival programmers were both sincere and, in the case of presenting/supporting new, national political cinemas, the result of a somewhat belated colonial urge to explore (“discover”) the cinematic hinterlands. The advantage for “Third World” filmmakers to screen their films first in the West, was the extensive media exposure and the greater cultural recognition that would be conferred upon them. The disadvantage was that some of these filmmakers began to make films for an international (above all Western) audience and part of the original, local relevance of political cinemas or aesthetic new waves was lost. (2007: 179)

The Pesaro Film Festival was the first in Europe to feature the revolutionary “Third Cinema” originating from Latin America, and it put the emphasis not on prizes and prestige but on democratic principles—“roundtable discussions, lengthy publications, and audience participation” (De Valck 2007: 167, Willemen 2013). Likewise, the IFFR developed an interest in Asian cinema, in part due to director Hubert Bals’s taste for South Asian cinema (De Valck 2007: 110), in part because it shrewdly noticed that other festivals were not then covering the region (Zuilhof pers. comm.), and in part, perhaps, because of Holland’s former colonial relationship with Indonesia. However, whereas the audience at Pesaro remained relatively small, the IFFR blossomed into one of the major international festivals, growing from an audience of only 17 at its June 1972 launch to 367,000 participants in 2007, making it the “largest event for paying visitors in the Netherlands” (De Valck 2007: 163). As De Valck notes, “The strength of Rotterdam compared to the major festivals in Cannes, Berlin and Venice is, in fact, precisely the co-existence of cutting edge and uncompromising film programs with an open-minded mass audience” (2007: 191). The priorities of the festival, she says, have always been the “triple-A niche” of “art, avant-garde, and auteurs” (ibid.: 165). Because people are their lifeblood, however, festivals have the potential to change dramatically over time. Different directors and programmers can entirely


alter a festival’s nature and atmosphere, and given that the events tend to be fragile and underfinanced entities, many might be categorized as labors of love or “oneman” or “one-woman” shows. The success of the IFFR is inextricably linked to the eccentricity and passion of its founder, Hubert Bals (1937–1988), who also cofounded the Federation Internationale des Festivals Independents, which started the Quinzaine des Realisateurs in Cannes and the Forum des Jungen Films in Berlin (De Valck 2007: 163). It took certain influential events, however, for Bals to sharpen his political and artistic acumen. He initially worked as a public relations manager for a chain of commercial cinema theatres, organizing what he called “Cinemanifestatie” in Utrecht in 1966 on their behalf; in 1970, a group of people held an “anti-commercial Cinemanifestatie” in protest. When it came to setting up the IFFR, Bals’s focus had shifted, away from attempting to make more money for the corporate cinema chains. As Wong says: Hubert Bals, the founder of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR), sought to remold the film festival from a showcase of the stale establishment to inclusive film events that celebrated innovation, risk, and diversity. IFFR now is renowned for discoveries without a red carpet. (2011: 148)

Bals found willing regional and municipal funders within the Netherlands, who both wanted to do something about the impoverished film culture in their country and regenerate central Rotterdam, still depressed from the bombardments of WWII (De Valck 2007: 171). In this way, the IFFR began its journey of joining and distinguishing itself on the international film festival circuit. It would take a long time, however, to turn its full attention to African filmmaking, a phenomenon I explore in Chapter 3. In the next chapter, I look at the representation of African film and filmmakers at that most prestigious of “red carpet” festivals—Cannes.

2

Afri-Cannes? African Film and Filmmakers at the World’s Most Prestigious Film Festival

F

ilm festivals’ whirlwind curatorial tours of the globe in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century beg an important question: where are the great sub-Saharan African filmmakers who began their work in the early 1960s? Several films, made with some African participation, were featured in 1950s film festivals. For example, The Boy Kumasenu (1952), produced through the Colonial Film Unit of Ghana and shown at the Berlin Film Festival, won a diplomat at the Venice Film Festival (Garritano 2013: 33). The 1961 Berlin Film Festival screened and awarded two Senegalese films: Grand Magal à Touba (dir. Blaise Senghor, 1960), which received the Silver Bear for the best short film, and Une Nation est née (dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr, 1961), which received a special mention (Bangré 1994). Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret (1963) won first prize at the Tours Film Festival in France. The only African director truly and consistently venerated on the international film festival circuit from the 1950s to the 1990s, however, was the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine (1926–2008). Chahine began his career at Cannes in the 1950s (De Valck 2007: 94); was featured in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in the 1970s (Wong 2011: 24); was the subject of major retrospectives by the Locarno Film Festival (in 1996) and the New York Film Festival (in 1998); and won the first Lifetime Achievement Award at Cannes in 1997 (Wong 2011: 47).1 For African filmmakers other than Chahine—even the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Sembene, the so-called “Father of African Cinema”—international festival recognition was far more sporadic. The task of analyzing the representation of African film and filmmakers at the major international festivals outside of the continent needs to begin squarely with Cannes. This is less due to Cannes’ specific relationships with African filmmakers, however, and more because the French government has been among the main funders of African filmmaking from its earliest days of independence. In 1961, the Ministry of Cooperation was created to facilitate relations between France and its ex-colonies, and in 1963 a Bureau of African Cinema was created within


the ministry, providing the funding for no fewer than 125 of the 185 African short and feature films made by 1975, most of them by “francophone” directors (Andrade-Watkins 1996: 112). Confronted with this aid, which was often framed altruistically by French authorities, African filmmakers frequently found themselves in an impossible situation. With very few other funding sources available in the early years of independence, and with filmmaking still an expensive endeavor (before the advent of digital), they felt compelled to take the money, but at the same time they wondered whether accepting it compromised their values and independence. More recently, as Diawara argues, the French government—in concert with Cannes—has instead cultivated a genre of “world cinema,” into which certain African films have been subsumed with little attention to their unique traits (2010: 86–7). Diawara thus censures the entire French film establishment for their ongoing “colonialist and technological paternalism when it comes to African cinema,” arguing that “[t]hey only have eyes for an African cinema that participates in the deconstruction of Hollywood film language and asserts the logic of a European humanitarian agenda” (2010: 87). Before I can address these claims, or Cannes’ contemporary relationship with African filmmaking, it is necessary to set the scene in terms of the kinds of African films historically shown and prized at Cannes. Journalist Claire Diao’s research on African films included in the Cannes Competition reveals that, from 1946 to 2010, 44 African films were screened: 15 South African films; 13 Egyptian films; four Algerian films; three Malian films; three Tunisian films; two Senegalese films; and one film each from Burkina Faso, Chad, Morocco and Guinea Bissau (Diao 2011). If we update these figures to include the period 2011 to 2014, we add one Egyptian film, one Chadian film, and one Mauritanian film. It must be acknowledged that the countries featured are representative of those African countries—South Africa, Egypt, the Maghrebian countries, and the “francophone” West African countries—where the strongest celluloid filmmaking cultures existed in the twentieth century. However, what is striking about these figures is not only that a mere 3 percent of the films in the Competition from 1946 to 2014 have been African, but that, contrary to what one might expect, only a third of the ones screened in the Competition have been “francophone” African films. What the statistics reveal is that while French authorities may have been funding the production of “francophone” African films since the early 1960s, they have not been screening many of them within the Competition section of their most prestigious film festival. In fact, having funded hundreds of “francophone” African films, they have featured only 18 of them in their Competition across 67 years. As Diao’s research reveals (2011), there has been far more visibility and support for African filmmakers beyond the official Competition at Cannes. The two most important programs within the Official Selection are the Competition and Un Certain Regard. According to Cannes, the criteria for Competition films is “auteur cinema with a wide audience appeal” whereas “Un Certain Regard focuses on works that have an original aim and aesthetic.”2 Diao’s analysis, reported above, focuses only on the main Competition; Un Certain Regard was inaugurated

Afri-Cannes? African Film and Filmmakers 47

in 1978, usually screening about 18 films, and has selected the work of several African filmmakers over the years, for example Mauritanian-Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness (2002) and South African director Oliver Schmitz’s Life, Above All (2010). Other sections within the Official Cannes program include the Short Film Competition (introduced in 1988); Cannes Classics (which includes restored films, retrospectives, and “Cinéma de la Plage”); the Out of Competition, Midnight, and Special Screenings (which usually feature about 12 films); and the Cinéfondation Selection (which curates 15 to 20 short or medium-length films from film schools around the world). The Cinéfondation (founded in 1998) also runs “Atelier” and “Residence” programs to support young filmmakers; in 2013, three of the 15 projects selected for the “Atelier” at Cannes came from Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa). And from 2000 to 2010, five African filmmakers have been beneficiaries of the “Residence” program (Diao 2011). The Directors’ Fortnight, inaugurated in 1969, the origins of which I described in Chapter 1, operates as a parallel, noncompetitive “minifestival,” aiming to recognize “independent” and “eclectic” cinema; it strives to be more accessible to “non-professional Cannes audiences” than the Cannes Film Festival itself.3 Another event running parallel to the festival is La Semaine de la Critique (Critics’ Week), which began in 1961, on the initiative of Robert Favre le Bret (then Artistic Director of Cannes), as a way of empowering the Association Française de la Critique (French Film Critics Association) with the chance to “explore and reveal filmmakers from all around the world.” Algerian director Merzak Allouache is one of the African filmmakers whose work has been featured in this parallel program.4 As I discuss later, African filmmakers have also, more recently, been the focus of a Pavilion (boasting a budget of half a million euros), created at Cannes by institutions such as the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF). Nevertheless, the disjunct between French support of African film production and the general absence of African films at Cannes is disconcerting, particularly given the self-congratulatory rhetoric that often surrounds new announcements of “aid” for African filmmaking at the festival. What is the point of producing something that you do not screen? The continued absence of African films at Cannes also fails to recognize the growing audience for them within France more generally. A 2010 report by the Centre Nationale du Cinéma (CNC) in France reveals that, whereas in 1992, only 17 African films had a theatrical release in France, in 2010, the figure had more than doubled to 38. The most interesting statistic in the report, however, concerns audience numbers in France for African films: they grew from 30,000 in 1992 to an overwhelming 570,000 in 2010; or from 0.03 percent of total cinema admissions in 1992 to 0.27 percent in 2010 (where the majority of admissions—48 percent—in 2010 were for US films and the next largest group of admissions—at 36 percent—were for French films). This means that African films collectively performed better at the French box office in 2010 than— for example—Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, and Chinese films combined. The paucity of African films featured at the world’s most prestigious film festival confirms Cindy Wong’s point that, at Cannes, Africa has been “a blatant area


of neglect” (2011: 61). Furthermore, those African films that have been featured “have rarely won major festival prizes” (2011: 17).5 Sambolgo Bangré writes: There can be no doubt whatsoever that it was the prestigious Cannes Festival, by awarding prizes to Sembene’s La Noire de . . . and Le Vent des Aurès by the Algerian [Mohammed] Lakhdar Hamina, in 1966 and 1969 respectively, that definitively marked the recognition of African cinema. (1994: 51)6

However, from 1946 to 2013, a total of only 14 African or Africa-related films have won prizes. The first of these cannot even be considered an African film—Othello by Orson Welles, which won the Grand Prix in 1952 (Latil 2005: 277); it brought acclaim to Morocco, the country of production but still a French protectorate at the time (until its independence in 1956). The next prize, which came in 1966, was not one of the main festival prizes but rather an ancillary prize: the Prix Jean-Vigo, which was awarded to Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de. . . . This prize is dedicated annually to a young French filmmaker of “independent spirit.” The fact that Sembene, a Senegalese filmmaker, won the award is symbolic of a consistent French practice of attempting to appropriate certain African filmmakers as their own, a remnant of their policies of assimilation and francophonie from colonial times. Steven Malčić (2013) refers to this contradictory behavior as a “vicious circle,” which the first “francophone” African filmmakers had to negotiate. While certain African filmmakers succumbed to this appropriation, Sembene remained fiercely Afrocentric until the last. As Maya Jaggi has noted (2005), Sembene judged “his worth as a filmmaker by his ability to touch audiences in Africa,” and he was known for his adage: “Europe is not my reference.” It is, furthermore, ironic (or perhaps cynical) that La Noire de . . . was awarded the Prix Jean-Vigo for French filmmakers when what the film attempts to do is carve out an independent space for black African expression, distinct from French control. Interestingly, the film was funded not by the Bureau of African Cinema, established in Paris in 1963 to sponsor African filmmaking, but by Les Actualités Françaises (a French newsreel service, based in Dakar, and headed by the rebellious Frenchman André Zwobada) and Filmi Doomirev (Sembene’s production company). Because of the coproduction with Les Actualités Françaises, Sembene was nevertheless required to seek authorization from the CNC by submitting the screenplay to the Bureau of African Cinema. The film is based on a true story of a young Senegalese maid, Diouana, taken to France by her white bosses; in a critical metafictional gesture, Sembene makes this white couple work for the Ministry of Cooperation, charged with running the Bureau of African Cinema (Malčić 2013: 169). In France, the young maid is so badly treated by her bosses that she ends up committing suicide. The Bureau was furious about the film, saying that it was “directed against France” (Andrade-Watkins 1993: 34). Zwobada retorted: “No, it’s not directed against France, it expresses the feelings of people who had France imposed on them” (quoted in ibid.). The Bureau rejected the film, giving it the distinction of being the only African film the Bureau ever dismissed because of its content (Diawara 1992: 26). Sembene and Zwobada went ahead, nevertheless, and made the film.


In the moving story of the beautiful young Diouana, Africans and diasporan Africans found common ground. The film expresses the aesthetic of melancholy that Simon Gikandi sees as a constant feature of responses by slaves to their imprisonment (2011). Sadly, expression of her melancholy is not sufficient to sustain Diouana’s will to live, and her death is a reminder and regrounding of the aesthetic in its human source, showing that the two are indivisible. This is no doubt why important African and diasporan filmmakers and thinkers, such as John Akomfrah, have continued to remind us of the indispensability of La Noire de . . . to the origin and canon of African filmmaking.7 Even Sembene’s contemporary, the Senegalese filmmaker Momar Thiam, told me at the 2010 IFFR—at which the festival curators were attempting to elevate him to the same status as Sembene within African film history—that Sembene deserved his title of “Father of African Cinema” (pers. comm.). The film was recognized on African territory by winning the grand prize for cinema at the 1966 Dakar First World Festival of Negro Arts, and the Tanit d’Or (first prize) at the 1966 Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC) in Tunisia. It is perhaps worth noting here, too, that Sembene “did not want his films to be viewed in solitary fashion—he wanted audiences to view his films as social events, provoking shared reactions, to be followed by discussions” (Dembrow nd). One might wonder why La Noire de . . . was awarded such a prestigious French prize at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival if the film had angered the French government to such an extent. When one looks at the larger picture of how the French authorities decided to deal with this scathingly critical film, one answer becomes clear: this was a form of appropriation designed to quell dissent, to give the appearance of tolerance of critique just as it restrained that critique. It was a form of what Herman and Chomsky would call the “manufacturing of consent,” of allowing visibility of critique in order to neutralize it (1994). For, after the making of La Noire de . . ., the Bureau of African Cinema in fact bought the (noncommercial) distribution rights for the film, as it did with many African films at the time (Malčić 2013: 170). As Malčić notes: This is interesting insofar as it shows that such foreign organizations invest their resources in acquiring control of African cinematic output in lieu of supporting the production of that output. . . . Armes (1996: 13) writes, “Indeed, distributors and exhibitors may well consider the very existence of locally-produced films (even if unsupported by them) as a threat to the profitability of their own operations, since— if successful—locally-produced films might change audience tastes.” . . . It is for this reason, perhaps, that upon the purchase of the film’s distribution rights by French companies, La Noire de . . . premiered in Paris and was prevented from being commercially screened in Africa (Diawara 1992: 108). (2013: 170–171)

Despite Africans’ veneration of Sembene at the 1966 Dakar Festival, despite La Noire de . . . winning the Prix Jean-Vigo in 1966, despite Sembene winning awards at other European film festivals,8 it took Cannes until 2005, when Sembene was 82 years old, to invite him to become the first African filmmaker to give the director’s lesson at the festival (Jaggi 2005). He passed away two years later, in 2007.


Algerian Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina was the first filmmaker from Africa to win any of the major awards at Cannes: in 1967, he won the Prix de la Première Oeuvre (the prize for a debut film) with Le Vent des Aurès; and in 1975, he won the Palme d’Or (the prize for the best film at the festival, introduced for the first time that year in lieu of the Grand Prix) for Chroniques des années de braise (Latil 2005: 284, 287). It then took until 1987 for an African film to win recognition again—this time it was the Prix du Jury, which Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé shared with Japanese director Rentaro Mikuni, for his film Yeelen (Light).9 In 1990, Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo shared the Grand Prix (the second most prestigious award at the festival, after the Palme d’Or) with Japanese filmmaker Kohei Oguri, for his film Tilaï (The Law) (Latil 2005: 295). African films won two further prizes in the 1990s: South African filmmaker Elaine Proctor became the first female and the first white African filmmaker to receive recognition at Cannes, with a “Special Mention” going to her film Friends in 1993; and Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine won the newly inaugurated “Prix du 50eme anniversaire,” or the lifetime achievement award, for Le Destin in 1997 (Latil 2005: 296–297). Since 2000, Africans or African-related films collectively have won six awards. In 2005, Burkinabé filmmaker S. Pierre Yaméogo won the Un Certain Regard “Prize of Hope” for Delwende; the same award went to Johnny Mad Dog (directed by the French filmmaker Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, but set in Liberia) in 2008. The whole cast of French-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes (about the contributions of North African soldiers to WWII) won the Best Actor award in 2006. Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun won the Prix du Jury in 2010 for A Screaming Man, while in 2013 French-Tunisian filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche won the Palme d’Or for Blue is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d’Adèle— Chapitres 1 et 2) and Haroun’s Grisgris was awarded the Vulcain Prize for technical achievement. It is clear, then, that African films have neither been frequently screened in competition nor fêted at Cannes. It is not only the festival itself that needs to be critiqued on this basis, however, particularly when we consider that Cannes makes a distinction between its in-house programming and the independence of its juries.10 This narrative of exclusion touches on the broader, international perception of Africa, African films, and African filmmakers, as well as the specific relationships among a whole swathe of French institutions and former French colonies in Africa. In order to understand these dynamics better, it is necessary to look beyond the statistics regarding African films screened and awarded to the controversies and debates—the (dis)sensus communis—surrounding some of the films. I want to look at two themes in particular: the political controversy that arose around the screening and awarding of Chroniques des années de braise in 1975; and the debates around the thematics and aesthetics of African films occurring when Yeelen and Tilaï won their awards in 1987 and 1990, and continuing at Cannes 2013 around the screening of Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film Grisgris. It seems a significant oversight in much film festival scholarship that the disruptions at Cannes 1975 have not been given equal attention to those of Cannes 1968.11 While Cannes 1975 was not cancelled, as was the case with the earlier


festival, it took place in a climate of frenzied security and anxiety. As Latil says, “this edition of the festival . . . remains until today the one that unrolled within the worst atmosphere, the lives of festival participants at times even in danger” (2005: 191).12 The controversy started well before the festival’s opening day, however. It was due to the festival committee’s decision to select for the official Competition the Algerian film Chroniques des années de braise, a film that tells the story of two generations of Algerians, one that fights alongside the French in WWII, and the next that fights for its independence against the French, in the war that lasted from 1954–1962. The mayor of Cannes at the time, Bernard Cornut-Gentille, was one of the first to protest the film’s selection, arguing that it would stir up too many emotions in the city, which—along with other cities in the region of Provençe—was now home to thousands of French people who had been repatriated from Algeria, many still believing that Algeria belonged to France. Cornut-Gentille warned the committee that screening the film would inevitably result in “incidents.” But the festival has a rule that says that city officials are not to attempt to interfere with its operations, and the committee remained resolute in its selection of the film (Latil 2005: 192). Cornut-Gentille’s augury was correct, however. The day before the festival’s opening, two bombs exploded near significant venues: one alongside the Palais, and another along the Croisette. The bombs caused destruction to buildings but no one was harmed. On the first day of the festival, anonymous phone threats were received, warning of further attacks, and the organization committee had to take extreme measures to ensure festival participants’ safety by delaying screenings and bringing in a significant police presence. The anonymous threats continued throughout the festival, sometimes through phone calls, sometimes through messages written on doors, although no further bombs were detonated. Various groups claimed responsibility for the explosions on the day before the festival’s opening, but the police were never able to ascertain who was accountable. The anonymous fury grew to fever pitch on the closing night of the festival, when Chroniques des années de braise became the first, and (to date) only, film by an African and set in Africa to be awarded the Palme d’Or. The police had to deal with a deluge of bomb threats, and the jury13 required police protection as they left the Palais that night. The Algerian delegation to the festival also received anonymous death threats. Still, no further bombs were detonated, and the festival managed to come to a close without a single participant being harmed. The festival, the jury, and Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina were, ultimately, the victors, securing a major symbolic victory for the global recognition of Algerian independence (and of the country’s sufferings under French rule) and for Algerian, African, and so-called “Third World” artists more generally since, as Latil points out, Lakhdar-Hamina was “the first director from a Third World country to win this validation” (2005: 196). The Algerian filmmaker acknowledged this in his speech at the awards ceremony, saying: “This time, the Festival has really become international. This prize is a recognition of the existence of the Third World: I dedicate it to the Algerian people, who allowed me to become a filmmaker” (quoted in Latil 2005: 196). To understand just how significant a moment this was, one has only to delve a little deeper into the history of the fraught relations between France and Algeria,


relations that were so traumatized during the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 that all films that even touched on the theme of the war were systematically censored at Cannes until 1962, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1960) (Latil 2005: 184–5). For the duration of the war, the festival remained on high alert, anxious about suffering attacks. Even four years after Algerian independence had been won, in 1966, Cannes’ rejection of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers led to a major diplomatic spat with Italy, on account of the film’s screening at the Venice Film Festival, and its being awarded that Festival’s highest award, the Golden Lion (Latil 2005: 186–8). The concomitant French embarrassment, perhaps, led to Cannes’ 1967 decision to accept LakhdarHamina’s Le Vent des Aurès for the official competition, even though the film is an intense tribute to Algerian nationalism and the agony suffered by ordinary Algerians during the French occupation. The film went on to win the Prix de la Première Oeuvre, thereby paving the way for Lakhdar-Hamina’s grand success at Cannes in 1975. The next controversy surrounding African films at Cannes was related to the thematic and aesthetic representation of African contexts on film, and not, as before, directly to the material and political aftermath of European colonialism in Africa. It was prompted by the fact that African films such as Yeelen and Tilaï were awarded prizes at Cannes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Based on a Bambara legend and on the workings of the secret Komo society of blacksmiths in Mali, Yeelen tells the story of Nianancoro Diarra, who has to escape his father Soma’s control in order to restore goodness to the land. The battle between father and son results in the destruction of both, but also ushers in a period of new hope for the people. Set in a village in Burkina Faso, Tilaï is a tale of two young lovers, Saga and Nogma, who are torn apart when Saga’s father marries Nogma while Saga is on a journey outside of the village. When Saga returns, he and Nogma have to express their love illicitly. The film ends in tragedy when Saga’s brother Kougri shoots him to restore the honor of the family. In his 1992 book, African Cinema: Aesthetics and Politics, Diawara categorized works such as Yeelen and Tilaï as part of an African film movement he called “return to the source,” referring to the way they spun mythical dimensions of the African past and oral storytelling forms into new cinematic tales. Some resented the attention the films garnered at Cannes, arguing they represented a regression, from urgent (mostly urban) political issues, to a less confrontational aestheticizing and exoticizing rural Africa for “Western” consumption. These concerns echoed broader global anxieties about the consecration of non-Euro-American films at festivals and the possible “Orientalism” and exoticism in which these films were compelled to participate to gain such recognition (see Wong 2011: 17, Qing 1993). The term that started to circulate describing such African films was “calabash cinema,” and it has remained remarkably durable, called upon the moment Africans feel an African film is in any way “pandering” to an “external” and “exotic” view of Africa. More recent scholarship (MacRae 1995, Austen 2007, Bolgar Smith 2010) has reassessed the value of these films, arguing that, in many cases, they use the past to disguise political critique of the present, thereby avoiding the possibility of censorship in their countries of origin.


In his more recent work (2010), Diawara attributes great importance not only to these films, but to the awards they received at Cannes, inspiring what he sees as the post-Sembenian new wave of African filmmaking. He writes: [I]n retrospect one can see that films like Yaaba and Tilaï by Ouédraogo and Yeelen by Cissé were important for the transition to the present. For one thing, they brought mythical and heroic dimensions to African film that were missing in Sembene’s cinema. Their careful attention to mise-en-scène, storytelling and the place of the individual in it, to spirituality and magic, is a testimony to their investment in film as a primarily fictional and relatively autonomous form. . . . The directors’ mastery of film form and style becomes the sign of their intervention and determination to carve a new space for Africa in world cinema. The fact that both Cissé and Ouédraogo received top awards at Cannes is an indication of this new trend in African cinema. (2010: 96, my emphasis)

It is somewhat contradictory that Diawara, just several pages after his critique of Cannes for cultivating a genre of “world cinema” into which African film has been subsumed (2010: 86–7), here implicitly gives Cannes and its juries credit for essentially being the first to recognize this “new trend in African cinema.” If Diawara wishes to rescue films such as Tilaï and Yeelen from the bland, flattening genre of “world cinema,” he needs to find a different way of understanding their value. His argument that “[t]he directors’ mastery of film form and style becomes the sign of their intervention and determination to carve a new space for Africa in world cinema” precisely echoes the very basis on which “world cinema” has been defined. Mark Betz, for example, argues that the cinematic language of “world cinema” can be characterized through the concept of “parametric narration, David Borwell’s term to describe a mode of filmmaking that foregrounds style as an organizing principle” (2010: 31, my emphasis). Initially used by Bordwell to describe the contours and limits of “art cinema,” the term “parametric narration” is appropriated by Betz to describe what many concur is art cinema’s offspring: world cinema. “World cinema” thus consists of films that, while set in unique contexts around the globe, frame their narratives within a standardized, highly stylized cinematic language that will appeal to a certain kind of international audience self-consciously seeking a “global” product (Betz 2010). We are not far here from Mitchell’s analysis of the world fairs and exhibitions as not simply “representations of the world, but the world itself being ordered up as an endless exhibition” (quoted in Rydell 2011: 141)— an exhibition that continuously draws upon the same, uniform, worldly language. In contrast, in a recent article for Black Camera, French critic of African cinema and founder of Africultures Olivier Barlet implicitly positions himself against such attempts to read an excess of style into African films celebrated at contemporary international film festivals. Attempting to explain why, of all the 300 films he watches each year from around the world, African films continue to move him the most, Barlet returns to the example of Yeelen and offers an interesting, albeit subjective, reinterpretation of it, with the help of the late French film critic Serge Daney: [African films’] originality indeed lies in how they respect the person and open up the way to understanding his or her place in the universe. Souleymane Cissé manages

54 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals this “very well,” as Serge Daney put it writing about Yeelen, “not by aestheticizing the world but by immediately inscribing bodies in their environment [. . .]” For Cissé, there is neither picturesque nor exotic! Exoticism requires picture postcard images, settings for our desires and our fantasies of the barbarian, the savage, the primitive man. On the contrary, the simplicity and clarity of the images, whose only aim is to serve what is said, leave the characters the naturalness and grace of their presence in the world [. . .] Cissé explains this himself [. . .]: “‘Damu’ is the Bambara term for the positive impression that is left by the sight of a person or a thing and which stays in the heart and mind a long time. ‘Damu’ is perhaps what grace is. When you see man living, you observe all that he is, all that surrounds him. When you understand him, you have to depict him with ‘damu’.” (2011: 139)

I have quoted at length from Barlet’s article because, although it at times risks homogenizing “African film” as a genre, it is exemplary in highlighting one of the main strategies certain filmmakers from Africa use to reject accusations of exoticism, and to reject integration into the bland category of “world cinema”—a turn to the resolutely local and specific. Cissé’s answer to those who would classify Yeelen as “calabash cinema” or “world cinema” is to look more closely, more deeply at the film, its setting, the context of its production. MacRae argues, similarly, that “Yeelen is so firmly rooted in West African Mande culture that the full significance of the plot, characterization, artistic intent, and social/political significance cannot be understood outside the cultural and historical context” (1995: 57). Those who wish to smooth out the differences that reign not only across Africa, but also within particular African countries and contexts, have only to turn to Cissé’s fascinating claim that the film “was a discovery of a new thing that I knew existed but which I had not experienced in real life [. . .] it was like an initiation for me” (quoted in Austen 2007: 39). The film is not an “exotic” representation of Africa, but neither can it naively be classified as a “nativist” perspective that reductively constructs “‘insiders’ as having better knowledge and understanding than ‘outsiders’, no matter what theoretical approach they use” (Khiabany and Sreberny 2014: 478). Still, the anxiety about films by Africans pandering to exotic, externalist views of the continent was resurrected as recently as Cannes 2013. The film in question this time was Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Grisgris, which tells the story of how a young disabled male dancer, who gets caught up in petrol smuggling, escapes to a rural idyll with his beautiful yet equally troubled girlfriend. Many African filmmakers with whom I spoke at the festival felt that it was yet another example of “calabash cinema,” and could not understand why Haroun— after making complex works such as Bye Bye Africa, Abouna, Daratt, Sex Okra and Salted Butter, The Return, and A Screaming Man (the latter of which won the 2010 Special Jury Prize at Cannes)—had made such a film. A casual conversation I had with two young women after a Cannes screening of the film perhaps best encapsulates the issues. These American women, who were about to embark on a film project of their own in Ghana, said something to the effect of: “We’ve learned so much from this film about what we need to do with our own film in Africa. African filmmaking is so slow and simple—the rhythms are so slow. Our film is too fast-paced for Africa.” But what they did not realize—in their ignorance of African films more generally—is that slowness is not indicative of African filmmaking on


the whole. Once again, one film by one filmmaker from Africa is forced to substitute for the entirety of “Africa.” The reviewers and jury at Cannes 2013 seemed to agree with African filmmakers’ general sensus communis around the film, and Grisgris, in spite of being in Competition, did not win any main awards, only a technical artistry honor (the Vulcain Prize). Of course, filmmaking involves the work of hundreds of people, and Grisgris was the result of collaboration amongst no fewer than nine production companies. This raises the question of whether certain problems lay in Haroun’s script or whether he was, for example, compelled to relinquish his power over the editing decisions to the Belgian editor Marie-Hélène Dozo. These are speculations that would be difficult to verify, given the politics and confidentiality of filmmaking; however, the example is representative of issues confronting many filmmakers working with larger budgets today, where standard practice is coproduction with a host of different companies with divergent, and possibly conflicting, agendas. While teamwork might benefit a film in some cases, in others it can lead to a compromise of integrity and clear authorial vision. One way of reading the problems many found in Grisgris is through Manthia Diawara’s critique of the production of the genre of “world cinema”: World cinema, by which festivals understand everything that is neither American nor European, is a new invention of films from the non-Western world that comfort Europeans in their paternalistic supremacy vis-à-vis the Third World and in their struggle against Hollywood. It is a cinema that [Congolese filmmaker] Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda calls “cinéma Haute-Couture,” a new genre created particularly by Cannes to boost the French politics of “l’exception culturelle.” (2010: 86–87)

The most apparent, material example of the evolution of the “world cinema” genre at Cannes is represented by the French government’s move away from supporting only African filmmakers to a policy of offering support to filmmakers from many

Figure 2.1 “Village International” at the Cannes Film Festival


different regions of the world. The place where filmmakers tend to gather for official workshops and conferences at Cannes is the “Village International.” Stretching along the beachfront beside the Palais des Festivals, and inaugurated in 2000, this “Village” houses “pavilions” (white tents with space for displays and workshops) for countries that are able to afford the cost. Of African nations, only South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and the North African countries have their own pavilions. Furthermore, most of the panels and networking events for African filmmakers are organized under the aegis not of one of these pavilions, but of the French government’s pavilion for non-EuroAmerican filmmakers. This particular pavilion began in 2003 as the Cinémas du Sud (Cinemas of the South) pavilion, initiated by the Institut Français, in collaboration with various partners, such as the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. In 2009, the pavilion was renamed “Les Cinémas du Monde” (Cinemas of the World), making explicit its commitment to the genre of “world cinema.”14 Much of the reason for the pigeonholing of African films within genres such as “world cinema” stems from the sporadic and isolated programming of these films within “A-list” festivals, which has prevented even film experts from expanding their knowledge of African filmmaking beyond a few select films and filmmakers. The general ignorance of African filmmakers’ entire oeuvres leads to uncritical assessments of what constitutes filmmaking by Africans. For example, the Sierra Leonean founder, director, and curator of the New York African Film Festival (founded 1993), Mahen Bonetti, argues that: Traditionally, American audiences simply have not had much exposure to films made by Africans and, because of this, such audiences often are not accustomed to the themes, subjects, aesthetics, and narrative styles that are a part of many of the films coming out of Africa. This unfamiliarity has relegated African cinema to existence as an obscure, art-house-oriented cinema. (2012: 193)

Bonetti points out that “African cinema is not a genre to be easily defined—if it is a genre at all” and sees the responsibility as resting with film curators to show that filmmaking by Africans “spans a range of genres and appeals to a diverse audience with different interests and tastes” (2012: 194, 198). Instead, what has tended to happen is that a select few filmmakers from Africa have been chosen to stand in for “African cinema” as a whole. Diawara critiques this very pointedly: It is also clear that, for ideological, personal and paternalistic reasons, the French have been known to select one African filmmaker at a time, whom they isolate from the continent’s other filmmakers. They then impose him on international audiences as the best African filmmaker and make him the envy of everybody in the African film world. Since the 1960s, this practice of “divide and conquer” has had a negative influence on the evolution and self-definition of African cinema. The different French administrations have always attempted to co-opt and contain the definition of African cinema, instead of encouraging the development of cinematic movements conceived by African filmmakers and producers themselves. (2010: 85)

Besides the work of a small handful of African filmmakers—those whom Arundhati Roy would call the saved turkeys, the anointed ones (Roy 2006: 202; see also


Adesokan 2011: 170–71)—films by Africans simply have not featured prominently at “A-list” international film festivals. In response, former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival Mark Cousins has lamented the “conservative, blinkered programming” that is at the “heart of the contemporary film festival problem” (2013: 169). He says that festivals rehash retrospectives of the usual suspects—such as Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa—yet continue to ignore Indian filmmakers beyond Satyajit Ray, and, in particular, filmmakers from Africa (ibid.). Filmmakers from Africa are tired of simply complaining about the situation. Rather, many people are actively working to do something about the problem, which I explore in the next chapter. The younger generation feels that it is reductive to speak about “the French” collectively, and thereby risk falling into the trap of adopting an essentialist approach themselves (see Khiabany and Sreberny 2014). Many have had very positive experiences at French film festivals, including Cannes.15 Furthermore, as I hope to have shown through the example of the controversy surrounding the Algerian film Chroniques des années de braise, no film festival—even the most prestigious—can be considered in monolithic, unchanging terms. Several African filmmakers have also expressed irritation with an approach that immediately assumes any film by an African made with French or other European funding will necessarily reflect the values of the funders. The survey I conducted of African filmmakers in 2013 revealed that very few have even availed themselves of such funding and that the majority feel they have been able to “pursue their own vision” regardless of the sources of their funding. Nevertheless, De Valck argues that there is now blossoming interest among film and film festival scholars for studying the ways in which European (festival) funds influence film projects and their cinematic language. One of the assumptions is that European tastes dominate the new global economy that has emerged for art cinema, resulting in a situation in which world cinema has to comply with cosmopolitan standards in order to be eligible for funding. (2014: 42–3)

It is true that early French funding support for African film has now been complemented by a whole range of funds managed through (mostly, but not exclusively) European film festivals.16 However, one could argue that to focus on the assumed influence of European film festivals over the thematics and aesthetics of non-European films is—far from offering critique of such festivals—keeping them centered, while rendering non-European or so-called “world” filmmakers simple “victims” rather than agents with power to negotiate their individual position and desires (see, for example, Halle 2010). What is needed more urgently than ever is a shift from the more textual approaches dominating film and film festival scholarship to an approach that incorporates ethnographic methods and draws on the heuristic value of “liveness,” whether that be the “live” interactions occurring between funders and their beneficiaries, curators and audiences, or filmmakers and festival organizers. It is just such an approach that I attempt in the next chapter, in order to assess the representation of “Africa,” “African film,” and “African filmmakers” at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam.

3

“Where is Africa?” at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Where Are You Taking Me? You are standing on the balcony of a hotel or a bar, looking down at a slice of a busy, dusty street. You are looking down at several men who are sitting on motorbikes, chatting to one another. You keep your eyes trained on them, for about a minute. They are clearly not aware of your presence. But then one of the men bristles, flicks a glance up in your direction, as though he’s felt himself being watched. Soon after, another of the men casts his eyes up towards you. And another. And another. This is where the first two minutes of American filmmaker Kimi Takesue’s documentary Where are you taking me? (2010) places you, whether you like it or not. It is an uncomfortable, voyeuristic space at first, gazing at people unaware of your presence. And then, when the men discover your presence, it turns into something else—an encounter between strangers, but hardly an encounter on a level playing field. You are aligned with the filmmaker’s perspective, with the one behind the recording device, “taking” the men’s image. When they look up at you in the act of gazing, you become embodied in that present in which Takesue shot the image. Even though you are only watching a film—an observational documentary that roams around Uganda, filming factory workers, schoolchildren, seamstresses, worshippers—you are constantly made to feel yourself involved in live, human encounters. And those encounters repeatedly challenge you about where you are watching the scenes from, and why you are watching in the first place. Late in the film there are shots of a young man’s face. You have been told that he is a former child soldier. He looks directly into your eyes; he looks tired. His voice comes at you separately, overlaid: “As I sleep at night, I dream I hear a gun. A gunshot. I dream about guns.” Then, his lips in synch with his voice, he says: “So why are you taking my story to US, to New York? About my life, as I’ve been telling you? Why you want to go with it there?”


Where are you taking me? was one of roughly 90 films screened at the 39th International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR), which ran from January 27 to February 7, 2010, in the largest Africa-related film showcase ever exhibited by a major European or North American film festival.1 The festival catalogue explains the motivation for the showcase as follows: “Why such an extensive program about Africa now? The answer is: it should have been made much earlier. Africa has been neglected. African cinema has been neglected. By us and by Africa itself ” (IFFR 2010 Catalogue: 264). This introduction is, paradoxically, accompanied by a still from a film called The Unluckiest, showing a young girl sitting beneath a brightly colored umbrella, her face obscured (ibid.). The words opposite the image read: “It cannot be our intention to leave African cinema alone after this extensive project. With effective instruments such as the CineMart2 and the Hubert Bals Fund,3 Rotterdam will continue on the path it is now taking.” It is difficult not to read the image and these words as a couplet. The eye flicks back and forth between them. The message is that Africans are the “unluckiest,” most downtrodden people on the earth—an exception to the rest of the world—and it is the responsibility of European film festivals to rescue them from obscurity, to discover, commission, and curate them into being, to give them the visibility they otherwise lack. This chimes with what Achille Mbembe says in On the Postcolony: More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence,” “lack,” and “non-being,” of identity and difference, of negativeness—in short, of nothingness. (2001: 4)

Unlike the representation of certain other regional cinemas at “A-list” film festivals, such as Iranian and Chinese cinema, which may be exoticized or Orientalized,4 in this chapter I will show that African film and filmmakers tend to be treated rather as an exception. Moreover, this discourse of exceptionality, as I will show, in many ways overlaps with racist discourses and imaginaries. The brainchild of regular IFFR programmer Gertjan Zuilhof, the African film showcase was divided into two separate but related programs titled “Forget Africa” and “Where is Africa?” “Forget Africa” was comprised of 22 films, commissioned by Zuilhof, by both non-African and African filmmakers. This is the program through which Where are you taking me? was commissioned and exhibited. The “Where is Africa?” program, in contrast, was comprised of about 70 films, all of them by filmmakers from Africa, and curated by Dutch art historian Alice Smits and American filmmaker and curator Lee Ellickson, both of whom are also the founder-directors of the Amakula Kampala International Film Festival in Uganda.5 “Basically, [the showcase] was just my idea,” Zuilhof told me in an interview. An art historian and film critic, he has worked for the IFFR for more than 20 years, first in the department that produces the printed catalogue, and later as a programmer. His first programming areas were European and experimental cinema. In 2004, however, Zuilhof tired of his usual remit and wanted to try something new: Since I worked for this festival for so long, I felt I should change, try something else. So I noticed there was nobody doing southeast Asia . . . Vietnam, Indonesia etc. So I

“Where is Africa?” 61

thought if I propose a project for these countries, I can go there, travel there. So it’s a bit similar [to] what I later did with Africa. I went there and traveled to ten countries for the very first time, met young filmmakers, and made a program. (pers. comm.)

Zuilhof thus suggests that the initial motivation for his move into curating southeast Asian cinema, and later African film, had to do primarily with a desire to travel, to go on an adventure.6 Filmmaking is mentioned only secondarily. This is confirmed in the overture of his “Forget Africa” program in the printed catalogue, where he admits: Less than a year ago, I had never been to Africa. There was no reason to go. I had no need. It was more a question of reluctance, or even fear. It took a while, maybe several years, before I realised that there would never be any reason to go to Africa. That I would have to make a reason. (IFFR 2010 catalogue: 265)

The reason was his “Forget Africa” program, with its provocative title that wants to “see whether it [is] possible to look at Africa without all the baggage” (ibid.)—in this case, the baggage of the Western news media, which tends to represent only the negative aspects of the continent. Zuilhof clearly also wanted to “forget” or sidestep another representation of Africa, however—those films by African directors who have already been celebrated to a certain extent on the international film festival circuit, and particularly at Cannes, such as the late Ousmane Sembene, the Mauritanian-Malian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, and the Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Zuilhof deliberately chose to avoid the countries, he said, where African film specialists tend to travel, such as Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso. The countries he chose were: Cameroon, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Angola, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Congo-Brazzaville. He said that for the filmmakers in these countries, his visits represented the first time they had met a film curator and that, often, they were “not even aware of what it was.” Of his own expectations of the local film work, Zuilhof says that he was “afraid to return home empty-handed.” While he did not expect to find “mature, beautifully produced features,” he hoped to find “some nice short films or documentaries” as well as “local genre films that might also work beyond their intended audience” (ibid.). Out of fear of returning to Rotterdam “empty-handed,” Zuilhof came up with a new plan for his journey, “the idea of doing this trip together with [non-African] filmmakers”: Because when I spoke to people about it, some people said, “Yeah, you should make a documentary about this trip, or you should have a television crew with you!” . . . But I wasn’t interested in that. It’s not about me, it’s about what I find. . . . So then I came up with this proposal to go there with [non-African] filmmakers or artists so they could do something there that was actually their own work. (pers. comm., my emphasis)

The result was that, of the 22 films7 screened in the “Forget Africa” program, 12 were credited to non-African filmmakers (from the Philippines, Indonesia, the US, Thailand, Singapore/Malaysia, Austria, and Germany) and 10 to African filmmakers (from Angola, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Cameroon,


Congo-Brazzaville, and Tanzania). The idea was that the non-African filmmakers, none of whom had previously been to Africa, would make films about their first impressions of the continent, but also establish contact with local filmmakers. According to Zuilhof, many of the locals then ended up working on films by the foreigners and vice versa. Zuilhof ’s curatorial approach raises several questions. First, if he had not been to Africa before, and if he had no knowledge of African filmmaking, why did he not defer to a curator of African film? In Rotterdam’s neighboring city, Amsterdam, the Africa in the Picture film festival has been successfully featuring African films challenging conventional Western media representations of the continent since 1987 (see Chapter 5). Why not invite the current director and curator of that festival, Heidi Lobato, who is partly African herself, to curate the program? Clearly Zuilhof wanted to exercize his individual creativity as a curator, and to realize a personal vision. His approach to curation coheres with the general curatorial principles of the IFFR, which prides itself on being a cutting-edge, avant-garde, and experimental festival. Zuilhof disavows this approach, however, when he says, in the quotation above, that the program is “not about me, it’s about what I find,” as though what one “finds” (or thinks one “finds”), and what one essentially “is,” are mutually exclusive. As Manthia Diawara says: “To paraphrase a famous statement by Michel Foucault, the anthropologist travels to the non-Western world but his research only reveals him/herself ” (2010: 89). Second, while the idea of going out to meet actual African filmmakers, rather than sitting in Holland watching African films, is a curatorial approach that this book supports through its general emphasis on the importance of “live” engagement, we need also to pay attention to the terms of that engagement. More than half the films in the “Forget Africa” program were made by non-African filmmakers who had not previously been to Africa. They were given small budgets and, due to the restricted time frame, had to begin shooting immediately on arrival. Anyone who knows the history of filmmaking in Africa will be familiar with the abundance of imperialist adventure films made on the continent, featuring foreign narratives of discovery that relegate black Africans to the background. These kinds of narratives dominated feature films about Africa until Africans were able to start making their own films, and the tradition continues today. The claim, that the “Forget Africa” program was a “discovery” of sorts, thus disavowed the ways in which this program was all too familiar.8 It was recognition of this contradiction that distinguished Takesue’s Where are you taking me? within the non-African section of the “Forget Africa” program. Having no choice but to accept the basic conditions of the project, she scrutinized those conditions within her film, asking complex questions about what it means to travel to an unknown place, shoot a stranger’s image, and remove it from its original context. This difference in approach emerged after the screening of her film at the IFFR, in the following conversation between Zuilhof and Takesue: Zuilhof: My experience traveling in Africa is that you learn very quickly on the way. So even if you stay only two weeks, at the end of the second week, you’re not as innocent as you were in the beginning. . . . So it’s not totally a first view somehow.


Takesue: Well, I don’t know if the trajectory is always clear, or always somewhere, to complete clarity. I think it’s always in fluctuation and changing. So like for my piece, one of the things I’m always interested in is the fluctuation in terms of moments of more detached observation, and more of a voyeuristic gaze, and then moments of greater intimacy and connection. And I think that that’s always changing and ongoing. . . . I think that maybe I finally achieved a certain intimacy that was impossible in the beginning, but I’m still interested in a form of looking that is more detached and observational.

Takesue also emphasized the “disorientation” she experienced as the journey “unfolded,” and that her primary interest was “on a spiritual level where people’s images have been taken, and then on a practical level how images are appropriated.” In this way, she undercut Zuilhof ’s attempt to make an exception of Africa— to suggest that it is somehow different to travel in Africa than anywhere else, and that it involves a loss of innocence. Edwin Carels, one of Zuilhof ’s fellow curators at the IFFR, and the only curator at the festival who does not cover a specific region, offered a similarly complex analysis of such curatorial travel. He said: “I think that festivals are a remnant of colonialism in the way that we are hunting, going on safari, bringing back the goods.” At the same time, however, he points out that he is “very, very proud” of the IFFR for its “very, very worldwide” perspective, a perspective that he says is partly cultivated through curators going “on location” (pers. comm.). The idea of film curators traveling as part of their work began in the “age of programmers,” the 1970s. The first Europeans to curate significant numbers of films by Africans charted new territory, often journeying around the world in search of unusual and inspiring content. For example, Philippe Jalladeau, one of the founders of the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, which has from its beginnings in 1979 focused on African film, was motivated to create the festival through travel to other festivals and meeting filmmakers. One of his key curators, the French film critic Serge Daney, did a large part of his programming by walking streets and neighborhoods on his world travels (Baron pers. comm.). Dorothee Wenner, who currently curates African and Indian films for the Berlin Film Festival, confirms this shift from a sedentary to a traveling mode in film programming around this time, noting that the traditional role of programmers was “waiting for films to arrive in Berlin and then we were looking and deciding which ones we liked or not.” This is “absolutely not” the case anymore, she says. In the 1970s, programmers started attending other festivals and working directly with filmmakers. Wenner herself cites a trip to now defunct South African film market Sithengi in 2000 as a “total eye-opener” and a “watershed moment” within her own curatorial practices, leading her to incorporate far more African films within the Berlin program (pers. comm.). Zuilhof did recognize at some point that his “Forget Africa” program would need to be contextualized within a much more comprehensive presentation of classic and contemporary African filmmaking, curated by people with appropriate knowledge. This is how the complementary “Where is Africa?” program came about, guest curated by Smits and Ellickson. The live introduction of the launch


of the Africa showcase by one of the IFFR staff members described the impulse behind the “Where is Africa?” program as follows: The name of the project “Where is Africa?” can, I guess, be explained in two ways. One way is . . . more like a rhetorical question. Where is African cinema in the big international film festivals? The answer is that it is not usually in the program of the big international film festivals. And then the second way to look at the question is where does African cinema or African film culture stand today?

Zuilhof describes Smits and Ellickson’s program—a hugely ambitious endeavor with roughly 70 films—as a “counterweight” to his “Forget Africa” program. He speaks in terms of the two programs also providing cross-publicity for each other: “they profit from the fact that people want to know about my project, and I profit from them because I have a project but they have more films” (pers. comm.). Smits and Ellickson were marked out very clearly as “guest programmers” at the IFFR launch of the Africa program and yet, as I will show, these “guests” became, in some respects, its saving grace. In other ways, however, Smits and Ellickson’s program also became caught up within a discourse that positioned “Africa” as alien to the rest of the world. It was not so much even in the “first impressions” of Africa in the “Forget Africa” films by non-Africans that the positioning occurred. It was to be found in the live festival interactions—what I will think through as “strange encounters” (Ahmed 2000)—that awkwardness and even anger emerged. I hope my analysis of some of these interactions in the sections that follow emphasizes the value of incorporating “live” methods into festival research. Moment One: The Soul of Africa? It is a crisp winter evening in Rotterdam. The boats are groaning in the famous harbor, filled with memories of sea spray and foreign lands. Travelers, in search of freedom from places unknown, are already huddled in the coffee shops, sipping beers and rolling marijuana joints. In the Schouwburg Grote Zaal, the largest cinema in the city, festivalgoers have gathered for the second night of the Africa showcase at the 2010 IFFR. There is excitement in the auditorium because it is the world premiere of young Kenya-based filmmaker Hawa Essuman’s muchanticipated Soul Boy (2010). The film, produced by German director Tom Tykwer and the German-British production company One Fine Day Films, was financially supported by the IFFR through its Hubert Bals Fund. As the lights dim, a bright blue globe appears on the screen and starts to rotate back and forth. Sprouting across it are verdant, green continents, except for one, which is black and centered, with a large white question mark superimposed over it: Africa. As the gigantic globe spins back and forth we, the audience, are introduced to Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, one of the founding members of the WorldConnectors organization, constituted of a group of “opinion leaders” of all generations in the Netherlands who are attempting to solve significant global problems. Soetendorp has been invited to introduce the film because Soul Boy has been highlighted as a WorldConnectors screening.9


Figure 3.1 Introduction to Soul Boy at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Soetendorp introduces Soul Boy as follows: The Earth Charter says, the choice is ours. To build a global partnership, to safeguard ourselves and the planet, or to risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. . . . We must realize that human development is when basic needs have been fulfilled. That it is being more, not having more. And it is this being more, this soul of Africa, that is expressing itself. It is this richness of the interconnectedness, of the relationship between a boy and his father, the dreams and the will power, the vision, and the will to execute the vision that makes all the difference. When this soul is connected with the hands and feet of citizens all over the world then there is no one anymore forgotten. . . . When the soul of Africa is given the breath of life then there is the possibility of this world which is filled with respectful community of life, social and economic justice, peace, non-violence and democracy, and then we are all witnessing in ourselves a mighty stream of creativity, of strength, and that stream is unstoppable.

During the screening, I wonder what the “soul of Africa” is, and why it needs to be “given the breath of life.” How has this magical realist tale of a young boy in Kibera, Nairobi, having to undertake tasks to save the soul of his ill father, somehow transmuted into the “soul” of the entirety of Africa? And how is it that the “soul of Africa” is going to be the savior of the whole world? After the screening, Essuman and Soetendorp are invited to the stage by the Chair of the Q&A, another WorldConnector named Rindert De Groot. De Groot first invites Soetendorp to respond to the film, and Soetendorp tells Essuman: “I am quite humbled. You’ve made an overwhelming film with all this color and all this hope despite everything.” The phrase “despite everything” is clearly meant to suggest that Africa is a place where it is unusual to find color and hope. It is a strange choice of words, especially if one knows that Essuman comes from a


transnational Ghanaian family and has lived in Germany as well as Kenya. De Groot picks up on the word “hope,” and asks Essuman: “Hope and joy—is that also what you felt making this film?” Essuman replies: “I felt challenged and, yes, a lot of joy making this film. I should mention that I could not have made this film alone.” At this point, she subverts the question and starts thanking all of the people in the audience, both Europeans and Africans, who helped in the making of the film. In this way, she avoids further questions that attempt to shoehorn Africa into some kind of exceptional space—a large black question mark of a space—where, “despite everything,” one can still, occasionally, find “hope.” She refocuses the discussion on the fact that the realization of the film was a professional, transnational activity involving a large number of people. After Essuman has thanked her cast and crew, De Groot says: “It is such a professional film. Light splashes off the screen. What is your miracle? . . . How come such a beautiful film could be made?” The subtext here seems to be, how could such a beautiful film be made in Africa? After all, we are sitting in the midst of one of the major international film festivals of the world, where hundreds of beautiful films are being shown. Essuman repeats that she could not have made the film alone. She mentions the Kenyan scriptwriter, Billy Kahora; she applauds the German director of photography, Christian Almesberger; she even thanks the drivers. De Groot’s next question to Essuman is: How do you think the north can contribute to Africa without, let’s say, judging, or without just trying to put money over the fence and not really caring. Do you have a vision on that? How can we help?10

We have been returned to a discourse in which Africa is the place in need, in which Africa requires help from the north (Moyo 2009). Essuman says: I don’t know how to answer your question in the broader sense, but I can tell you what I think you can do for filmmakers in Kenya or me. Which is, if you want to support filmmaking, then find out what’s required. It’s not just about money. It never is just about money.

De Groot asks what is needed if not money. Essuman returns to her refrain about the nature of filmmaking—that, unlike the production of literature, it is usually a process that requires the collaboration of many people over a long period of time. In this way she reminds the audience that the film can in no way be positioned as a “miracle” from Africa simply because she has directed it. The film has involved the collaboration of many Africans and many Europeans. It is not an “African film.” It is simply a film in which many Africans have played key roles. What Essuman keeps saying, in fact, challenges the idea that there can be such a thing as an “African film.” At the end of the discussion, Soetendorp says: “I’m from Holland. What I’ve realized being here tonight is that Africa has something to give us.” Unlike De Groot, who consistently maintains a sense of “northern” superiority throughout the discussion (the “we” he uses in the quotation above refers to “northerners”),


Soetendorp at least attempts to position Africa as the teacher and his own people (the Dutch, emphasized through his statement “I’m from Holland”) as the learners. Neither De Groot nor Soetendorp, however, is able to desist from invoking and producing difference in their statements. There is a clear “we” (Holland, or northerners) and a clear “they” (which is mostly used impersonally, to invoke “Africa,” not even “Africans”). The gigantic globe with the black question mark of an Africa suggests even more: that Africa is alien, not entirely human, not entirely of this planet. The visual economy of difference, in which Africa is positioned as separate from the rest of the globe, is not unique to the IFFR. It continues to arise in various discourses—visual and verbal—at a range of film festivals, even those that can, like the IFFR, be seen as engaging seriously with African films. Cameron Bailey, codirector of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the first black director of a major “A-list” festival, is one figure who has attempted to achieve more recognition for African film and filmmakers over the past two decades. After his first trip to Africa in 1991 to attend FESPACO, Bailey spoke to Piers Handling (codirector and CEO of TIFF) about the possibility of expanding TIFF’s programming to encompass African film. In 1994, Bailey proposed “Planet Africa,” a strand of TIFF that launched in 1995 and ran until 2005. This development was not exempt from criticism, though, as Bailey has himself pointed out: Planet Africa was always a little bit contentious amongst the filmmakers who were in it because a lot of them had mixed feelings and conflicting points of view about the value of a separate program for African and African diaspora cinema. Some really liked the extra interest the films would get as a result, and some felt that it was some kind of ghetto. I can remember being told, “You’re separating Africa off as though it’s another planet.” (interview with Neal MacInnes, 2010)11

Former curators of Planet Africa June Givanni and Gaylene Gould confirm Bailey’s point, and, Givanni notes, the prestige and publicity garnered by the “A-list” film festivals make curatorial practice in such contexts much more “political” and “sensitive” (2004: 73). Because of the controversy, TIFF folded the Planet Africa program into the main part of the festival. Consequently, one of Bailey’s tasks became to maintain a strong focus on African cinema, something he emphasizes has not been easy to do when African films are placed in disparate strands (interview with Neal MacInnes, 2010). Postcolonial feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s book Strange Encounters is particularly useful to this debate, not least since festivals typically thrive on bringing together people who do not know one another. As Ahmed argues, a stranger could be anyone; to each human on the planet, there are billions of unknown humans. However, very particular acts of demarcating who is strange or alien in any space or society frequently precede encounters with strangers. It is these “processes of expelling or welcoming the one who is recognized as a stranger that produce the figure of the stranger in the first place” (2000: 4). This explains how the stranger can come to be produced as “the one who is, quite literally, not from this planet” (ibid.: 1). While programs such as “Where is Africa?” at the IFFR and “Planet


Africa” at TIFF may thus appear to be “welcoming” African filmmakers within the international festival circuit, they are simultaneously capable of producing “Africa” as alien to the rest of the world if they are not framed and managed correctly. Ahmed’s analysis is “an attempt to work through the familiarity of alien forms (‘strangers’)” (2000: 3, my emphasis). She argues that what is surprising is that “In the gesture of recognizing the one that we do not know, the one that is different from ‘us,’ we flesh out the beyond, and give it a face and form” (ibid.). In other words, whereas logically any “stranger” or “alien” should be the one who confounds, who forces the subject to scrutinize its own lack of knowledge, this lack quickly becomes substituted with something. The “stranger” has to be the one who is already known, or else s/he becomes too threatening. Whereas in reality “the encounter itself is ontologically prior to the question of ontology” (Ahmed 2000: 7), the subject asserts itself by projecting an a priori identity onto the one perceived as a stranger. In the case of the discussion after Soul Boy at the 2010 IFFR, even though it involved a room full of strangers, it was Essuman who was positioned as the supreme stranger because she was perceived to be ontologically “African.” Instead of allowing the conversation to unfold and through it to discover points of human similarity and difference—to discover that Essuman has strong personal ties to Germany, for example—De Groot and Soetendorp entered the encounter with the certainty that Essuman’s identity was first and foremost as an “African.” I reflected with Essuman on what had taken place at the 2010 IFFR a few months later, in Tarifa, one of the southernmost tips of Spain, where Mane Cisneros Manrique founded an African film festival in 2004 (see Chapter 5). With Morocco visible across the 14km Strait of Gibraltar, I asked Essuman what her impressions were of the African program in Rotterdam. She responded: It was more a curiosity than really seeing where it is that we are. . . . It was just like a look-see. . . . There was a lot of navïete and a lack of knowledge about Africa in general. There just is in Europe. The coverage we’ve had has always been agenda-based. Either that or it’s just backdrop—you know, picturesque. (pers. comm.)

Essuman hereby suggests that, while claiming to be a “discovery,” the Africa program at the 2010 IFFR remained haunted by the specters of stereotypical European images of Africa: “agenda-based” NGO and development images, or the “picturesque” scenes of landscapes and animals that feature in films such as Out of Africa (1985). She also acknowledges, however, that “the curiosity led to something positive” because Soul Boy won the Dioraphte Award, given to the most popular film supported by the Hubert Bals Fund (as voted by the IFFR audience), and prize money of 10,000 euros. It could be argued, then, that the audience, mostly Dutch, subverted the controlling framework of the curators in this instance. Essuman also attributes the fact that the film “continues to be invited” to festivals to the exposure the IFFR and Dioraphte Award brought to it. When I asked whether the postscreening discussion of her film had made her angry, she remained positive: “Anger is a waste of energy in situations like that. . . . If you’re not interested in being represented in such a fashion, then let’s do something about it” (ibid.). Someone who is trying to do something about the problem through an “A-list” film festival is Elizabeth Radshaw, Director of Industry Programs at the HotDocs


Film Festival in Toronto, Canada, which set up its Blue Ice program for African filmmakers in 2011 (pers. comm.). Funded by the Blue Ice Group, the $1million Blue Ice fund provides filmmakers living and working on the continent with documentary development grants of $3,000–$8,000 and production grants of $5,000–$40,000. Between four and 10 projects are awarded each year. However, as Essuman says, “It’s not just about money. It never is just about money.” The Blue Ice program brings awardees to the HotDocs Film Festival to receive peerto-peer mentoring from leading filmmakers, as well as to establish contact with film funders. It also brings filmmakers to the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa, arguably the most important international film festival on the continent (see Chapter 6). What is so unusual about HotDocs’ approach, however, is that they ask filmmakers from Africa what they want and need. A two-page survey was sent to all 2012–2013 grant recipients, and the HotDocs team used the responses to plan the training program at the festival. Former recipients Sarah Ping Nie Jones and Jean Meeran (from South Africa) said that this is what truly distinguished the Blue Ice program from other, similar funding schemes for African or “Third World” filmmakers managed by “A-list” film festivals (pers. comm.). It should be noted, however, that some feel that change best happens not from within the belly of the beast but through parallel ventures. One such parallel venture is Eitel Basile Ngangue Ebelle’s Festival International du Film Panafricain (founded 2004), a black and pan-African film festival that takes place in Cannes every April, just a few weeks before the Cannes Film Festival itself. In this way, Ebelle’s festival benefits from Cannes’ prestige and publicity, but also carves out a separate space for the kind of films that rarely make it into the world’s most prestigious festival. As Ebelle told me: “When I moved to Cannes in 1999, I said to myself, in this city, in this capital of global cinema, it makes sense to feature pan-African cinema as well, to feature cinema that hasn’t been given an existence.” Calling himself a “Cannois” and insisting on the need to recognize Africa’s “global yet unique dimensions,” Ebelle has a philosophical attitude towards the general absence of African films in the official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, saying: “Perhaps our film production [in Africa and by Africans] is not as beautiful as it could be. . . . When we are creative and ‘in the light’ no door can shut itself to us” (pers. comm.). Moment Two: African Time and Lost in Translation One of the highlights of Smits and Ellickson’s “Where is Africa?” program at the 2010 IFFR was a tribute to the pioneering filmmakers of Africa. The so-called “Father of African Cinema,” Ousmane Sembene, was nowhere to be found in the program, however. Instead, the spotlight was placed on the following directors: Moustapha Alassane (the Nigerien director of films such as the short satirical animation Bon Voyage Sim [1966] and the Western parody Le retour d’un aventurier [1967]); Momar Thiam (the Senegalese director of films such as the adaptation Sarzan [1963], from a Birago Diop story, and the autobiographical fiction Karim [1970]); Timité Bassori (the Ivorian director of films that deal with the clash of local myths and psychoanalysis, such as Sur la dune de la solitude [1966] and La


femme au couteau [1969]); and Sebastien Kamba (from Congo-Brazzaville, with films such as the love story Kaka yo [1966]). Alassane and Thiam were also invited to the festival as special guests. At the launch of the program, Ellickson welcomed Alassane to the stage as “the father of African cinema, in our view.” And at the first screening of Sarzan he called Thiam to the stage, saying “The gentleman I’m going to introduce played just as instrumental a role as Ousmane Sembene.” The point was clear: Smits and Ellickson were attempting to rewrite the history of “African Cinema,” in which Sembene is usually positioned as pioneer. This was a bold move, and an important one, given that there were, in fact, African filmmakers working in sub-Saharan Africa before Sembene. Sarzan, for example, was made before Sembene’s Borom Sarret (1963), which is usually cited as the first film made in sub-Saharan Africa by an African.12 The opportunity to see these old, inaccessible, rarely screened films by Africans was greatly appreciated by the audience. Smits and Ellickson worked hard to bring the program to fruition, as Smits reflects here: This is a very complicated program . . . We had lots of technical problems. I think it’s the hardest thing that we have done. We’ve had to go from one format to the other, corruption with the tapes, people not sending their stuff, or sending the wrong tapes, [or they] send it by normal mail and it never arrives. (pers. comm.)

It was not only difficult for Smits and Ellickson to locate the film copies. In some cases it was hard to locate the filmmakers. Introducing one of the screenings, Ellickson spoke of his attempt to track down Edouard Sailly, the first filmmaker in Chad and the director of Le Troisième Jour (1967), a 15-minute film with no dialogue in which Sailly poetically illustrates a fisherman’s sorrow. Ellickson said that he began to despair when several people told him that Sailly had passed away; this narrative was confirmed by several stories on the Internet that referred to the “late Edouard Sailly.” But when Ellickson called Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the celebrated Chadian filmmaker, Haroun said Sailly was alive and well, and passed on his telephone number to Ellickson. “So that was a great discovery,” Ellickson said. This humorous story of something becoming lost in translation turned out to be an uncanny one given the context of its telling. After Ellickson’s introduction, films by Sailly, Alassane, Thiam, and Kamba were to be played, followed by a Q&A with Alassane and Thiam. Before the screenings, Alassane and Thiam were not present, however, and Ellickson remarked publicly that they were obviously on “African time.” He said this in spite of the fact that Thiam said publicly, the previous night, at the tribute to him in the Schouwburg Grote Zaal, that he had had to bring his son with him to the festival because he is so old that his arms and legs are not working properly (Thiam was more than 80 years old at the time). To ignore Alassane and Thiam’s age, in lieu of focusing on their “Africanness” via the stereotype of “African time,” positioned these special guests as strangers by focusing on their “African” identity above all else.13 After the screening, Alassane was still absent, and Ellickson remarked that he must be having the “endless lunch.” Thiam had arrived, however, and was brought


to the stage with a young man who was to translate Thiam’s French into English. Attempting to address earlier problems of translation within the program, Ellickson asked Thiam to speak in brief segments, so that it was easier for the translator to do his work.14 Thiam did so. The issue, this time, was that the translator could not understand. The problem was twofold, technical and cultural. In technical terms, the young man was simply not understanding all of the French. For example, the audience was interested in the distribution possibilities available to Thiam in Senegal in the 1960s, when he made Sarzan. He told the translator that the French Cultural Centre in Dakar would buy the non-commercial rights to African films. But the translator missed the crucial emphasis on the word “non-commercial” and did not translate it. Thiam recognized the misunderstanding and kept repeating the word until the translator finally got it right. The translator, clearly embarrassed by the situation, then stopped using the microphone when he was speaking French to Thiam, or handing the microphone to Thiam when Thiam was speaking. Instead, he would hold the microphone down when translating a spectator’s question, which he did at the level of a whisper. The only time the microphone was used was when the translator was speaking in English to the audience. This meant that those of us in the audience who understood French could not assess what was being lost in translation. The technical translation problems overlapped with cultural problems. If the translator had known about the history of filmmaking in Africa, he would have known that the French Cultural Centers in many West African countries only bought the non-commercial rights to films by Africans, which were then screened for free, bringing no audience-based returns to filmmakers, something many believe prevented a more robust industry developing on African soil. The young translator also did not know of the First Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers, at which Sarzan was screened; or of Birago Diop, the Senegalese writer whose work is adapted in Sarzan; or of Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese writer and filmmaker; or of Wolof, the main local language in Senegal. In his translations, he was forced to elide this specific information, referring—for example—to Thiam’s “native language” rather than “Wolof.” The experience was a painful one of mistranslation, one that illustrated the relevance of the earlier faux pas, that an important filmmaker such as Sailly might be wrongly thought to have passed away. A few years later, on May 16, 2013, sitting in the air-conditioned Théatre Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival, I lamented once again the poor choice of translator at the 2010 IFFR Thiam tribute. I was watching New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion in an interview with Michel Ciment (a French film critic and editor of the film journal Positif) after having won the Carrosse d’Or (Golden Coach) Prize.15 The translator assigned to Campion was extraordinary. She was able to listen to long pieces of conversation and translate them with both accuracy and poetry, without even taking notes. She was given an ovation, along with Campion, at the end of the interview. For the IFFR not to have thought about, and planned for, issues of translation was unprofessional when the festival was attempting to honor filmmakers just as important as Campion. The resulting mistranslations and the lack of care taken over this element of the festival’s hospitality to its guests rendered irrelevant their unique backgrounds, ages, personalities, and languages of


communication. The nature of the encounter was predicted before it even began, as one between (white) “Europeans” and (black) “Africans.” Focus Three: Forget Africa and Midnight Madness The 2010 IFFR’s “Where is Africa?” program featured the international premiere of The Figurine (Araromire) (Nigeria, 2009), a film by one of the most important filmmakers to have emerged in Africa in the past decade: Kunle Afolayan, who comes from an illustrious filmmaking family in Nigeria. Afolayan’s father was Adeyemi “Ade Love” Afolayan, one of the acting and directing stars of the Yoruba traveling theatre, a precursor to the Nollywood industry (see Barber 2000). Afolayan has made explicit his connection to, as well as difference from, Nollywood. He says that if being a Nollywood filmmaker means drawing inspiration from everyday stories in Nigeria, then he qualifies. But he also points to his unique biography compared to many filmmakers who are considered the stalwarts of Nollywood. Coming from a relatively privileged background, Afolayan spent seven years as a London banker, turning to film with a solid grasp of finance that would stand him in good stead when doing independent fundraising. Before directing his own films, he acted, starring in the films of his mentor Tunde Kelani, a Nigerian who also has an ambiguous relationship with Nollywood (Haynes 2014: 61). In Haynes’ view, Afolayan’s ambitions marked him out from the start, as did his “superior talent and charisma” (2014: 60). His films to date—Irapada (2007), The Figurine (2009), and Phone Swap (2012)—all boast high production values and clever scripts that suggest they have been labored over rather than being produced quickly, as with many Nollywood films. Afolayan was understandably excited for the international premiere of The Figurine at a major festival such as the IFFR. The London Film Festival had been the only “A-list” festival to pick up Irapada; notably, it had mostly been screened and praised in Africa—at the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAAs) and the Zuma Film Festival in Abuja, Nigeria—and at African film festivals outside the continent, such as the Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles and the Women of Color Arts and Film Festival in Atlanta. As Haynes says, The Figurine “is a bigger, slicker, more cosmopolitan and ambitious movie [than Irapada]: Afolayan’s breakout film” (2014: 63). At the 2010 IFFR, however, Afolayan was confronted with the internal hierarchies that operate at many of the “A-list” festivals, finding himself at the bottom of the pecking order in spite of his fame and popularity in Nigeria.16 As he later pointed out to me in an interview at the 2010 Tarifa African Film Festival: My film just had one screening [in Rotterdam]; the industry screening was just cancelled without any reason, and my film was scheduled to screen on the last day of the festival when everything was over, when all the film people—the buyers, you know—they were all gone. . . . And they didn’t pay for my trip down there—I sponsored myself there [even though] the film was selected and invited. (pers. comm.)17


The sole screening of The Figurine was not only scheduled for the last day of the festival, but for the worst possible time slot—midnight. The disappointment was greater because, by appearing at the IFFR, Afolayan had sacrificed the opportunity of premiering the film at the Berlin Film Festival, another “A-list” festival and one that is increasingly changing its attitude to films by Africans, thanks to the stewardship of Dorothee Wenner. Wenner is not only a programmer of Indian and African films, but has made some of the most original documentary films about Nigeria and Nigerians in the past few years, such as Nollywood Lady and Drama Consult. Nevertheless, the power of the audience eclipsed the shoddy planning by the IFFR curators, for Afolayan says that he received one of the best audience responses to The Figurine at that Rotterdam screening, where—in spite of it being midnight of the last day of the festival—300 people showed up. He was touched that people stayed for the Q&A and said it “gladdened [his] heart” that the audience (mostly white and Dutch) “really related well to the film” (pers. comm.) But positive audience response was all that Afolayan gained from his participation in the IFFR. With no industry screening and no response from any of the sales agents or distributors to whom he gave screeners, premiering the film at Rotterdam hardly led to the kind of major global distribution deal Afolayan was hoping for. As he notes above, neither did the festival pay for him to attend. It is paradoxical in this respect that at the festival, Zuilhof continuously and publicly referenced a lack of resources available for African filmmakers, yet diverted funds that could have supported them to his “Forget Africa” program, thereby funding non-African filmmakers to travel to Africa to make films. Congolese filmmaker Léandre-Alain Baker made a public joke during the festival that it seemed Africa really had been forgotten, since he had been shown no hospitality during his stay, with no one even to meet him when he arrived. This kind of treatment can be quite typical of “A-list” festivals, however, which often assume that the prestige they confer on filmmakers exempts them from having to pay screening, travel, and accommodation fees, or to show directors hospitality at the festival. Despite the positive audience response to his film, Afolayan left the IFFR disillusioned with the “A-list” international film festival circuit and more appreciative of the African—and particularly Nigerian—network (both within Nigeria and the diaspora) that supports his work. He says that “the most amazing public screening” of The Figurine was the one organized by UK-based Nigerian distributor Moses Babatope at the Odeon iMax cinema in the Greenwich district of London, at which there were no fewer than 1,000 people. Afolayan describes the experience as follows: We used two screens—one seats 400 and the other 200 and something. And people had to sit on the floor—they said they were not going to go . . . And we were . . . two hours behind schedule. And after the screening I tried to apologize and they said, no, it was worth the wait. . . . And now they still want the film back and that’s what gave me that assurance that if the film gets that distribution—that mainstream distribution in the UK—it’s going to do very well. (pers. comm.)

Afolayan estimates that 70 percent of the London audience was Nigerian, demonstrating primary interest in his work from Nigerians back home as well as in the


diaspora. As Nigerian cultural studies scholar Moradewun Adejunmobi argues, “Notwithstanding its ‘global’ presence and the fact that one can find Nollywood films on virtually every continent, it is important to underscore the extent to which Nollywood is a national film industry exported abroad for nationals around the world, and those that identify culturally or phenomenologically with the narratives being shown, if not with the state from which they emanate” (2014: 87). She thus argues that Nollywood has to be interpreted as a “minor transnational practice” (2007, 2014), one that is only partially embedded in international image industries and networks. In this sense, Adejunmobi urges caution before making assumptions that Nollywood films necessarily have less of a struggle within the global marketplace than any other kinds of African films. Afolayan’s descriptions of the audience response to The Figurine in both Rotterdam and London are a reminder that the success of Nigerian films, relative to other African films, has to be attributed, at least in part, to their popularity with a large number of spectators. It was for this reason that the 2010 IFFR’s installation “Old School Video Hall” in the foyer of the Schouwburg failed. The installation (part of Smits and Ellickson’s “Where is Africa?” program) was an attempt to show where and how most Africans tend to watch movies: “Seated on wooden benches . . . in video halls” (2010 IFFR catalogue: 296). The IFFR offered a daily program “announced on the chalk board outside of the hall as is customary, drawn from a collection of some of the most outlandish Nollywood videos, enormously popular through English speaking Africa” (ibid.). However, with no way of representing the audiences in Africa who love the films, the installation was lifeless, a pure aestheticization of Nollywood. The video hall sat empty, Nollywood movies playing all day to no spectators. This was a stark example of certain films’ inability to travel, not only because of their content, but also because of how they are curated. This lifeless aestheticization of a cultural product, whose lifeblood is people, was quite similar to the ways that the Nigerian state aestheticized its own arts and crafts at the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), as Andrew Apter shows in his book The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture (2005). The purpose of this festival, Apter argues, was to forge a national Nigerian culture out of the country’s disparate and diverse communities. However, in the process of removing and relocating arts and crafts from their productive contexts, the festival—and the state—“created a national culture that lost touch with the very public it was supposed to elevate and represent” (2005: 118). The festival ultimately produced an aestheticized, abstract idea of “‘the people’ over and above the people” themselves (ibid.). Despite the fact that FESTAC took place during the period of Nigeria’s oil boom and the wealth associated with it, this festival—as with so many other festivals around the world—did not compensate those artists whose handiwork it appropriated. The only compensation awarded to artists came in the form of certificates, medals, and press recognition. Apter thus argues that “In a narrow economic sense, we can say that these crafts and costumes were de-commodified as objects of economic production and recommodified, indeed refetishized, as objects of national culture” (2005: 119, my emphasis). Every nation, Apter concludes, quoting


Trouillot, is “a fiction in politics” (2005: 118), one that relies in specific ways on revaluing certain objects as “cultural” rather than “commercial.” One could argue that festivals, too, are fictions in politics, creating imagined communities—in the case of the IFFR, an imagined “Africa”—that sometimes decommodify their displayed objects (in this case, films) just as they magically reify these objects as “art.” This reification hides the crude, bottom-line considerations of festivals’ own economic survival. No festival—not even ones such as Cannes and the IFFR—is sustainable on a purely commercial level; the “A-list” festivals are funded through a mixture of public money, corporate sponsorship, and accreditation/box office returns. Afolayan may have carried away with him the symbolic capital of having screened a film at the IFFR, but it was a prestige that he had to finance himself and that, according to him, is yet to translate into any kind of economic capital. This example indicates that we need to reinvest the idea of curatorial practice with its original meaning in Latin—to take care of something, and not just an object, but the people associated with it. A Disruptive Footnote: Vita Nova “My view of cinema is that it’s more than just film, it’s an attitude, it’s a frame of reference.”—Edwin Carels (pers. comm.) At one corner of Mauritsplaats, on the edge of De Doelen—the headquarters of the IFFR—is a small glass enclosure. In 2010, this space was adopted by one of the festival programmers, Edwin Carels, who used it to create a pop-up store and free screening space called “Break Even.” With a small bar serving coffee and wine, a projector, and a dozen or so chairs and beanbags, Break Even was hardly marked out as the hub of a festival that welcomes 367,000 people (De Valck 2007: 163), but it created a relaxed, informal space for festivalgoers. This temporary space—set up solely for the 2010 edition of the festival—was the embodiment of space on the margins, the “fringe” to the official festival. It was, as Carels himself suggested, a footnote to the festival (pers. comm.). The store offered rare films and books Carels had found and bought on journeys to different parts of the world, which he was reselling at the cost of purchase. The screenings offered offbeat films, and two of these related to Africa: Vita Nova (2009), by Vincent Meessen, and Congo Love, by Xavier García Bardón. The latter involved the live mixing of Congolese music videos from the 1970s and 1980s, while the former has been described, drawing on Derrida’s phrasing, as “a colonial hauntology” (Demos 2013: 45). In an interview, Carels was quick to distinguish himself from the Dutch programmers at the IFFR, such as Zuilhof, and also to distance himself from the “Forget Africa” concept: I’m the only Belgian [programmer] here, and as a Belgian, you have a different relationship with Africa, as the Dutch have with, say, Indonesia. So I couldn’t approach this [program] in a naïve way; I couldn’t say well let’s reinvent—or let’s rediscover— [African] cinema without any background or any back story. I know in Belgium this is the 50th year of independence [for the Congo]. As a Belgian I cannot dissociate my programming and deal with African cinema apart from my own country’s

76 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals history. Belgium’s richness comes from exploits of the Congo. Leopold II abused his colonies. In Belgium in the last ten years, there has been a re-reading of that. I know that the Belgian Film Archive in a month’s time are giving back a lot of film they’ve restored, digitized, to the Africans. And one person said, this is like giving images of the Shoah to the Jews. This is a big thing. It’s admitting things. So I thought the rediscovery or the naïve take . . . of let’s just go to Africa with open eyes and no preconceptions . . . I couldn’t just go with that. (pers. comm.)

Notably the curatorial trope of “discovery” is converted into one of “rediscovery” in what Carels says here. There is an acknowledgment that what is thought to be strange is already familiar in the shoals and meshes of colonial encounters. But in Carels’s positioning of himself as Belgian and thus different from the Dutch, he overlooks Holland’s colonial ties with Africa—for example, through the exploits of the Dutch East India Company, and the entrenching of apartheid in South Africa by the descendants of the Dutch in this region. It was partly in response to what he saw as the problems of the Africa program at the 2010 IFFR that Carels created a footnote to it in his innovative Break Even store, specifically through his screening of Vita Nova. This film takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s deconstructive, anticolonial analysis of the front cover of a 1955 edition of the French magazine Paris Match—the now iconic cover in which a young, black cadet is saluting the French flag. The photograph was, in fact, taken at a festival of sorts: Les Nuits de l’Armée (The Nights of the Army), a televised military spectacle that brought together the French Foreign Legion, the Paris Fire Brigade, the Republican Guard, the Garde Noire de Dakar (The Black Guard of Dakar), and the children of French West African troops, among others, to “celebrate France’s colonial empire” (Demos 2013: 46). Barthes’s analysis of the imperial utopia created through the photograph is well known to the postcolonial scholar. He writes: I see very well what it signifies to me—that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colours discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (quoted in Demos 2013: 46)

Meessen’s primary interest, as an artist and filmmaker, has been described as how to “transform documents into experience and vice versa.”18 As Demos says, in Vita Nova, Meessen gives “new life” to the image of the young cadet—Diouf Birane, from Burkina Faso—and he also brings to life a flesh-and-blood Roland Barthes, a Barthes of the world, not solely of the word (ibid.). Meessen moves from document to experience, from text to life, from the image of a boy on a magazine to a search for the man in real life, from Barthes’s ideas as expressed in writing (and the silences therein) to the material circumstances of his life and family. The shock at the core of Vita Nova is a silence, a silence that is a material injustice: despite all his anticolonial analysis, even in his autobiography Barthes refuses to discuss his direct family ties to colonialism. Meessen takes us on a journey into this history, revealing that Barthes’s maternal grandfather, Louis Gustave Binger, set sail for West Africa from France in 1887, at the age of 29, and—after various journeys


of adventure—went on to become the colonial governor of Ivory Coast. The city “Bingerville” is named after him. Writing about Vita Nova, Demos draws on Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” to describe this methodology of revelation, which “conjures ghosts” as it “links diverse peoples, geographies, and political histories” (2013: 51). Demos says: The term [“hauntology”] proposes a methodology of interpretation that attempts to uncover both the ontology of a haunting (the being, effects, and affects of possession) and the haunting of being (the way presence is shadowed by unacknowledged histories and suppressed relationships that disturb the present’s complete severance from the past). (ibid.)

One could describe in similar terms Simon Gikandi’s gesture of bringing to life the “ghosts” of a bourgeois Englishwoman, Anna Margaretta Larpent, and a West African slave, Nealee, in the second chapter of Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011). This, too, is a use of hauntology to re-embody a discussion that has become bowdlerized through aestheticization. Gikandi’s work approximates Meessen’s “archival investigations [which] always lead to loose associations and appropriative gestures that are rewritten into critical narratives.”19 Susan BuckMorss also works within the methodology of hauntology in her groundbreaking article “Hegel and Haiti,” in which she convincingly argues that the (unacknowledged) inspiration behind Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic was the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, just after the French Revolution. As she notes: “The Haitian Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the bourgeois reading public knew it” (2000: 837). And yet, she argues, even those leading European philosophers of the time—including Jean-Jacques Rousseau—who stringently opposed slavery in principle, turned a blind eye to it in practice, thereby disembodying philosophical discourses around the question of human liberty (2000: 830). Vita Nova, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, and “Hegel and Haiti”— notwithstanding their formal differences as film, book, and article—collectively gesture towards the possibilities of liveness and hauntology within research methodologies in the humanities. As Ahmed says, “What is crucial is that the colonial project was not external to the constitution of the modernity of European nations: rather, the identity of these nations became predicated on their relationship to the colonized others” (2000: 10). The ways in which Africa was frequently rendered alien to Europe and the rest of the world through the “Where is Africa?” program at the 2010 IFFR was a disavowal of the messy, material ways in which Africa and Europe are entwined, historically and in our contemporary world. Europe’s current constitution is one both financed and haunted by its imperial adventures and exploits in Africa (and elsewhere), rendering the conventional curatorial trope of “discovery” at “A-list” festivals problematic when one is considering the representation of films by formerly colonized peoples. This prompts the question: is there a more appropriate trope for such curatorial practices, a trope that will insist on more ethical encounters between curators and the curated?


Alan Singer’s attempt to bring to bear on Kant’s concept of sensus communis a renewed link among the aesthetic, political, and ethical provides one potential answer. Examining the power of eristics (the art of debate/argument) in the public sphere of Athens in the fifth century BC, he notes that as a political means, [eristics] was a philosophical stance that encouraged the leveling of social barriers of class and ethnicity and precipitated an unprecedented level of public conflict . . . The dialectical spirit thus advanced in the polis an agonistic ethos and a tide of democratization, which threatened aristocratic and authoritarian social establishments. (1997: 214)

In seeking parallels between this democratizing impulse of eristics centuries ago and the need to acknowledge the imbrication of aesthetics, politics, and ethics in our contemporary era, Singer turns to Hannah Arendt’s (re)reading of Kant’s sensus communis. He notes that what particularly attracts Arendt to this Kantian concept is the idea of “enlarged thought,” an attempt to liberate ourselves from those “subjective private conditions” that limit our powers of judgment (1997: 217) and to take the judgments of others into account. The way that Kant suggests we can achieve enlarged thought, says Arendt, is to “train [our] imagination[s] to go visiting” (1997: 220) because, by doing so, “we formulate the interests of others” (1997: 235). In other words, if we relate this back to the work of curation, the curator, instead of going adventuring (which implies the centering of the self), needs to go visiting (which insists on equalizing the self in the face of an “other” or many “others”). But how is this to be achieved in practice? In the final instance, Singer critiques Arendt for not pushing her politicized reading of Kant further, and particularly for containing her own theorizing within the abstract philosophical realm of the vita contemplativa rather than the vita activa, just as Kant ultimately does. Singer is interested, instead, in encounters that are based within a “real, instead of a virtual, intersubjectivity” (1997: 236) and he relates the practice of aesthetic judgment to the practice of teaching, thus fortifying a common link that is made between curation and pedagogy (Sandlos 2004, Iordanova 2013b). Singer also advocates openness to the stranger as the ideal way of training our imaginations to go visiting: I would say that the difference between teaching and teaching to go visiting is captured in . . . prolepsis [rhetorical anticipation] as a potential aesthetic tenet . . . where the proleptic status of such knowledge is stipulated as knowledge of what we don’t know. For with this stipulation, the knowledge of what we don’t know remains a yet rationalizable contingency rather than a stigmatically irrational misrecognition. We can reasonably call it a mode of visiting, because prolepsis dictates that any reconciliation between self and other arising from it is understood to be constrained by a standard of acceptability (an exigency of time), not a standard of truth (an exigency of ontology). When we are asking for acceptance, we are conceding a communitarian interest, where a change of consciousness is perforce constitutive, not destructive, of social identity. (1997: 236)

While encouraging the seeking of acceptance through community, Singer recognizes that all social encounters are dynamic, since “the stance of solicitude implicit


in persuasion is at once temporally determinate and temporally open-ended in its very dialogic dimension” (Singer 1997: 229). While as curators (and teachers, and scholars) we should train our imaginations to go visiting, remaining alive to what we do not know, we should not fear the (dis)sensus communis that is the natural outcome of any open, democratic and ethical social experience. As I hope has been clear from my analysis of the “live” aspects of the “Where is Africa?” program at the 2010 IFFR, if curators do not attempt to engage in such visiting and in the (dis)sensus communis that will inevitably arise from it, such (dis)sensus communis will assert itself in much more violent and potentially destructive ways during the festival itself. Africa is Here to Stay: New “A-list” Attitudes to African Film Despite my critical analysis of the “Where is Africa?” program at the 2010 IFFR, it is impossible to deny that the landscape of the “A-list” film festivals is slowly changing in relation to films by Africans and filmmakers from Africa. The “Where is Africa?” program, for all its problems, has to be credited with drawing attention to the prior absence of African filmmaking within “A-list” film festivals; in this sense, it can perhaps also be considered part of a new movement in which major film festivals are hiring programmers with specific knowledge of films by Africans, and expanding their focus on Africa. One example within this movement is the inauguration of the AsiaAfrica program at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2008, curated by Nashen Moodley (from South Africa), which brings approximately 60 African and Asian films to the festival each year. Moodley started to work with the festival in 2005, helping to introduce African films into the program (pers. comm.). Since 2006, the festival has also run the Muhr Awards for Arab, Asian, and African filmmakers; these awards come with significant cash prizes: $50,000 for the best feature fiction film; $40,000 for the best documentary; and $30,000 for the best short film (Moodley pers. comm.).20 In 2008, the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea made African filmmakers the beneficiaries of its Jeonju Digital Project, giving $50,000 each to three filmmakers, from Burkina Faso, Chad, and Tunisia respectively.21 The Jeonju program director, Jung Soo-wan, who produced the films, prides the festival on giving “the filmmakers complete freedom . . . We didn’t want to dictate what they made” (quoted in Danielsen 2008). A $150,000 grant from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to the Seattle International Film Festival in 2012 has also allowed this festival to create a major “African Pictures” program from 2013–2015 (Hanna 2012). Neither are these “A-list” festivals ignoring spectators in Africa; since 2010, the IFFR and the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) have drawn on, respectively, the Hubert Bals Fund and the IDFA Bertha Fund to create the “Cinema Mondial Tour,” a collaboration with film festivals in Africa to bring fiction and documentary films to audiences across Africa. In 2011–2012, the screenings were reported to have attracted 30,000 people.22 Many African film curators at “A-list” festivals today—such as Cameron Bailey, Rasha Salti, Nashen Moodley, Dorothee Wenner, and Jérôme Baron—cannot be


neatly aligned with the “dominant image of the subject” critiqued by Rosi Braidotti as “masculine/white/heterosexual/speaking a standard language/propertyowning/urbanized” (2011: 212). In the past few years, we have also seen the first “black” helmers of major international festivals, bringing with them fresh agendas, such as Cameron Bailey, the codirector and artistic director of TIFF, and Nashen Moodley, director of the Sydney Film Festival in Australia. What I find particularly interesting about the new generation of curators is how little standardization one finds across their work. Despite the prominence given to programmers at festivals since the 1970s, the field remains extremely heterogeneous. According to Moodley, if you spoke to most people who are involved in film festivals, very few set out to be film festival programmers or festival directors. Very few have studied film . . . Maybe that will change, but for now, most of the people I know come from varied backgrounds. From journalism quite a lot, but I also know really great film festival programmers who were, for example, gardeners before! (pers. comm.)

Jessica Morgan catalogues the range of former careers of today’s most celebrated curators as including poetry (Carlos Basualdo, Okwui Enwezor), architecture (Jean Leering), theatre (Francesco Bonami), and politics and economics (Hans Ulrich Obrist) (2013: 24). Peter Rorvik, who for 12 years was the director of the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa, came from an even more unlikely background: surfing. In many African contexts, as I will explore in the following chapters, curating and festival organization is often a de facto activity for filmmakers, who have felt interpellated by the lack of cinematic alternatives to Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood films in their local contexts. Even in France, possibly the most cinephilic nation in the world, there is very little standardization around film curation today. One of the leading curators involved with African film there is Jérôme Baron, who has been a programmer for the Festival des 3 Continents Film Festival in Nantes since 2004, and its director since 2010. He, too, came to curation by chance—through growing up in Nantes and watching films at the festival. He says he realized he “didn’t want to make film,” but rather that his “place should be somewhere between the people who make films and the people who watch films.” He only later learned what a curator was, and has since combined curation work with teaching, voluntarily running a year-round art-house cinema, and a “long career” as an operator in an iron factory (pers. comm.). Baron forms part of a new generation of curators who reject the “aristocratic model” of curating, i.e., the legacy of wealthy collectors and connoisseurs (Morgan 2013: 22). The fact that many people come to curation by chance might be a result of how relatively young the practice is as a paid profession; very few curatorial positions offer a full-time salary. According to Rasha Salti, the Middle East and Africa film programmer for TIFF, France is the only country where curators are consistently hired by the state, under titles such as “Commissaire” or “Inspecteur,” and provided with the full social security given to government employees (pers. comm.). As a result, the field of curating is marked by precariousness, turnover,


and volunteerism, with many programmers working as freelancers, or subsidizing their curatorial work through paid jobs. It also means, however, that curatorial practice is always at risk of being available only to the independently wealthy, to those who do not rely on other work for their livelihood. This dynamic makes the field extremely competitive, with hundreds vying for the “plum” curatorial positions at the “A-list” festivals and the most prestigious galleries and museums. And it sometimes discourages more democratic curatorial practices on the part of the select few curators who have “made it,” for fear of having their power usurped. At the same time, some less prominent curators feel that the most successful curators are capable of appropriating their ideas and contacts for no return except implicit, deferred promises of career advancement. As Moodley and Baron note, many curators did not study film, or undertake higher education of any kind. And yet, as Salti says, curators have to be like Druids;23 they are expected to know about everything (pers. comm.). Spending several days with Salti at Cannes 2013 gave me firsthand insight into how she approaches her curatorial work. The daughter of Syrian refugees who had to flee to Lebanon when she was a child, Salti is a transnational spirit who spends much of her life traveling. She arrived at Cannes from Morocco, where she had traveled all over the country meeting artists and filmmakers. At Cannes, her days were filled not only with watching as many films as possible, but with one-onone meetings with filmmakers, learning about their current and future projects. She would stay awake until the early hours of the morning, watching trailers and screeners sent to her by filmmakers, and engaging with the news in three different languages—English, French, and Arabic—all of which she speaks fluently. Good curation, in short, involves not only creativity, but a great deal of hard, constant work in keeping oneself broadly educated, not only about one’s area of specialization, but about the world in general. A deep knowledge of particular places and languages also helps, as in Salti’s case, to avoid falling into the trap of curating a bland “world cinema.” While this form of liberal, transnational, multilingual education may be beyond the reach of many, the ways in which the Internet has democratized access to diverse forms and sources of knowledge means that there is potential today for anyone to train herself to become a curator. Indeed, over the past few decades, the definition of curating has become so open and flexible that the term “curate” can now be applied to almost anything. In an article for the New York Times, Alex Williams (2009) writes: The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. . . . [A]mong designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”

While some argue that this trend involves the appropriation and vernacularization of a prestigious, elite term by opportunists, others claim it is another sign of the democratization enabled largely by the Internet and broader access to previously


rare content. The popularization of the term “curation” has been facilitated by social media sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest, which suggest that their users are involved in a form of “social curation,” curating themselves rather than a specific topic or idea. With ever greater numbers of filmmakers engaging in online funding, distribution, and exhibition, through platforms such as Kickstarter, DynamoPlayer, and YouTube, filmmakers are also increasingly becoming the curators, distributors, and exhibitors of their own work. This “self-curation” is also increasingly occurring more in “live” contexts, through initiatives such as Gathr,24 wherein filmmakers can organize their own theatrical screenings. Anthony Gardner notes (2013), however, that it was largely the information overload brought on by the Internet that led to the canny adoption of this “highfalutin” term which, lexicographer Sara Hawker says, is “now so widely used that it’s become just a way of saying ‘select.’”25 Clearly if curatorial practice is to have any meaning at all it has to involve more than simply selecting certain things as opposed to others. Furthermore, the sheer amount of film material online calls for new forms of curatorship to guide viewers to and through content. Iordanova suggests the increasing rapprochement between scholarship and curatorial work when she asks: Can film scholars assist aspiring browsers of the Internet’s global video store in making more informed and imaginative choices? In our roles as media researchers, scholars now resemble curators and guides; no longer helping students discover cinema itself, but mostly assisting them in connecting, comparing, and making things meaningful in cinema’s relation to history, aesthetics, and politics. (Iordanova 2013b: 49)

Indeed, Marie Lora-Mungai, CEO of the Kenya-based VOD platform BuniTV, attributes the success of BuniTV’s free, online screening of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film The President to the “curated” approach adopted (2013), in which content is not only properly marketed to potential audiences, but through which the value of watching the content is also explained. The film attracted 8,500 online views in the one week it was made available, which equates to about 42 cinema screenings, and the audience feedback was extremely positive, despite the film’s experimental form and what some might argue is an intellectual impenetrability. Shweta Kishore argues that “Festival organizers and programmers see themselves as enablers of cinephilia, developing and extending the art of cinema” (2013: 739). Film curators are, indeed, usually cinephiles—people who love watching movies and sharing that love with others—but they also tend to be people who are interested in diverse forms of culture and cultures. Baron describes himself as a cinephile, but also as someone making connections between films, between cultures, between people, between “unique ways of thinking about the world.” And while he says that in France “cinema isn’t something entertaining, it’s something serious,” his cinephilia is hardly restricted to that contentious category called “art” film. Rather, he says it “came first from [his] very deep passion for American classics”—films like Rio Bravo (1959) (pers. comm.). Anyone who assumes that film programmers are studied cinephiles or elitist art film “snobs”


stands corrected by Moodley, who—when I asked him his advice for would-be programmers—said: Watch as many films as you can. Read as much as you can. Watch as many plays as you can. Learn about politics. Read poetry and listen to music. Try to get as diverse an education and appreciation of the world and art and of life as you possibly can. I don’t think you should just sit and watch DVDs all the time. . . . My favourite curators are people who have a broad understanding of the world and a broad understanding of the arts and are able to bring that to their programming. . . . Otherwise you’re just a film nerd! (pers. comm.)

Curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London and head of the Africa Acquisitions Committee, Kerryn Greenberg (from South Africa), has similar advice for aspiring curators: “Be in the world. The more you see, the more you read, the more you write, the more people you meet, the more you will understand and the better you will be as a person, and as a curator.” She describes curating not as a “profession” but a “lifestyle.”26 Baron, too, maintains a flexible attitude to what curation means, describing it as an intensely personal, subjective, and eclectic activity that is “a way to stay alive and curious, if nothing else.” His version of curation approximates that of editing, and he likes to “resist the temptation” to use films to construct rigid chronologies, to instead “create some connections between films, and situations that are apparently very far away from each other” (pers. comm.). This associative rather than rigid, linear approach might be precisely what is most needed in curatorial practice, to establish it not as a dogma but a constant problematizing of dominant narratives, a consistent opening onto alternatives, a teaching of the imagination to go visiting. According to art curator Jens Hoffman, despite the growing professionalization of the field, it is still likely that a decade from now the role of the curator will be analogous to a many-headed creature, the perfect embodiment of a peripatetic, decentralized, deregulated intellectual worker who fills gaps in cultural meaning through a wide range of products and services to an ever-broadening consumer market. (2013: 15)

This conceptualization of the future curator as a kind of nomadic “intellectual worker” chimes with Braidotti’s attempts to imagine how actual “social alternatives” can be produced through new models of nomadic citizenship and thought (2011: 19). In Braidotti’s terms, the curator needs to train both her imagination and her body to go visiting, as thinker and citizen. Theory around curatorial practice developed first in the field of contemporary art studies,27 through journals such as Manifesta, Curator, Museum Management, and Curatorship. Founded in 2003, Manifesta developed its first twelve issues as a kind of handbook for curatorial practice and reflection, exploring issues such as space, time, globalization, ethics, collective and individual identity, the subconscious, pedagogy, creativity, the archive and documentation, grammar, and canonicity. There is also a growing body of work that specifically addresses film


programming.28 A special issue of The Moving Image (4.1, Spring 2004), coedited by Jan-Christopher Horak and Laura Marks, works with similar themes and suggests that the exhibition of film and video participates in the following five activities: “(1) the provision of information; (2) the provocation of insight; (3) the soliciting of pleasure; (4) instantiation of cultural memory in the form of images, sounds, and gestures; and (5) the formation of social settings in which identities, communities, discourses and solidarities are reconfirmed or put in question” (Marks 2004: X). The issue includes an important article by black British film curator June Givanni (2004), while the more recent edited collection Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals (2012) includes a perspective on the curating of African films by Mahen Bonetti, founder/director of the New York African Film Festival. Despite the scarcity of specific reflections on the curation of African films, there has, nevertheless, been a significant ongoing debate around curatorial practices in relation to contemporary African art, particularly in the journal NKA. In a recent curators’ roundtable in this journal, Chika Okeke-Agulu puts forward for debate a common conception of curators not as open-minded people who make connections for others, but as stern gatekeepers of cultural value: In the field of art, especially contemporary art, curators are arguably the most powerful shapers of art’s discursive horizons, with their exhibitions (which can make or break artists’ careers, influence values of artwork and their movement into museums) and catalogs (that have increasingly become referenced texts competing for scholarly attention with the autonomous monograph). . . . What difference does it make to acknowledge this significant “power” of the curator in knowledge production? (2008: 160)

Laurie Ann Farrell’s response to this is that, even with practices of collective and collaborative curation emerging through the social turn in curatorial practices in the 1990s,29 “Exhibitions will never transcend the limitations of subjectivity” (2008: 161). Similarly, Okwui Enwezor turns the question on its head, asking what would be left of curatorial practice—or art—if the “worlds” that “artists and intellectuals” make out of “modes of self and collective fashioning” were jettisoned (2008: 163). In other words, curating inevitably involves the valuing of certain cultural products and the sidelining of others, but it also needs to be seen as an artistic and creative practice in its own right. Moodley agrees, but also saddles curators with a kind of responsibility to the public through one of his curatorial mottos: “We watch the bad stuff so that you don’t have to!” (pers. comm.). These two perspectives represent two discourses around curation: one insists on the responsibility of the curator to others (artists and audiences); the other emphasizes the fundamental independence of the curator. The tension between these two discourses is summed up in the main question Manifesta Journal issue 12 asks: are ethical concerns “a secondary consideration for curatorial work, or inextricable from the process and as such a consistent part of the curator’s intellectual self ”?30 Rasha Salti reframes the question of the ethical responsibility of curators, seeing her primary curatorial responsibility to herself, a responsibility that—if


honored—will then translate into a broader sense of responsibility to filmmakers and audiences. She says: In French, we would say coup de foudre. I fall in love with every single film that I program. And I think that is really important. If you’re not in love, if you don’t have that spark, then you can’t really present the film in front of people. Something will show. (pers. comm.)

All the curators I have interviewed in the course of my research seem to have a set of criteria that allows their practice to be reflected upon more philosophically and abstractly, and it is the acknowledgment of these criteria (however vague, as with “falling in love”) that allows for accountability and debate. Two of Salti’s further curatorial mottos, for example, are “Where the Poetic meets the Political,” and “Imperfection rather than perfection makes a film more interesting.” The former motto would seem to relate to her context of upbringing, as a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, where the political and aesthetic dimensions of life were inextricable. The latter motto is perhaps attributable to her eclectic education in Lebanon and New York (where she attended the New School for Social Research), and to her adventurous personality, where she is consistently seeking the offbeat and the oblique. It is such an approach that artistic director of TIFF, Cameron Bailey, strongly supports and encourages, saying “unlike many other festivals, we give our programmers a lot of autonomy and they’re individuals and they have personalities, they’ve got individual tastes. They’re all very knowledgeable but they choose films based on their knowledge and their tastes and I like that and we allow them to do that because we feel that gives us a richer program” (pers. comm.). Moodley’s assumption that people’s definition of what constitutes “the bad stuff ” (and, by extension, “the good stuff ”) will be identical, reveals, in the final analysis, at once the curator’s sense of communal responsibility and independent power as tastemaker. The only way out of this conundrum, according to curator of the Planet in Focus Film Festival Mark Haslam, is further theoretical and personal reflection on curatorial practices. While Haslam acknowledges that “Curation is inherently a matter of personal taste and aesthetics,” he also argues that “this can become a problem when one’s own tastes are exalted to the level of the absolute. Often along with this comes the attitude that because this set of aesthetic parameters is now considered absolute, it doesn’t need to be articulated, defined, or made explicit to others” (2004: 56–57). What Haslam encourages is acknowledgment of one’s curatorial criteria so that those criteria are available for critique, and thus vulnerable to (dis)sensus communis. I will later elaborate on this idea from the perspective of Africa-based curators.

4

African Film Festivals in Africa: Curating “African Audiences” for “African Films”

The First Film Festivals in Africa: “Educating” the “African Audience” No celebration, no festival, could take place without a public, an audience, writes Odile Goerg (1999: 8–9). If this is the case, then it is quite remarkable that so little scholarly attention has been granted to considering audiences at film festivals.1 Although certain prestigious film festivals (Cannes, in particular) operate mostly as closed, industry events focused on the glamor and business of filmmaking, most of the thousands of film festivals around the world see their main beneficiaries as both filmmakers and audiences (see Peranson 2013: 193–196). In fact, “the curator Neil Young has questioned whether Cannes, which excludes the public from most of its screenings, qualifies as a festival at all” on this basis (Archibald and Miller 2011: 250). As a field of study, film festivals offer an ideal opportunity to observe films playing out in public contexts, with live audiences and discussions. The contested meanings of films in these settings challenge the dominant hermeneutic practice of close film analysis as it takes place in professional settings, such as universities and newspapers, where the contexts of a film’s screening are rarely taken into account in the critic’s judgment of the film. There is particular potential for research on the (dis)sensus communis surrounding African-made films in this respect, given that festivals are among the few public arenas in which such films are screened. Along with the exhibition of Nollywood movies at thousands of video halls across the continent, festivals are among the public spaces awaiting more in-depth research.2 Although there are exceptions, the organizers of many film festivals in Africa put great emphasis on the central value of audiences to their festivals’ worth and meaning. As I will show, many Africans have been motivated to found and run their festivals by the structural and institutional barriers to a certain kind of film being accessible to Africa-based audiences, and many curators of these festivals find ways of actually incorporating audience perspectives into their curatorial


principles. The kinds of spectators cultivated by many African curators are a world away from what Kishore, for example, describes of audience experiences at the first Ladakh International Film Festival in India in 2012: Audiences were restricted to the established position of “viewer,” which allowed the consumption of film but excluded contributions to structural aspects of the festival. Opportunities for intervention, such as post-film discussions, interactions with film-makers, and festival structures that included audience feedback were missing—especially significant given that LIFF was the first film festival in the entire region. (2013: 738)

As Witz explains, if no audience spontaneity is fostered by a festival, there will be little chance of festive excitement. Rather the festival will assume a unidirectional pedagogical tone. As will become evident in the next few chapters of this book, where film festival directors and curators within Africa have not incorporated audience tastes and desires into their conceptualization of their festivals, audiences have frequently stepped up to claim this power and sense of authorship and ownership over the festivals. It is thus not only the festival organizers who determine whether a festival’s culture is participatory or not. As Barber’s foundational work on popular culture and audiences in Africa has shown, there are especially porous boundaries between production and reception in many African contexts (1987, 1997). Ways of thinking about audiences in Africa have come a long way since colonial times. A significant body of scholarship on the practices of colonial film units and missionaries who used film in Africa has revealed the extent to which “the African audience” was constructed by such groups as a homogenous and nonindividuated mass to be feared and policed (Frederikson 1994, Ambler 2001, Burns 2002, Peterson 2003, Larkin 2008). While they did not call themselves film festivals, the mobile film screenings held in different parts of the continent by film units and missionaries from the early 1900s onwards satisfy my definition of a film festival, in that they brought together huge, live audiences at specific moments to watch and, sometimes, discuss films. The kinds of films shown were usually instructional, and valorized “Western” technology. For example, Africans were shown films about why they should cultivate and drink tea and coffee, and save their money in banks (Nottcutt and Latham 1937). As research reveals, however, (dis)sensus communis prevailed in the interpretation of the value of these films. Writing about one of the largest of the colonial film projects—the British Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE) of the 1930s, which operated across five countries in East Africa—Aboubakar Sanogo notes: According to the BEKE, these mostly outdoors screenings were well attended, sometimes with crowds of about 3,000 to 5,000 people. Given that the audiences were reportedly seeing films for the very first time, the BEKE can hardly claim that the huge crowds validated its brand of cinema. Instead, one may propose such motivations as the desire for communal gathering around the cinema as a recreational object, the need to compensate for the recreational repressions enforced by the administration and the church (forcing the converts to renounce supposed heathen practices), but also the techniques used by BEKE to attract audiences, which included Swahili

African Film Festivals in Africa 89

songs, missionary choirs, folk stories and the music of Paul Robeson. (2011: 239, my emphasis)

As I have discussed elsewhere (Dovey and Impey 2010), there has been a turn recently in film scholarship to acknowledge the diverse and sometimes surprising reasons people engage in the experience of cinemagoing (Jancovich et al 2003, Larkin 2008). Cinemagoing is about far more than the exercise of personal judgment in choosing a particular film to view (Jancovich et al 2003: 3). In the context of northern Nigeria, Larkin argues that “Cinema draws people because of the narratives and spectacles of the films it shows, but the experience of going there is greater than the films themselves” (2008: 1–2). People have historically gone to the cinema for a variety of reasons: to socialize, to escape the mundaneness of the domestic sphere, to engage in otherwise socially unacceptable romantic encounters, or even to sleep (Jancovich et al 2003: 8–9). Radway’s research on a group of American women’s enjoyment of reading romance novels similarly reveals that this practice constituted an event for them. What they were gravitating towards was not simply a genre, but an activity—a form of escape from family life (1991). In my research of audience tastes and desires at film festivals, I too have found that people attend festivals for a variety of reasons.3 However, in contrast to the sites of “popular” film and literature consumption on which the research mentioned above is based, film festivals do seem to be valued by audiences for their provision of what is seen as alternative or rarely screened content, and many respondents to my surveys and interviews suggest that they attend festivals on the basis of wanting to see a particular film. In audience research I conducted at the 2013 Durban International Film Festival,4 for example, the majority of respondents said they had attended a screening because of the particular film being shown (33 percent).5 However, a significant proportion said that they came for other reasons: because they were generally interested in the film medium (24 percent); to spend time with friends or family (8 percent); for enjoyment and relaxation (7 percent); and to support the festival’s work (4 percent). In terms of what participants hoped to get out of the festival as a whole, knowledge and education were most mentioned (by 18 percent of respondents).6 However, other stated reasons for attending the festival were: to see alternative, new, diverse, and “non-commercial” films (13 percent); entertainment, enjoyment, and an escape from daily life (11 percent); a mixture of entertainment and education (11 percent); to see great films and good stories (10 percent); to be inspired and have a great experience (8 percent); and to network (6 percent). What respondents most associated with the idea of a festival, furthermore, was fun, excitement, and enjoyment (22 percent), and celebration, festivities, and partying (18 percent). A significant proportion of my respondents in the township of KwaMashu (22 percent), outside of central Durban, said they associated a festival with community and the gathering of people. While hardly rigorous enough to sustain a complete argument, a brief preliminary survey I have conducted into the vocabulary used to identify festivals in several African languages suggests that, in different African contexts, certain words do not typically point to what we think of today as an “arts festival.” For example, the Amharic word for festival—“bä’al”—denotes a feast day, a day of celebration,


or a holiday. Similarly, the Yoruba words for festival—“orò” and “àjòdún”—refer to a celebration or feast. In Zulu, the word most frequently used for a festival is “umkhosi,” meaning “a gathering of people.” “Tamasha” is the Swahili word often used for “festival,” as in the local title of the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Notably, it is a word originating from Persian, in which it referred to a performance or show, and was then adopted in other languages, such as Hindi and Urdu, to mean something exciting. Languages such as Kalenjin (spoken in parts of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) and Shona (spoken mostly in Zimbabwe, but also in Zambia, Mozambique, and Botswana) have no original word that equates to “festival.” At the same time, a comment by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, that there is no word for “art” in the Wolof language, inspired me to begin exploring whether that is the case in any other African languages. In several I investigated—for example, the Ethiopian languages of Amharic and Oromo— the words used for art (in this case, “t’ïbäb” and “ogummaa,” respectively) are most commonly also used to identify a skill or craft, but can refer to knowledge or wisdom more generally as well. The arrival of European forms of education in this context saw the adoption of the word “art”—for example, the title of a university liberal arts degree in Amharic is “bä’art tïmhïrt mät’änä tïmhïrt” (my emphasis). I refer to the meanings of these words not to seek out a homogenous, indigenous “African” meaning for festivals and art—which would be impossible given Africa’s diversity—but to keep in mind the range of ways festivals have manifested themselves on the continent over time. There are signs in these languages, for example, that in the precolonial era festivals had a more celebratory rather than pedagogical flavor, a view confirmed by the few published works that exist on African festivals before the colonial era (see, for example, Goerg 1999, Olaniyan 2012, Awofeso 2013). If I pay more attention here to the colonial moment, I do not mean to suggest that this moment was more central to African experience than any other historical era, but that it is undeniable that film festivals, when they arrived in Africa, were imbricated with colonialism and the new forms of “Western” modernity and technology that colonial authorities brought with them to the continent. If we return to the early film festivals organized by colonial film units, then, it is clear these gatherings of people were not intended as celebratory experiences in the entertainment sense. Rather they were a form of educational instruction that would develop “modern,” European sensibilities in spectators. The name of the BEKE speaks for itself and, according to Vincent Bouchard, “At the beginning of the 1930s the main colonial empires in Africa (British, Belgian, French) all established filmmaking and distribution services for the purpose of educating the local subject populations” (2010: 96, my emphasis). Where mobile screenings were occasionally organized under the rubric of entertainment, there was usually an ulterior motive. For example, although the Rev. Ray Phillips of the American Mission Board screened popular films—such as Charlie Chaplin films—to mineworkers in South Africa from 1919 to 1940, he often turned to such works as a way of quelling political dissent (Peterson 2003: 39). Ultimately his interest was in teaching the mineworkers how “to distinguish between good and bad characters” in the films (Peterson 2003: 43). Entertainment films were to be used, then, only insofar as they could assist with Phillips’s mission to endow Africans with a moral education.


Reading between the lines of the documentation that we have of these early film festivals in Africa, it is possible to conjure a clash of interpretations—(dis) sensus communis—around the meanings and value inherent in the festivals and the films they screened. For many Africans, as Sanogo suggests above, the screenings afforded an opportunity for leisure through the act of gathering with other people amid storytelling and song. For many of the organizers, however, the intention was moral and scientific instruction, and the incorporation of Africans into a European logic, economy, and way of behaving. The colonizers’ anxiety about an “interpretive community” (Fish 1980) that might use the screenings in ways contradictory to their own intentions, is evident in the response of the Mombasa African Affairs Officer in Kenya when a multiracial “Committee on African Advance” suggested holding screenings in the Mombasa Sports Stadium in 1953: Mombasa Africans do not need entertaining en masse after dark. Most of them like to be at home by then. Should they be encouraged to go out? Once out, will they not want to “go on” somewhere after the show? Where will they go if not to bars? (quoted in Frederiksen 1994: 25, my emphasis)

The anxiety here has nothing to do with the kinds of films being shown; it purely concerns the event of public cinemagoing and all that it entails—people coming together “en masse,” and the activities that tend to accompany cinemagoing, such as drinking and dancing. The anxiety leads the officer to homogenize the audience, referring to the people derogatorily as “Mombasa Africans,” as though they are not individuals with distinct personalities, desires, and behaviors. If the first colonial anxiety concerned the event of public cinemagoing in Africa, the second anxiety concerned the nature of the films available to Africans. Certain films were “harmful,” the organizers of the BEKE tell us in their report, because of their explicit sex and violence, and their negative depiction of white people (Nottcutt and Latham 1937: 22). As Sanogo points out, “a faster-paced cinema . . . was positioned as the bad object that the ‘essential’ African spectator should be protected from” (2011: 240). The BEKE relied on rules devised by William Sellers, a colonial film unit administrator in Nigeria, who argued that films made for Africans should be slow in pace, avoid trick photography, leave nothing to the imagination, and emphasize continuity (Burns 2002: 52). “The BEKE even imagined a taste-formation filmic diet,” Sanogo notes, “introducing the proverbial illiterate peasants to BEKE educational film to a point of saturation to such an extent that they would be ‘weaned off ’ ‘unsuitable’ commercial films before even being exposed to them” (2011: 240). What is perhaps at risk of being overlooked in this focus on the moral order, however, are the economic motivations behind the desire to instill a certain kind of cinematic taste in the colonized. In his study of French colonial censorship of screenings in West Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, Șaul suggests that much of the French anxiety stemmed from the fact that their own film industry had not recovered since WWII, and that they were concerned about economic competition from other film-producing regions, such as the US, India, Egypt, and Italy (2010: 135). Audience research commissioned by their Overseas Ministry in the


late 1940s suggested that “in a few years Indian films would become ‘dangerous competition’” for French films; by the late 1950s the French were consistently banning all Egyptian films from their cinemas in West Africa out of fear of their popularity with audiences (ibid.).7 Notably, one of the members on the Ouagadougou censorship committee was a “representative of French private enterprise” (ibid.). Similarly, Sanogo notes that there was “a representative from a private film company, Gaumont-British Instructional” on the BEKE board of advisors (2011: 235). The difficulty in prizing apart cultural and economic interests offers a rejoinder to any argument that the form French colonialism took in Africa—its mission civilisatrice—was predominantly cultural and only secondarily economic. Contradicting the colonizers’ construction of Africans as “a visually impaired audience that had never been exposed to cinema,” Sanogo argues that the BEKE was forced to come face to face with “a critical culture of spectatorship” (2011: 241) and, we might add, a popular culture of spectatorship, through which viewers took, and have taken, great pleasure in watching American, Indian, Egyptian, and Chinese films.8 Audiences questioned not only the narrative relevance of the BEKE films to their own lives, critiquing some of the films for being “boring” (2011: 240), but also the “quality” of the films (2011: 239), which they felt were “crude” (2011: 240). The “African audience,” deemed half-witted by the British, had a sense of professional standards when it came to the technical aspects of film and, quite simply, rejected the “ideological inscription of amateurishness” in the BEKE films (2011: 239–40). Liberating and Politicizing African Audiences Just as the colonial authorities were obsessed with African audiences, so too were the first African filmmakers and film critics—although for very different reasons. One might even say that the first African filmmakers and critics were haunted by the audience—or, rather, by the lack of African audiences for African films. As I will argue later in this chapter, FESPACO was envisaged as a kind of phoenix rising from the ashes of colonial exploitation, to connect African films with African audiences, to conquer the problem that African films are “foreigners in their own countries” (Sama 1996: 148). Nowhere is the issue more emphatically stated, perhaps, than in the opening line of Tunisian film critic and founder of the JCC Tahar Cheriaa’s book Écrans d’Abondance: Ou Cinémas de Libération, en Afrique?: “The problem of distribution is incontrovertibly the key problem—the one that largely determines all the rest—materially affecting the cinema of the African and Arab countries’ (1978: 9).9 When the first filmmakers in Africa devised manifestos at conferences in Algiers, Niamey, and Harare, it was African audiences they had in mind and, inspired as they were by the Third Cinema movement of Latin America and the broader drive of Tricontinentalism,10 it was the politicization of African audiences they sought (see Bakari and Cham 1996: 17–36). Ethiopian film scholar Teshome Gabriel was probably the most vociferous African proponent of revolutionary Third Cinema, but what is most theoretically interesting about his early work is how he insists that politically subversive


aesthetics are not intrinsic to a film but are able to develop only in the relationships between audiences and films. Gabriel writes: Style is only meaningful in the context of its use—in how it acts on culture and helps illuminate the ideology within it. It is, therefore, utterly misleading to argue, for example, that only the type of distancing device that Brecht used, makes a film “socialist,” or, that only Godard’s non-illusionary device is “non-bourgeois camera style,” or that the use of a film star or a central figure submits a film to the prototypes of Hollywood individualisms. (1979: 89)

Gabriel’s interest was in the contextual and contingent nature of film aesthetics and style. In the 1970s, a time in which the independent and autonomous genius of film auteurs was being celebrated in Europe and North America through the “age of programmers” at film festivals (De Valck 2007: 167), Gabriel was asking uncomfortable questions about the relationship of aesthetics to cultural location, difference, and reception from his location within a place in which “art” film was not an integral part of culture and society. While Gabriel’s ideas on film audiences have been subsequently eclipsed by more contemporary and sophisticated theories of spectatorship (see, for example, Brooker and Jermyn 2003, Jancovich et al 2003, Bird 2003, Carpentier et al 2014), his work was instructive and enduring within the development of African screen media theory for the way it insisted on the situated nature of audiences and the contingency of film aesthetics. Gabriel made a strong case, for example, that apparent ugliness is not the sign of an aesthetically weak film. In his comparative analysis of two films made in South Africa during apartheid—the pro-apartheid film Journey to the Sun (1975) and the anti-apartheid Last Grave at Dimbaza (1973)—Gabriel writes, quoting from Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1976): The question [. . .] is not which film is aesthetically superior to the other. A work can no longer be considered aesthetically correct because it is sublime or beautiful. A work is aesthetically apt if it is “able to grasp and portray popular life in a more profound, authentic, human and concretely historical fashion.” (Gabriel 1979:103)

The look and sound of a film, Gabriel argues in the final analysis, is “not a result of mere quirk on the part of the filmmakers. It is historically and ideologically determined by the ‘aesthetics’ in a people’s lives” (1979: 102). In such a way, Gabriel precociously provides us with one of the most compelling ways of moving beyond a position in African screen media scholarship that dares not take Nollywood and its aesthetics seriously, or that sees Nollywood aesthetics only as a form of meaningless rubbish.11 The kind of spectatorial consensus that has enabled Nollywood’s success suggests that this kind of filmmaking is considered aesthetically superior within certain contexts, however lacking in conventional image and sound quality it may appear to other eyes and ears. A similar critique is at the basis of an important lecture delivered in 1975 at Indiana University by the man often referred to as the “Father of African Cinema,” the Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembene. In his lecture, titled “Man is Culture,” Sembene argued that, in light of global history and the assaults


of slavery and colonialism on black Africans, it makes more sense to use the term “culture” than “art” to speak about human expression, since culture grounds expression in human production, whereas art is too readily associated with an abstracted aesthetics. As Marcia Landy notes, “By situating culture in all human activity, [Sembene] unite[d] cultural considerations with the struggle for survival” (1982: 133, my emphasis). Sembene correctly suggests that it would be “vulgar” and “unscholarly” to discuss art and culture without referencing the brutal history in which “Africa has paid with her flesh the primary accumulation of capital for the benefit of the bourgeoisie” (quoted in Landy 1982: 133). The centrality of human activity to cultural production, and the centrality of audiences to the meanings of this cultural production, is the thread running through the history of African screen media theory and practice. It can be seen surfacing not only in colonial anxieties around “the African audience,” and through claims about the potentially revolutionary uses of cinema (Gabriel 1979, 1982), but also in a long tradition of criticism discussing the education and conscientization of spectators through African films (Diawara 1992, Ukadike 1994, Gugler 2003, Thackway 2003, Dovey 2009), and—most recently—in the emphasis given to the popularity of African-made video movies with contemporary audiences, in Africa and elsewhere (Garritano 2013, Krings and Okome 2013). In all cases, the yardstick by which the importance of a film has been tacitly measured is its (assumed) relationship and/or popularity with African spectators. The first film festivals founded in the decolonization era in Africa reveal a similar obsession with African audiences, and can thus be used as a way of looking more deeply into this consensus. Arts Festivals in the Era of Decolonization In one of the few postcolonial analyses of film festivals we have in an otherwise quite Eurocentric field,12 Wong argues that “Non-European festivals emerged slowly, as a sense of a festival world of networks and competitors took shape” (2011: 11). Wong’s focus is mainly on film festivals in Asia and, in particular, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, which began in 1978 as “one of the first Asian festivals” (2011: 146). If one takes the first film festivals in postcolonial Africa as one’s examples, it is not possible to say that they “emerged slowly”; rather, several burst onto the scene in the 1960s as significant acts of cultural and political resistance, liberation and self-empowerment, inspiring discussions and debates about Africa, African film, African filmmakers, and African aesthetics on African soil. Certain film critics give the impression that conversations about what constitutes “African cinema” began not within Africa itself, but at the “A-list” film festivals outside the continent (see, for example, Bangré 1994). The first festivals to take films made by Africans and diasporan Africans seriously, however, were held within Africa: the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal; the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC) in Tunisia (the first regularly held film festival established on the continent, founded in 1966);13 the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers in Algeria; and FESPACO, the Festival


Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (founded 1969), which takes place biannually in Burkina Faso.14 In the heady years of political independence for some nations, and the continued decolonization struggles for others, filmmakers from different African countries met at these and other festivals and conferences on the continent, drew up manifestos about what “African Cinema” should and might be, and shared their work with one another and with audiences. As the current director of FESPACO, Michel Ouédraogo, says, FESPACO “was created in a context in which the African states had recently acquired their independence and they wanted to express their sovereignty and their identity” (quoted in the film Afrique Cannes). While JCC and FESPACO were the first major festivals on the continent to focus entirely on celebrating African films, the 1966 and 1969 arts festivals in Dakar and Algiers also featured African film prominently. Jules-Rosette notes, for example, that: “Among the most important resolutions made in 1966 [in Dakar] were those of the cinema group, which planned to build a visual archive of African cultural traditions and develop an inter-African office of cinematography” (2000: 69). One could even argue that, along with JCC, which took place later that year in Tunisia, this moment marked the birth of “African Cinema” as a self-consciously defined concept on the continent. For, although papers about African film had been presented at the Society for African Culture’s 1956 Paris and 1959 Rome conferences, “little attention had been devoted to this domain until the Dakar festival” (ibid.). Film had a similarly important role at the 1969 Algiers festival, to which filmmakers such as Sembene and Djibil Diop Mambety were invited; Sembene was a particular focus of attention, through the screenings of his films Borom Sarret (1963), Black Girl (1966), and Mandabi (1968) at the Algiers Cinémathèque (Hadouchi 2011: 118).15 Festivals Dedicated to Films by Africans In the late 1960s, two festivals dedicated to films by Africans were established in Africa. Of these, FESPACO, in Burkina Faso, soon established its preeminence over its “sister” festival, JCC, in Tunisia. As Bikales points out: What the world has come to know, in varied form, as African cinema—categories of film titles, subject matters, and themes; novel aesthetic approaches, uses of “tradition,” time, and space; particular auteurs—has been consistently and consciously shaped and defined by FESPACO, the major point of introduction of African film makers and their works to national and international audiences. (1997: 209)

Similarly, Dupré points out that “[FESPACO] allows for the ‘taking of temperature’ of cinema on the continent and of opening it to the world” (2012: 15).16 While JCC and FESPACO have worked collaboratively rather than in competition, establishing themselves in alternating years since 1973 (Diawara 1992: 131–2), the question arises: why did FESPACO and not JCC become the festive capital of African film on the continent?17 One potential answer is provided by


Bachmann, in an early report on JCC that reveals the festival took place in an authoritarian context in a way that FESPACO did not: “The police are everywhere, watching against leftist turmoil, and after the 1970 film festival here, it appears that its head [the film critic Tahar Cheriaa] spent six months in jail. This year, all films shown were censored first” (1973: 49). By 2008, when Jeffrey Ruoff began documenting the festival, things had changed somewhat, with government censors promising director Nouri Bouzid that they would grant a distribution visa to his film Man of Ashes (which deals with rape, and features such characters as a prostitute and a Tunisian Jew treated sympathetically) if it were successful at JCC. Four thousand people queued up to see the film at the festival, guaranteeing the visa (2008: 46). There are, however, many similarities and correspondences between FESPACO and JCC. They both began at a time of decolonization and framed themselves as highly politicized events, engaged in the process of the liberation of African countries from colonialism. They were both the result of African filmmakers deciding they needed to find a way to exhibit African films for African audiences. And both festivals have received a significant portion of their funding from their respective governments, however much the politics of these states may have contradicted those of the main organizers of the festivals. Furthermore, the grand prizes awarded by each festival are symbolic of their commitment, at least in principle, to the value of the precolonial past and, notably, of women. JCC’s Tanit d’Or celebrates precolonial, pre-Islamic Tunisia through the Phoenician mother goddess, and FESPACO’s Étalon de Yennenga may be a “stallion” (étalon) of gold, but it references the horse of a female heroine—Princess Yennenga, the mother of the Mossi nation (Burkina’s largest ethnic group) (Bikales 1997: 300). One of the few points on which the two festivals can be distinguished is their geopolitical focus: whereas FESPACO, perhaps taking notes from the 1969 PanAfrican Cultural Festival of Algiers, has always positioned itself as a pan-African event and considers North Africa as much a part of Africa as sub-Saharan Africa, JCC makes a distinction between what it calls Tunisia’s “African” and “Arab” heritages, promoting films that “critically examine the social realities of Arab and African peoples” (Ruoff 2008: 46, my emphasis).18 The part-Arab focus of JCC may also be one of the reasons behind its contemporary decline in importance, in a context in which there has been a significant proliferation of festivals focusing on Arab cinema in the Middle East from the late 1970s on (Ruoff 2008: 49–50, Caillé 2014). Today, the center of African film exhibition at festivals in the Middle East has shifted also to the Dubai International Film Festival (see Chapter 3). The point of this brief comparison between JCC and FESPACO is not to dismiss the importance of the former, whose historical and contemporary contribution to African filmmaking is undisputed, and which is famous for the passionate commitment of its audiences (see the documentary From Carthage to Carthage). It is simply an attempt to understand why the majority of filmmakers from Africa make attending FESPACO more of a priority than attending JCC, and why FESPACO has been seen—until recently, when new players such as the AMAA (African Movie Academy Awards)19 arrived—as the major institutional shaper of a certain kind of African film.


FESPACO: Creating African Audiences for African Films While discussions of curation in contemporary African art scholarship are far more developed than those specifically around the programming of African film, there are some significant differences between African art exhibitions and film festivals that suggest divergent trajectories. As described by Okeke-Agulu, the origins of the interest in the exhibition of contemporary African art is usually traced to Jean-Hubert Martin’s show Magiciens de la Terre (1989) and Susan Vogel’s Africa Explores (1991). These exhibitions were then followed by “a succession of megashows in the 1990s,” and then by the rise of shows curated by Africans, such as Okwui Enwezor’s Short Century and Simon Njami’s Africa Remix (2008: 156). The main problem with these megashows, however, was that none of them—except Africa Remix—was created or exhibited in Africa, meaning that they knowingly “address a Western audience” (2008: 160). This is no doubt one of the reasons contemporary African art scholarship remains relatively impoverished when it comes to the question of African audiences, and why some critics have argued that such curatorial practices “can be faulted for legitimizing a notion of Africa that dispenses with the continent itself ” (Ogbechie 2010). Another might be related to the different experiences offered by galleries on the one hand, and film festivals on the other. Visitors to festivals tend to watch films communally and to discuss them after screenings, developing a sense of aesthetic judgment within a (dis)sensus communis. Visitors to galleries tend to move through these spaces haphazardly, in far more individualistic and less social ways. As I hope to show in the following discussion of FESPACO, this Africa-based film festival was founded, unlike the first African art exhibitions, with African audiences fully in mind. Until the video movie industries in Ghana and Nigeria transformed the distribution and exhibition infrastructures for African films in the 1980s through their adoption of the cheap formats of video and VCD, the means for distribution and exhibition within Africa was restricted to television and cinemas. And since neither television stations nor cinemas initially prioritized the screening of films by Africans, to begin any history of African films as viewed by Africans one needs to start with film festivals. Providing an alternative to the foreign fare shown on television and in cinemas was perhaps the most basic agenda of these festivals. As Diawara notes: “[FESPACO] had as its objective ‘to make people discover and to promote African film which for the most part was ignored’” (1992: 129, my emphasis). FESPACO began in 1969 as a film festival run by a group of individuals, including filmmakers such as Sembene, loosely connected through the Franco-Voltaic Cultural Centre in Ouagadougou. One of its founders, the Burkinabé François Bassolet, describes the origins of the festival thus: In January 1969, during a time of economic upswing, a group of friends got together, and we raised the question of what we could do to make Ouagadougou a point of attraction. We were looking for something such as a festival of music or other arts that would allow the world to get to know Ouagadougou. (quoted in Bikales 1997: 220)20


By the third festival, in 1972, the government of Burkina Faso had appropriated the festival as its own (Bikales 1997: 216). This appropriation was organizational, financial, and ideological, with the government continuously providing the majority of the festival’s funding from 1972 on (see funding tables in Dupré 2012: 177–8). Government support for FESPACO has also survived successive coups d’état and regimes;21 the Burkinabé state has consistently recognized that promoting cinema is a way of putting this resource-poor, landlocked country on the map, of securing its existence. With cotton its only export, Burkina Faso needed something to raise its profile. Nevertheless, despite appropriation by the state, the independent spirit of the festival’s founders is still evident in many ways, as I will describe. In this sense, FESPACO to some extent fits into De Valck’s second phase of “independently organized” film festivals (founded from the late 1960s to the early 1990s). Still, it cannot necessarily be said to align itself with the values of the European “age of the programmer” because its focus has been much more on showcasing films from diverse African countries, as a way of valuing the political independence of these states, as well as elevating certain filmmakers to the status of “auteurs.” Despite FESPACO’s significant current organizational problems, despite the conflicts that have flared up across its 40 years, the existence of such an event in one of the poorest countries in the world has to be celebrated, and one is hardpressed to find an African filmmaker who denies FESPACO’s historical importance, however disillusioned many may be with some contemporary aspects of it.22 American journalist Kenneth Turan can barely hide his glowing admiration for the festival in his book, which spans film festivals from Sundance to Sarajevo. He points out that “in a scenario that even Hollywood would reject as outlandish, [FESPACO] has managed by a combination of passion and determination to turn itself into the undisputed capital of the African film world” and that the festival “shreds preconceived notions of festivals as merely places where tickets are taken and movies are shown” (2002: 65). What makes FESPACO distinct from many film festivals is its openness and accessibility. As a timid doctoral student during my first visit in 2003, I was overwhelmed by the generosity of the filmmakers who, instead of cordoning themselves off from the general public, could be easily approached as they drank beer beside the pool of the famous de facto festival headquarters, the aptly named Hôtel Independence, or ate a meal of brochettes (kebabs) at one of the small, makeshift restaurants outside the main cinema venues, the Ciné Burkina and the Ciné Neerwaya. Due to their generosity, I was able to conduct interviews that year with some of the leading filmmakers, including Sembene and Moussa Sene Absa. FESPACO encourages relaxed relationships among industry participants and the general public through its lack of concern for red carpets and exclusive parties. Warm nights, free midnight music concerts in public squares, a huge marketplace where local traders sell their goods, clowns on stilts who welcome spectators as they approach the entrance of the Ciné Burkina, the sounds of the muezzin’s call to prayer and the vroom of the ubiquitous mobylettes on Ouagadougou’s dusty streets—these are the defining features of FESPACO, along with the wealth of films. Unlike many festivals, which formally open and close with gala premieres accessible only to an inner circle of guests, FESPACO kicks off and concludes with


Figure 4.1 Man on stilts welcomes FESPACO guests to the Ciné Burkina

ceremonies at the vast Stade de 4 Août (Stadium of 4 August), which seats 35,000 people. These ceremonies (particularly the opening) are very popular with the Burkinabé because of the steady stream of entertainment, from music (Malian star Salif Keïta has performed several times, for example) to equestrian shows to fireworks. The stadium is named for August 4, 1984, the day former President Thomas Sankara changed the country’s name from its colonial appellation “Upper Volta” to “Burkina Faso,” which combines Mossi and Mande words to form the meaning “country of honest people.” The festival’s openness is also evident in the local public’s involvement in and engagement with it. Tickets to films cost a mere 500 CFA (roughly 62 British cents), which makes screenings affordable even to the least well-off. Free screenings are also offered in the less central quartiers by organizations such as the CNA (Cinéma Numérique Ambulant), a mobile cinema, followed by discussions facilitated by local film critics. While a little didactic in tone, these “outreach” screenings are well attended and enthusiastically received by participants eager to see films by their country-people and to learn more about film from local experts.23 Former director of the New York Film Festival Richard Peña, who is a regular FESPACO attendee, says: “Here you can see how open and dialogic the relationship to film is. Godard said that cinema is what goes on between the screen and the audience, and it really goes on here. You are seeing a truly communal experience” (quoted in Turan 2002: 66). This dialogism astounded me the first time I attended, where I found myself surrounded by fellow spectators who expressed their enjoyment by applauding, loudly laughing, addressing screen characters, or turning to their neighbors to make comments. Foreigners sometimes do not understand this form of film appreciation, as I witnessed when a young Russian woman at a screening at the Amakula Kampala International Film Festival in Uganda in 2010 bellowed out her disapproval at the noise audiences were making, yelling: “Be quiet and show some respect for the filmmaker!”


As Alimata Salembéré, one of the founders of FESPACO and the first president of the organizing committee, told me in an interview: The motivation [to found FESPACO] was, in the light of the emergence of African filmmakers with African films made on African territory, to show their films to African audiences because they didn’t have the opportunity to show their own films in cinemas. So, we showed their films, the people came to see them, and the directors discussed them with the audience. In this way, the directors could understand what the audience expected from the directors. It allowed them to improve their work. And then, also, amongst themselves, the directors had few opportunities to get together and speak with one another, to discuss their work, and exchange ideas. So [FESPACO] was an occasion during which the directors could talk and exchange their experience with one another. And, at the same time, they would talk to the audience to understand what they thought about their films. (pers. comm., my emphasis)24

The narrative provided by Salembéré focuses first on the relationship between African filmmakers and African audiences, and second on the relationship amongst African filmmakers themselves. The two inspirations behind the festival, in her account, were, first, to allow Africans to see themselves and their stories on the screen (something that had not been possible up until that point, except in Egypt), and, second, for African filmmakers to exchange ideas and experiences with one another, thereby consolidating an Africanized perspective on filmmaking.25 At the same time, as I have emphasized, the Burkinabé state clearly saw FESPACO as a way of internationalizing the country and putting it on the world map. For all stakeholder groups, the idea of creating African audiences for African films was central from the festival’s earliest days. The state made its point through statistics. Along with a huge increase in the number of films and participating countries, FESPACO saw a massive growth in audiences, most of whom were local: from 10,000 (in 1969) to 100,000 (in 1979) (Bikales 1997: 240), and from 400,000 (in 1987) to 500,000–600,000 (in 2009) (Saul 2010: 146). It was not love (or identification) at first sight, however, when it came to African spectators watching African films at FESPACO. Patrick Ilboudo, a professor at the former film school INAFEC (Institut Africain d’Éducation cinématographique de Ouagadougou)26 and author of a book about FESPACO (1988), points out that at the early editions of the festival, the Burkinabé audience was quite critical of the African films they saw, comparing them to “the more polished, commercially oriented films predominantly from Hollywood, but also from Europe, India, and China/Hong Kong to which they had grown accustomed” (Bikales 1997: 236). This critical response was not unlike the earliest documented audience responses to the amateurish films made specifically for African audiences by colonial film units, as I described earlier. In this case, too, instead of immediately gravitating towards films made by Africans, audiences at FESPACO—accustomed to international cinema—questioned their quality, contradicting Burkinabé filmmaker Gaston Kaboré’s well-known adage that, after years of being subjected to foreign films, Africans were “thirsting” for African images. Filmmakers such as Sembene and Mamadou Djim Kola attributed the audience’s initial distaste of their movies to a kind of mental “colonization” by Hollywood, and suggested that spectators needed time to become familiar with African


films (Ilboudo 1988: 116, Bikales 1997: 236, Saul 2010: 146). Sembene also hinted, however, that the problem had to do with small production budgets and that African filmmakers needed more support from African governments (Saul 2010: 146). This idea of an impoverished, unfamiliar yet “authentic” African art with which audiences could not initially identify is perhaps not dissimilar to that of Senghor’s attempts to build the “African art” of tapestry in Dakar in the 1960s. As Harney points out, Senghor did not provide the Senegalese public with the “guidance or incentive to acquire the kind of ‘cultural capital’ needed to serve as an active consumer or patron class for these new arts,” (2004: 79) which resulted in one of the teachers at the tapestry school telling his students: “You have a very great responsibility: to make our profession legitimate in the eyes of our fellow countrymen” (ibid.). Similarly, FESPACO was involved in a process of attempting to legitimize African filmmaking in the eyes of African spectators. It sought “to teach the population to like African movies” (Saul 2010: 146).27 The FESPACO organizing committee succeeded in building an audience for its new, celebrated art form where Senghor did not, however. The embracing of FESPACO by Burkinabé audiences over time would seem to be related to something greater than a simple change in film tastes, however. The increased popularity of films at the festival is undeniably linked to the national pride that the Burkinabé government, and the festival organizing committee, have engendered through FESPACO. Over the 10 years I have been attending the festival (every edition from 2003 to 2013), the films most popular with the locals have been the Burkinabé ones. Whenever I have been caught in a near-stampede at one of the cinemas and ended up squashed between other spectators sitting on the floor, a Burkinabé film has been at its heart: for example, Pierre Yaméogo’s Moi et Mon Blanc in 2003, or Appoline Traoré’s Moi Zaphira in 2013. Burkinabé filmmakers such as Yaméogo and Traoré, as well as Gaston Kaboré, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Fanta Régina Nacro, and Boubakar Diallo, are local legends in Burkina Faso. This is a country where cabdrivers aspire to be filmmakers, like Drissa Touré, who succeeded in having a film accepted at Cannes (Bikales 1997: 331). What has led to this celebration of Burkinabé film within Burkina? FESPACO cannot be seen as solely responsible, although the festival was critical to the process (Bikales 1997: 244). From 1970 on, the Burkinabé government engaged on many fronts to ensure the country’s existence through cinema. In 1970, just one month after the second edition of the Festival de Cinéma Africain de Ouagadougou (it only came to be called FESPACO from 1972), the Burkinabé government— under the leadership of General Sangoulé Lamizana—took the courageous move of nationalizing the country’s cinemas. This helped to raise significant funds for the production of Burkinabé films, because instead of the majority of box office revenue reverting to foreign distributors, it was now redirected to the government (Diawara 1992: 130, Barlet 2000: 232–237, Saul 2010: 144). While the 1970s saw the nationalization of Burkina’s cinemas and the growth of FESPACO, the 1980s became the heyday for Burkinabé film. In that decade, filmmakers such as Gaston Kaboré and Idrissa Ouédraogo began to be recognized at home and abroad (Bikales 1997: 257–8). Support for local film also grew when 34-year-old Thomas Sankara became the new president of Burkina Faso through a coup d’état in 1983.


In power until 1987, when he was assassinated, Sankara threw his weight behind FESPACO and African filmmaking in general, and is credited with bringing back to life an organization—FEPACI (the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers)— that had remained dormant for almost a decade, despite its ambitious, idealistic manifesto created in Algiers in 1975 (see Bakari and Cham 1996: 25–26). At FESPACO 1985, Sankara provided a great deal of funding and support to FEPACI, and the headquarters of the organization was established in Ouagadougou with Kaboré as its Secretary General (Saul 2010: 142). Film critic Frank Ukadike accordingly calls Sankara the “only African leader who was wholeheartedly committed to the development of African cinema” (1994: 199). Unlike many African governments, who sidelined culture in their national plans, Sankara believed that “The cultural conquest is a central part of the global strategy of the Revolution” (quoted in Dupré 2012: 167). Indeed, Sankara is also one of very few state presidents who have seen the value inherent in a film festival, his enthusiasm for FESPACO perhaps rivaled only by Mussolini’s fervent support for the Venice Film Festival (see Chapter 1). Sankara’s attempts to pay attention to the economic dimensions of African film is evidenced by the inauguration of the MICA (Marché International du Cinéma Africain) at FESPACO’s 1983 edition (Bikales 1997: 275), although that entity has never truly established itself as a viable marketplace for African film, as the Marché du Film at Cannes is for global film, for example.28 In 1989, FESPACO commissioned the University of Ouagadougou to research the festival’s economic impact, which was found to be about 700 million CFA, more than twice as much as the festival’s budget that year (ibid.: 281). Many people in Ouagadougou with whom I have spoken, from cabdrivers to sim-card sellers, are most excited about FESPACO because of the extraordinary trade opportunities it offers them, not because of the films shown. These people might not attend any of the screenings (indeed, many struggle to find the time, however affordable the ticket prices), but they are still intricately woven into the fabric of the festival as a different kind of (economic) participant and beneficiary. Sankara was not only concerned with the local dimensions of FESPACO, however, but had international ambitions of a very particular kind for the festival. Through FESPACO, he courted countries and individuals who shared his “black power” and Marxist ideologies, attempting to build transnational linkages on these platforms. His support for FESPACO and for the medium of cinema was greatly inspired by his admiration for the Cuban revolution, and in a public speech on the twentieth anniversary of Che Guevara’s death, he said: “Che is Burkinabé” (Dupré 2012: 166). FESPACO’s connection with communist countries, however, remained largely ideological rather than practical, although during Sankara’s era the Havana Film Festival (founded 1979) showcased the “Largest Retrospective on African Films in the World” in 1986, while FESPACO featured Latin American film programs in 1985 and 1987 (Wong 2011: 12, Dupré 2012: 173). In 1987 FESPACO also included, for the first time, a Diaspora category with the Paul Robeson prize, thereby welcoming films from the global black community (Dupré 2012: 172). In 1985 and 1987 liberation organizations such as the ANC (African National Congress) and SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization) were


also present (Dupré 2012: 196). Financial contributions to FESPACO, however, came far more from European organizations—such as the ACCT (Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique), the CEE (European economic community), and UNESCO—than from communist countries such as Cuba and the USSR. It was only in 1987 that the USSR embassy in Burkina Faso became a funder of FESPACO, though it provided a minuscule amount compared to other organizations (see funding tables in Dupré 2012: 177–8). We can only conjecture the heights to which FESPACO may have grown had Sankara lived. On October 15, 1987 he was assassinated; many believe his death was ordered by Blaise Compaoré, who was in power from then until 2014 (Bikales 1997: 277). However, while many African filmmakers boycotted the 1989 edition of FESPACO in protest (Dupré 2012: 166), and while certain African filmmakers (such as Haile Gerima) have altogether refused to return to FESPACO since the Marxist leader’s assassination (Turan 2002: 77), Gaston Kaboré argues that “cinema in Burkina does not belong to one government or one president. It is part of the patrimony of our country” (quoted in Turan 2002: 77). While it is true that FESPACO belongs to many people—and especially, perhaps, to those Burkinabé audiences who cherish it for various reasons—it is nevertheless possible to pinpoint a dramatic change in the festival after Sankara’s death. Many have attributed it to the role of Filippe Sawadogo, FESPACO’s general secretary from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, at which time he resigned from FESPACO to become Burkina Faso’s ambassador to France (Bikales 1997: 321). Sawadogo was controversial with many African filmmakers for the particular international and professional vision he brought to FESPACO after Sankara’s death, something characteristic of what De Valck calls the “age of directors,” the third phase of international film festivals (2007: 191). Indeed, it was key to Sawadogo that FESPACO integrate itself more into the international film festival circuit and he began to compare FESPACO’s workings to those of Cannes (Bikales 1997: 290). Unlike the Marxist and “black power” approach of Sankara, Sawadogo actively courted the European Union for funds. Perhaps it should not be seen as unrelated to Sankara’s death, then, that the festival’s budget grew from 160 million CFA (roughly £200,000) in 1987 to 326 million CFA (roughly £400,000) in 1989, largely due to the significant growth in support from the EU, which stepped up its funding from 18.4 million CFA (roughly £23,000) in 1987 to 105 million CFA (roughly £132,000) in 1989 (Bikales 1997: 278). This funding, as well as attempts to broaden the languages of participation to include English and Arabic, and not only French (Diawara 1992: 137–8), led to a gradual “dismantling” of specific French hegemony at FESPACO, according to Diawara (ibid.) and Bikales (1997: 278), and to what some see as the introduction of a more generalized European hegemony at the festival. Nevertheless, French influence is still keenly felt, with many of the “Anglophone” filmmakers complaining that they are treated as second-class citizens. Many films in African languages are subtitled only in French, and many of the press conferences are conducted in French.29 Setting aside the differences between Sankara and Sawadogo’s ideological and international visions for FESPACO, however, what is most important in my analysis is the way the festival has consistently been envisioned by the Burkinabé


government and by its organizers not simply as a rare, biannual event, but as part of the lifeblood of this impoverished country. This means it is possible, to some extent, to exempt FESPACO from the critique that has issued from many of the authors in the volume African Theatre Festivals (2012), edited by James Gibbs, who argue that festivals, as short-lived events, do not leave lasting legacies. Several African-centered ways of conceptualizing festivals draw on metaphors of harvesting the food that sustains human life. Mshengu Kavanagh refers, for example, to the long-standing importance of harvest festivals across southern Africa—the incwala in Swaziland, the Zulu umkhosi in South Africa, the ngoni of Zambia, and the ngoma in Tanzania—as well as yam festivals across West Africa (2012: 3). It follows, he says, that an arts festival in the African context “might be regarded as the celebration and showcasing of an artistic harvest” (ibid.). Similarly, Ayi Kwei Armah has called for festivals in Africa to operate not like “destructive tropical storms” but as “gentle, life-giving, daily rain” (quoted in Gibbs 2012a: 41). Biting critique is aimed at one-off festivals such as FESMAN 2010 (World Festival of Black Arts), which Amy Niang argues exploited the “aesthetics of extravagance” to stage a self-aggrandizing “[Abdoulaye] Wade Show” (2012: 31). The focus of much of this critique is the disproportion between the sometimes vast amounts of public money spent staging festivals, and the paucity of local artistic production, which the critics feel should be the main beneficiary of such funding. While FESPACO’s future remains in the balance, it is difficult not to see the festival historically, at least, as a “celebration and showcasing of an artistic harvest.” The Future of FESPACO Şaul and Austen suggest that it was the arrival of Nollywood in the early 1990s that started to disrupt the version of “African Cinema” that FESPACO was primarily responsible for curating into existence: The great change in the twenty-first century . . . is the co-existence of two distinct African cinemas: a (relatively) long established tradition of celluloid art films centered in French-speaking West Africa and identified with its biennial FESPACO [festival] . . . and a newer, more commercial video film industry based in Englishspeaking Africa and labeled, after its major Nigerian source, Nollywood. (2010: 1)

Indeed, while Sankara’s revolutionary regime depended to a large extent on television as a medium of communication, and thus opened the door to an inclusion of the medium at FESPACO from 1987 on (Dupré 2012: 182–3), the festival continued to ignore video filmmakers on the continent for more than 20 years thereafter (McCain 2011). At FESPACO 2007, Nigerian filmmaker Tunde Kelani was deeply offended when he discovered that filmmakers like himself—simply because they work in digital formats—had been overlooked at FESPACO’s biannual conference on African film, held jointly with CODESRIA.30 FESPACO made a small yet condescending concession to such filmmakers when it introduced a parallel, competitive program called “TV/Video Films” in 2009. The irony of separating out these films due to their format was apparent to many at FESPACO 2011, when some of


the most exciting works of the year—such as Kunle Afolayan’s The Figurine, Hawa Essuman’s Soul Boy, and Boubacar Diallo’s Julie et Romeo—were on the “lesser” list (see McCain 2011 for a critique of this separation). The arrival of new, cheaper technologies has seen filmmakers who previously worked exclusively with 35mm film try their hand with digital experimentation, as in the case of the Cannes-award-winning Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Haroun is frequently held up as an example of an African art-house “auteur,” because of his success at Cannes, but this reductive categorization ignores the heterogeneity of his oeuvre, which includes, for example, the hilarious family drama he made for French television, Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (2008). With its grainy, television aesthetic, the general tone of this film is neither meditative nor searing, as in films such as Daratt and A Screaming Man, but rather fast-paced and comic in its focus on a Malian man, Malik, whose young wife leaves him for a white French oyster farmer in Bordeaux. Other experiments have gone in the opposite direction, however. For example, those Nigerian filmmakers who have been dubbed part of the “New Nollywood” movement in recent years, such as Kunle Afolayan, have shifted from using cheaper digital formats to working with 35mm in some cases. The audiovisual mediums used by filmmakers today are remarkably diverse, thanks to technological developments, and have a great deal to do with the political economy of funding and access rather than purely “aesthetic” choices. While there is widespread belief that many African filmmakers whose work is shown at festivals are sustained by European grant funding, a 2013 survey I conducted reveals that the majority are not, and continue to piece together budgets from a range of sources. This contradicts the common association people assume between film festivals and so-called “elitist art films.” For example, one critic claims that FESPACO is “[d]eemed elitist by many local practitioners” and that it is “synonymous with art films financed largely through foreign subsidies made essentially to please the tastes of festival-goers all over the world, not necessarily those of local African audiences” (Evrard 2008). While that may have been the case in the past, when the Bureau of African Cinema was still financing many of the “francophone” African films, it is a markedly different scene today, and the relish with which local Burkinabé spectators watch the films contradicts the simplistic insider/outsider dichotomy drawn here. The conflicts around the transformation of analogue to digital formats came to a head at FESPACO 2013, when several films selected for the official competition were suddenly disqualified because the organizing committee discovered they were not on 35mm celluloid film. That the FESPACO rules around format are a hangover from a much earlier era, and now anachronistic and quite frankly illogical and disrespectful to audiences, was cogently summed up by one of the disqualified filmmakers—Mozambican producer Pedro Pimenta (of the film V irgin Margarida)—who said: [FESPACO’s] projection is so bad that there’s no point in [films] being in 35mm. If you’re serious about 35mm, start with your projector. Your projection facilities and quality. . . . Alain Gomis [who went on to win the Étalon de Yennenga for Tey], he

106 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals has got a 35mm print. He tested it, and he tested the DVD. And he asked them please screen the DVD . . . it’s better quality than the 35mm. . . . What we’re seeing here is the DVDs, not the 35mm prints. (pers. comm.)

Pimenta says that he attempted to start a protest about the FESPACO rules before the 2013 edition, by trying “to get all the selected films to take a common position: either our film is screened in its own format, or we are not coming.” But this attempt at solidarity and boycott failed, he says, because some filmmakers refused to participate, saying “we spent 30, 40, 50,000 euros to get a 35mm print to come to FESPACO.” If FESPACO does not change its rules on format in future years, Pimenta says, it will not only be the fault of the festival, then, but also of the filmmakers (pers. comm.). The argument does not come down to medium alone, however. It is clearly also related to the perceived threat felt by FESPACO of the popularity of Nollywood films with audiences across the African continent and what that means for the festival’s future. The basis on which Nollywood scholars argue for the undeniable importance of the video movie-making trend is its huge audience, in contradistinction to the relatively modest audiences other kinds of African films have garnered. As Garritano says: “video has allowed videomakers in Ghana and Nigeria, individuals who in most cases are detached from official cultural institutions and working outside the purview of the state, to create a tremendously popular, commercial cinema for audiences in Africa and abroad” (2013: 1, my emphasis). In relation to Jean-Marie Teno’s documentary Sacred Places (2009), which focuses on the poor Ouagadougou neighborhood of Saint Léon during FESPACO 2009, Garritano asks: “in a documentary about African cinema and African audiences, why was there no mention made of African popular movies?” (2013: 196). Similarly, Ken Harrow argues that “Nollywood . . . is the answer to African culture’s quest for a viable economic basis that rests upon an African audience and its taste” (Harrow 2013: 6, my emphasis). While these claims about the popularity of video movies with Africans and diasporan Africans are undeniable, we must keep in mind a sense of the inequalities in power arrangements that also determine what is available (or not) to audiences at any particular moment. As audience scholar Elizabeth Bird asks, Are U.S. soap operas successful around the world because they are instantly appealing in all cultures, as local audiences busily reinterpret them within their own contexts? Maybe, up to a point. But we all know that the central reason they are shown worldwide is that they can be bought much more cheaply than local programming can be made. Viewers “choose” them, but often it is a Hobson’s Choice. (2003: 172)

A variety of institutional obstacles may have prevented the kinds of films selected at FESPACO from achieving popularity across the continent, their content aside. These obstacles concern who controls film distribution, exhibition, and marketing on the continent. For example, two foreign film distribution and exhibition companies, SECMA and COMACICO, controlled much of the film content that entered the West African market from the 1920s until 1984, when an inter-African distribution consortium, CIDC (Consortium Interafricain de Distribution


Cinématographique), was created. CIDC collapsed due to lack of resources and bad organization, however, and a viable alternative was not found. Until the 1990s, when the media began to liberalize and digitize across the continent, African television stations were mostly state-run and under-resourced, and many requested that African filmmakers pay them if they wanted their films screened. In South Africa, prior to 1994, film and television were almost completely controlled by the racist white minority government, and the distribution of black African films had to operate mostly as a noncommercial, activist, underground movement. The way in which the African audiovisual industries were externally controlled meant that it was very difficult to build diverse film-appreciation cultures. In the 1990s, furthermore, the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), introduced into many African countries, made cinema attendance prohibitively expensive, resulting in the closing of cinemas across West and East Africa, or conversion into supermarkets, churches, or mosques. It was into this context that the video moviemakers stepped, availing themselves of new, cheaper technologies, and with their clever distribution and marketing strategies, making audiovisual products that were actually accessible to Africans. Setting aside a political economic interpretation of media access, however, it is possible to say—as the scholars of African video movies have so convincingly shown—that video movies afford real pleasures to the people who watch them, speaking to their daily anxieties and aspirations (Haynes 2000, 2014; Meyer 2003; Saul and Austen 2010; Adamu 2011; Kerr 2011; Green-Simms 2012; Krings and Okome 2013; Garritano 2013; Newell and Okome 2014). These audiences do not have to be “curated” in the way that FESPACO has actively curated its audiences, despite the fact that many Africans feel that the “quality” of video movies does need to improve.31 African popular culture scholars and media anthropologists initially formulated their critique of postcolonial African film studies (focused on so-called “FESPACO” films) within the neo-Marxist rubric of the ordinary (or the “everyday”). The revolution they have inaugurated in African screen media scholarship, through paying attention to Nollywood and other video movie industries, relates primarily to class differences, and they have rightly accused film scholars (and film festival programmers) who refuse to consider video movies in their work of elitism and dissociation from African sites of cultural consumption, of turning a blind eye to the huge numbers of Africans who consume video movies on a daily basis with great pleasure and enjoyment. Indeed, the video movies made by Ghanaians, Nigerians, and other Africans in the past 30 years have undoubtedly provided an exciting alternative to the kinds of African films typically curated through FESPACO and other festivals, most obviously because they have been available to African audiences in a way that the African films shown at festivals have frequently not. This availability and access explains why Garritano is able to assert that “The emergence of popular video industries in Ghana and Nigeria represents the most important and exciting development in African cultural production in recent history” (2013: 1). To appreciate the value of these popular video industries, however, does not mean that one cannot insist that they should be able to coexist with film festivals and the kinds of films usually shown at such events; to do so would be to


adopt a crass utilitarian position, to reductively privilege “mass media” over “small media.” Along with providing an alternative to the mainstream Western media images of Africa, festivals such as FESPACO present an alternative to the dominance and ready availability of Nigerian video films. Nollywood scholars were correct to critique the absence of Nigerian and Ghanaian video films from programs or discussions at FESPACO and other festivals in the 1980s and 1990s, when video filmmakers were revolutionizing the models of distribution and exhibition of African films. Today, however, in a context in which video movies are ubiquitous and easy to access within Africa and abroad, we can perhaps reconfigure the ways in which we see the kinds of African films shown at festivals not as elitist but as alternatives to a dominant vision. Nevertheless, we must not forget to credit the popularity of Nigerian video movies for enabling the possibility of different forms of African filmmaking to be seen as offering alternatives in the first place. Neither must we overlook the fact that within African videomaking itself, there are both dominant and marginalized players. As Garritano notes: Faced with the relentless onslaught of Nigerian videos in Ghana, some Ghanaian videomakers have come to regard Nollywood as a far more pressing threat to their survival than Hollywood. Seen from this point of view, Nollywood looks a lot like an invader, a regional cultural power whose success has endangered local production. (2013: 3)

In this light, Ghanaian videomaking might be seen as the alternative and, as Garritano notes, “margins, like centers, are multiple, relational, and shifting” (2013: 4). If FESPACO does not take these shifting margins into account, and does not pay attention to the varied, alternative forms of filmmaking on the continent, it will risk rendering its programming obsolete and outdated. At the same time, while providing alternatives to mainstream fare, FESPACO should not lose sight of its original emphasis on the importance of African spectators and participants, because that is where the main strength of this festival lies. Within the fields of (African) popular culture studies, festivals have often been treated with a great deal of skepticism because they are perceived to be inherently “official” and “formal” events (Lobato 2012: 1). If we broaden our understanding of spectators’ and participants’ roles in festivals then we are better placed to recognize FESPACO’s continued appeal in spite of its significant problems. According to business scholars Moeran and Pederson: the symbolic function of fairs is to be seen in activities that are carried on outside the normal course of trade exchange. Food and drink are shared, parties held, relationships between . . . participants formed and occasionally cemented, and all the time information is exchanged. (2011a: 6, original emphasis)

It would be impossible for anyone who has regularly attended fairs or festivals to contest this point. Over the 15 years that I have been directing and attending festivals, I have been constantly amazed at how little is achieved through the formal dimensions of these festivals (the speeches, the organized meetings and


conferences) and how much work is accomplished informally, while chatting over cold beer after screenings, dancing, and developing close friendships. At FESPACO 2013, the most successful exchanges happened not in the hallowed halls of the Hôtel Independence, traditional home of the festival, but in the maquis (bars) of one of Ouagadougou’s busiest streets, Kwame Nkrumah Avenue. At places such as the open-air bar Taxi Brousse, with vivid portraits of independence heroes painted on its walls, filmmakers considered important within the international film festival circuit—such as Jean-Marie Teno, Daouda Coulibaly, and Alain Gomis—relaxed with producers, curators, audience members, and even the prostitutes who frequent the bar, discussing everything under the stars, over whiskies that tasted more like pastis. If one takes away the informality of festivals, they would be empty shells, completely useless, and no one would even bother to attend them. To repeat Goerg’s words, “No celebration can take effect without its public, necessary ingredient for warning of the reality of power” (1999a: 8–9). I take this statement to mean that the powerful authorities who preside over some festivals—whether governments, or other organizations seeking to promote themselves—need the audience to ensure their legitimacy and power, but—whenever an audience is present—the survival and extent of that legitimacy and power is also threatened. The central position historically accorded to African audiences by FESPACO, as well as many other film festivals in Africa, ensures that this productive tension is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

5

Moving Africa: African Film Festivals Outside of Africa

The Rise of Third World, Black, and African Film Festivals Outside of Africa The first Third World, Black, and African film festivals outside of continental Africa began to appear in 1979, and include (in chronological order of their founding): the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, France (1979); the Festival International du Films d’Amiens, France (1980); the one-off Black Film Festival organized by Parminder Vir and Jim Pines in the UK (1981); the Verona African Film Festival, Italy (1982); the one-off Third Eye Festival of Third World Cinema, held in London and Birmingham in the UK (1983); Vues d’Afriques (Views of Africa) in Montreal, Canada (1985); Africa in the Picture in the Netherlands (1987); the Festival Cinema Africano Milano in Italy (1991); the Cascade Festival of African Films in Oregon, US (1991); the non-annual Africa at the Pictures screening initiative founded by Keith Shiri in London (1991); the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles (1992); the New York African Film Festival (1993); and the African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York (1993) [see Appendix 2 for complete list]. Mostly founded in Western Europe, these African film festivals can be interpreted in two broad ways: first, as relating to representational politics around the concept of “Africa” (particularly as curated into being through “A-list” film festivals and the mainstream news media); and, second, as relating to the increasing presence of diverse African diasporas in the post-WWII era. In the latter sense, these festivals can also be read alternately as responses to, and expressions of, African immigrant minorities. Challenging the “Short Circuit” of the “A-list” Film Festivals Many directors and curators of African film festivals and programs around the world took their initial inspiration from FESPACO. Jean-Pierre García explains that the Festival International du Films d’Amiens in France (which he founded in 1980, and which has a strong focus on African film), benefitted from a partnership with FESPACO as early as 1982, resulting in the exchange of information and films


(pers. comm.). FESPACO had a similar relationship with the Montreal-based Vues d’Afriques, which pioneered the screening of African films in Canada a decade before TIFF initiated its “Planet Africa” program in 1994. Africa in the Picture (founded by Mariët Bakker in the Netherlands in 1987) was born when Bakker and current-day director, Heidi Lobato (who is African, West Indian, and Dutch), met on a plane headed for FESPACO in 1985; and the Milan-based Festival de Cinema Africano, Asia, and America Latina, founded in 1991 as an African film festival by a group of Italians, also sends a delegation to FESPACO every year. The Sierra Leonean founder and director of the New York African Film Festival (NYAFF), Mahen Bonetti, cites a program called “Thirty Years of African Cinema” at the 1989 Locarno International Film Festival1 as the inspiration behind the creation of NYAFF in 1993. However, she says that it is FESPACO that “has most influenced” NYAFF since it was there that she was able to begin “forging relationships with the key players of African cinema, including the legendary director Ousmane Sembene” (2012: 190).2 Some of these film festivals were created not with the idea specifically of “Africa” but of the “Third World” in mind. Alain and Philippe Jalladeau, the French founders of the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes in 1979, attribute their inspiration to create a festival focused on African, Latin American, and Asian cinema to several other festivals and the new cinemas they were starting to feature at that time. These included the 1969 Venice Film Festival and the 1972 Berlin Film Festival, where the Jalladeau brothers were first introduced to Brazilian filmmakers, and the 1978 JCC (Carthage Film Festival) in Tunisia, where they met not only Arab and African filmmakers, but also Colombian, Venezuelan, and Sri Lankan directors. The Festival des 3 Continents was also a response, however, to the hierarchies created between Euro-American and other films at some of the “A-list” film festivals. For example, the Jalladeau brothers note that at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival they were dismayed at the way films such as Bye Bye Brasil by Carlos Diegues and Indian director Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players were rendered almost invisible amongst the European and American films, due to the venues and times at which they were programmed as well as their limited marketing muscle.3 The hierarchical and heterotopic nature of the “A-list” film festivals has not necessarily changed today. Their curators usually only have a small quota of African films they can show. For example, the Middle East and African film programmer for TIFF, Rasha Salti, usually has fewer than 10 slots for African films. She voiced to me her frustrations in programming for TIFF 2011: Indochine: Traces of A Mother—I agonized over programming it. Programming The Education of Auma Obama is a lot easier . . . [the director Branwen Okpako is] a woman, she struggled to make her documentary, she’s a Nigerian working in Kenya, the Germans put money in it. These are all very positive things . . . that an invitation to TIFF would have reinforced. So, while I thought Indochine was a much more fascinating documentary, at least if I can make a break with Auma Obama this time, I will. (pers. comm.)

Sometimes Salti even foregoes the critically acclaimed African films of the year, and films that she personally loves, such as Alain Gomis’ Tey, because she feels

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that they, too, will be lost at a festival as large as TIFF, and better served at more niche festivals where they can gain wider exposure. South African filmmaker Sara Blecher agrees with Salti. She reflects here, in a 2013 interview I did with her, on the differences between “A-list” film festivals and small, dedicated African film festivals after her film Otelo Burning had played at more than 70 festivals around the world: To be absolutely frank and honest, the African film festival is better than the London [film] festival in terms of a UK festival because the African film festival gets real attention for African films, whereas at the London film festival, you’re lost. You know, it’s so prestigious. When people say, “Oh, what festivals did your film play at?” I don’t talk about the African film festival, I talk about the London film festival. But in terms of actually helping the film, it’s the other way around, it’s completely the other way around. (pers. comm.)

Although the older generation of filmmakers from Africa was concerned about being “ghettoized” at African film festivals outside of the continent (Diawara 1993, 1994; Bangré 1994; Sakbollé 1994), the younger generation (those generally under 45) is far more flexible and strategic when it comes to the problematic category of “Africa” itself. Rungano Nyoni (originally from Zambia, but based in Wales) argues that while “Africanness” can sometimes be “a disadvantage if you come from a country like Zambia with very poor infrastructure for film, it can also be a great advantage, because you can use that to specifically aim for film festivals for African filmmakers.” Using marketing vocabulary, she says that “Africanness” can be exploited as one’s “unique selling point.” She praises specialized African film festivals for putting the entire focus on promoting African filmmakers and, thereby, identifying audiences (both African and non-African) who are specifically interested in watching their films. As she says: “At Film Africa [London’s African film festival] I’ve been interviewed by the BBC and CNN. That would never have happened at any other festival.” She says it was the first time she got to take part in a real press junket and that she believes that that helped considerably in securing her short film Mwansa the Great a BAFTA nomination.4 In representational terms, then, African film festivals offer two clear advantages over “A-list” festivals. First, they have the programming space to provide much broader and diverse curation of Africa, African film and African filmmakers, thereby revealing the heterogeneity of the continent to spectators and challenging the stereotypes that tend to prevail in the mainstream media. Second, although they do not have the prestige or economic muscle of the “A-list” festivals, they can potentially play the role of better representing African filmmakers, creating more global opportunities, publicity, and greater audiences for filmmakers from Africa than the “A-list” events because of their dedicated focus on African film and African filmmakers. Responses to, and Expressions of, African Immigrant Minorities According to a 2007 report by the International Organization for Migration, most African-born migrants outside of the continent live in Europe, where there are


4.6 million (making up roughly 0.6 percent of Europe’s population), in contrast to just under a million in the US. The Migration Policy Institute estimated in 2007 that there were even greater numbers of African-born migrants in Europe— somewhere between 7 and 8 million, thus making up about 1 percent of Europe’s population. The majority (about two-thirds) of these migrants came from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), but there has also been an increase in migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe recently, particularly to the former colonizing countries of Britain, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.5 The concentration of African migrants is greatest in the largest cities of these countries. Director of the Netherlands-based Africa in the Picture film festival, Heidi Lobato (2012), predicts that 24 percent of Amsterdam’s population is African or African-descendent, and in our introduction to the Film Africa 2012 Festival in London we used as justification for the festival’s importance a 2012 Office of National Statistics report that revealed that London is home to about 400,000 African migrants, beyond the fact that more than 10 percent of its population is black British. This puts London’s African and black population collectively at roughly 15 percent.6 African film festivals outside of Africa can thus also be productively read as both responses to, and expressions of, different waves of African immigrant minorities, particularly to Western Europe. When I say “responses to,” I am thinking about the typical funding sources for this type of festival in Europe, which can largely be grouped under the imperative of multicultural policy. As Rattansi notes, the term “multiculturalism” in Europe “usually refers to policies by central states and local authorities that have been put in place to manage and govern the new multiethnicity created by non-white immigrant populations, after the end of the Second World War” (2011: 12, my emphasis). A good example of a festival that was brought into being under such a policy is the Festival Cinema Africano, Asia, and America Latina de Milano in Italy.7 This festival, founded in 1991, is organized by the Centro Orientamento Educativo (COE), which describes itself as “a non-governmental organization engaged in promoting dialogue between cultures” in Milan. The catalogue for the eighth edition of the festival, which took place March 20–26, 1998, constantly refers to recent African immigration to Italy, and to how the new cultures forming in Italy are a necessity for the growth of Europe. But a poem at the beginning of this catalogue, written by Don Francesco Pedretti from the COE, suggests a very different attitude to Africans on the part of Italians, a disavowal of the historical relationship between Italy and its ex-colonies in Africa. “It’s as though we have known each other for ages,” the poet muses, but he offers no postcolonial reckoning with Italy’s brutal occupation of Ethiopia or Eritrea, no trace of the savage and racist colonial contact zones in which Italy attempted to annex parts of Africa for itself, using the “inferiority” of black Africans as justification. Furthermore, the rousing sentiments of human connection he offers paradoxically rely on the division of humanity into an “us” and a “them,” “Italians” and “Africans,” “white” and “black,” that undermines the universalizing desires of the poet and shows no awareness of the differences within such groups, or within individuals, or of contemporary postcolonial and poststructuralist theories of human identity as something always in the process of “becoming” rather

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than as an essential form of “being” (Bhabha 1996, Hall 1996, Braidotti 2011). Beneath both the positive sentiments and the silences of Pedretti’s poem lies a palpable anxiety about how Italians should behave towards new (black) African immigrants to Italy. When I say, however, that African film festivals outside of the continent are sometimes “expressions of ” African immigrant minorities I am referring to the fact that a significant proportion of the directors of these festivals come from Africa, meaning that they can be considered part of Africa’s diverse diasporas making an “African” impact on their new homes. In a survey I conducted in 2010 of directors of African film festivals outside of the continent,8 what directors collectively said they enjoyed most about directing the festivals is the “connection” it gives them to Africa. This suggests that, in this case, what these festivals primarily accord their directors is a sense of identity and, for diasporan Africans, the actual and metaphorical creation of a relationship to a “home” left behind in Africa. The Sierra Leonean founder, director, and curator of the New York African Film Festival, Mahen Bonetti, speaks for many African film festival directors when she describes her inspiration to create her festival as follows: As a proud young African living in New York, I was disturbed to realize that there were few, if any, African voices present in [television] depictions of our continent, or the ensuing conversations. I became totally obsessed with the dichotomy between the Africa that I experienced during my youth, and the Africa that I saw in the American media. I felt angry, frustrated and most of all ashamed. I urgently needed to find a way to show my daughter, my friends and the people of New York City the Africa in which I grew up—to give them a more multifaceted depiction of the continent that shaped me into the person I had become. (2012: 189)

Along with making a contribution to the representational politics surrounding Africa, as described by Bonetti, many of these African film festivals can also be credited with building diasporan African communities abroad, since “The community is to an important extent constituted through media . . . in so far as media performance is one of the main reasons to meet together, and there is very little else available as a mediator of information and entertainment” (Cunningham 2001: 137). While Nigerian and Ghanaian video movies increasingly entertain diasporan African families throughout the world in their domestic spaces (through VOD platforms such as iROKOtv), African film festivals still have an important role to play in encouraging African communities to gather and meet live to share and exchange experiences. Although not pitched specifically as an “African” film festival, the one-off Third Eye Festival of Third World Cinema, held in London and Birmingham in 1983, provides an excellent example of how such festivals can contribute to the building of communities. As one of the curators and organizers of this festival, June Givanni, recalls: “Black politics” in the United Kingdom was the shared platform where AfricanCaribbean and Asian struggles for rights in British society were situated. There were local political issues to deal with, but these sorts of coalitions also brought links with

116 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals the countries of origin of many immigrant communities living in Britain. The established and vibrant film cultures of India and Latin America, the emergent cinemas of Africa and the Caribbean, all found resonance in the philosophy of “Third World Cinema,” which was widely embraced. (2004: 67)

Where the Jalladeau brothers in Nantes sought to divorce particular films from the idea of the “Third World” in lieu of recuperating “cinema as ART,”9 Givanni insists on the festive excitement that buoyed the concept of the “Third World” in the context of communities who self-identified as “black.” Rather than aestheticize films by suggesting a distinction between art and politics, Givanni and her team asserted the imbrication of the cultural and the political realms through building “black” audiences for these films in Britain. While Givanni registers the unease that some people from these communities felt with the term “black” on account of its “historical limitations and physical exclusions” (ibid.: 72), she argues that any curatorial work has to respond to its specific context of production, and that “At a time of strident black identity politics in the United Kingdom, it made sense to program the work that addressed such issues in those terms” (ibid.: 67). To Givanni, the audience is the indelible other side of the curatorial coin. Rather than falling prey to the sometimes paralyzing debates around the identification, and thus ghettoization, of group identities (such as “black,” “African,” “female,” “LGBT”), she correctly suggests the need for curators to focus on the particular material context in which they are working, which means thinking about how best to bring a particular film or a particular body of work to (1) the biggest possible audience, (2) the audience that could best appreciate and identify with the story being told, (3) the audience that would be most challenged by the film, (4) the audience that most needs to see the film. Ideally, all are necessary. (ibid.: 64)

In other words, successful curatorial thinking involves confronting the question of audiences head-on. And for Givanni, in the context of a racially fraught and unequal British society in the 1980s, the audiences prioritized above all were the “black” audiences, the audiences who “might find stories that spoke to their experiences and identities, films that provided a different, more localized, personal and political engagement with their lives” (ibid.: 66). To think about audiences also means to think about spaces—the kinds of spaces in which different kinds of people are comfortable or not. The question of venues was thus at the forefront of these initiatives in Britain in the 1980s, and Givanni and her team sought a balance between venues such as the National Film Theatre (NFT) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), which were then mostly associated with “artistic and intellectual European and British independent cinema” (ibid.: 68), and “community and cultural centers” through which there was more room for “debate and discussion” around “black” films by “black” communities (ibid.: 65). In comparing the explicit motivations of the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes with those of the Third Eye Festival, it is impossible to ignore the role of the organizers’ identities, as well as their communal and cultural affiliations. It was clearly Givanni’s African-Caribbean heritage and everyday experience as a “black” British person that inspired her to prioritize considerations of audience, community, and

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venue in her curatorial work rather than cleave the artistic from the political as the “white,” French Jalladeau brothers did through their festival, however noble and important their aim to validate the aesthetic work of African, Latin American and Asian filmmakers, and set it on a par with the work of Euro-American filmmakers. Ultimately, however, the choice lies with the curator, regardless of her identity: whether to value only representational and aesthetic questions, or whether also to value material and political questions of space, audience, live participation, and community-building. At the Film Africa festival, which I co-founded, we chose the latter option, and worked hard to make ourselves and our program known not only to a “white,” mainstream film audience, but also to London’s roughly 400,000 African-born and 1 million “black” residents. Our feedback forms from Film Africa 2011 revealed that about 66 percent of our audience identified as “white.” The audience of Film Africa 2012, however, was far more reflective of London’s colorful, diverse makeup: 48 percent identified as “white” (with only 29 percent of those being “white British”); 43 percent as “black” (with 29 percent as “black African” and 12 percent as “black Caribbean”); 8.2 percent as “mixed race”; 2.7 percent as “Asian”; and 1 percent as “other.”10 Building the African and black British audience for Film Africa was not an easy task, however, and required some strategizing around and imagining of audience taste that, in many ways, mirrored the strategizing of Givanni and her coorganizers of black British film festivals and screenings in the 1980s and 1990s. In my role as film program director of Film Africa in 2011 and 2012, one strategy I devised in this process was a principle of responsiveness. This led to my

Figure 5.1 Participants at Film Africa 2011


introduction of a film into the 2011 Film Africa program at the last minute. On August 4, 2011, just before the program was due to go to press, a 29-year-old black British man from Tottenham, Mark Duggan, was shot dead by police. The police made official a contradictory story about the circumstances surrounding Duggan’s death and, as a result, Duggan’s family marched to the Tottenham Police Station, accompanied by other local residents of the area, demanding a clear explanation. There is still confusion about how this peaceful protest then erupted into widescale violent protesting and rioting across London and the rest of England, but subsequent investigations have found that long-standing anger with police treatment of black people, social inequality, and poverty were among the motivations. It seemed to me at the time that to hold a film festival that concerns itself with African and diasporan African issues just a few months after this massive social unrest, but without in any way addressing it, would in itself be a deeply conservative political statement. It would erase the ways in which African and black identities often coexist and would position Africa as a region remote from Britain, both geographically and historically. I thought immediately of John Akomfrah’s foundational film Handsworth Songs (1986), which explores in an extremely poetic and sophisticated way a series of race-related “riots” that had occurred across England 25 years earlier, during the period of “strident black identity politics” to which Givanni refers above (2004: 67). The screening was one of the most exciting at the festival, with television presenter Henry Bonsu and performance poet Zena Edwards leading an intense debate with the audience after the film about the 1986 and 2011 protests, and whether people felt there had been any changes in race relations across this period. With participants from myriad social, cultural, and professional backgrounds in attendance, this was “liveness” in action, producing something quite magical that, in many cases, academia, with its more rarefied, abstruse style, fails to produce. Drawing such diverse attendance, in addition to a strong core African and black British audience, does not necessarily happen by chance, then, but requires curatorial strategizing. The Africa in the Picture festival in the Netherlands (founded in 1987 by Mariët Bakker and directed today by Heidi Lobato) has succeeded in attracting a large diasporan African audience to the festival through its specific programming of films relevant to contemporary issues of migration and racial conflict in the Netherlands. For example, in 2005 the festival organized a debate about conflict between Dutch and Dutch-Moroccans, people who migrated to Holland in the 1960s when Dutch factories were in need of labor. The 2005 festival brochure argues: “The world is in need of new concepts to redefine citizenship and identity. We are searching for a new definition of what is admissible within our country’s borders. How can knowledge and recognition of our common history guide us in that quest?” (p. 22). Such a program was desperately required at a time in which Holland was in crisis after the brutal murder in 2004 of the controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, on account of his involvement in the making of Submission, a film that makes an argument about Muslim male oppression of women. Van Gogh’s murderer was a young, second-generation Dutch-Moroccan man, who “Only a few years earlier . . . had been featured in a Dutch magazine, his picture on its cover, touted as an example of the success of integrating Muslims into Dutch society”

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(Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007: 3). Notably, religious identity—Muslim identity, in this case—is often far more divisive than region-related identity, such as being “Moroccan” (see Buruma 2006). One might argue, then, that for a festival to deal with racial, religious, gender, and sexual identity under the less-inflammatory umbrella of regional identity—“Africa in the Picture”—either depoliticizes these identities, or—more positively—is a subtle, subversive strategy of encouraging discussion around them. Identity (racial or otherwise) does not completely determine affinities, of course; however, it is noteworthy that while “Third World” and “African” film festivals have been founded by people from a range of racial backgrounds, no “black” film festivals have been founded by people who do not identify as “black.” Herein, perhaps, lies a clue to distinguishing between the many African and black film festivals that exist outside of the continent today [see Appendix 2 and 4, respectively].11 While “African” film festivals predominantly designate a region of the world (although they might also designate an identity), “black” film festivals primarily conjure an identity (in the same way that the terms “women” and “LGBT” conjure identities, not regions). Nevertheless, the vast majority of contemporary black film festivals can also be associated with a particular region—the US—whereas the region that currently hosts the most African film festivals, as I have said, is Western Europe.12 This would suggest that black film festivals can largely be read as the expression of what Rattansi calls “substate national minorities,” which include African Americans in the US, French Canadians, the Scots and the Welsh in the UK, the Catalan and the Basque in Spain, and the Flemish in Belgium. Rattansi distinguishes these groups both from indigenous peoples, such as the Maori, Inuit, Aboriginal peoples, and First Nations people in Canada and the US, and also from “immigrant minorities,” groups of people—such as Moroccans in the Netherlands, or Turkish people in Germany—who migrated to their new countries after WWII (2011: 4, 12–14). One also needs to make a distinction between the first wave of these immigrant minorities, such as the African-Caribbeans who arrived in Britain in the late 1940s and whose children and grandchildren were born in Britain and are today more like “substate national minorities,” and more recent waves of immigrant minorities. My focus in this book is on festivals that designate some kind of explicit relationship with the category of “Africa” rather than “blackness,” and so I have to set aside further comparative analysis of African and black film festivals outside of Africa. I do not want to suggest, however, that the category of race is any less important than that of region to the analysis of African film festivals. As Rattansi emphasizes, the concept of multiculturalism in Western Europe was “racialized from its inception” (2011: 9). And, just as “[i]n most debates on multiculturalism, in Europe especially, ‘race’ is the elephant in the room” (ibid.: 10), the question of race often resides just beneath the surface of such African film festivals, as I will show. In fact, in some ways, the prevalence of “African” rather than “black” film festivals in Western Europe can be interpreted as symptomatic of the lack of legal, political, or social space given to “substate national minorities” (in this case, people who self-identify as “black”) by certain Western European nations. Just as one cannot homogenize “Africa,” however, one homogenizes “Western Europe” at


one’s peril. To explore some of the possibilities and pitfalls of African film festivals outside of the continent, then, I want to take one particular film festival as my case study: the Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival in Spain. Having conducted field research on this festival over a period of five years (from 2010 to 2014), I hope to emphasize not only the uniqueness of each and every festival, but also how the dynamism of any festival demands diachronic study to more fully understand its changing meanings. The Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Place13 If, as I have argued above, one of the primary values of African film festivals outside of the continent is the speaking to and creation of African diasporan communities, what role can festivals that do not attract such communities play? Mane Cisneros Manrique, the founder/director of the Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival (FCAT) in Spain, shared with me the problems of reaching African audiences that this festival has faced in the Spanish context: One must remember that every [African film] festival is very different, in different circumstances. We do not have the diaspora audience that Amsterdam does. When I started the festival [in 2004], it was my dream to have the cinemas full of Africans who lived in Spain. They didn’t come. Only 1–2 percent came. . . . The Moroccan community—which is the second largest community in Spain from elsewhere—after the Equatorial Guineans, is very large. There are many, many of them. But they don’t come to the cinema. So it’s part of a process. Immigration in Spain is still relatively young. And it’s usually the second generation who ask questions about their origins, who are interested in discovering their cinema, but not the first generation. I believe that in France, in England, in Holland, the people who come to the cinema, it’s often the second generation. And for us, that generation is still too young. (pers. comm.)14

One might query the point of an African film festival in Spain if it is not succeeding in reaching any African spectators. Manrique argues, however, that such a film festival is needed precisely to create the kind of “open spirit” that Franco’s dictatorship in the country (from 1939 to 1975) attempted to crush. As she laments, “we experienced forty years of dictatorship in Spain which completely closed people’s thinking, the vision of the Spaniards, and the links of Spaniards with the rest of the world” (pers. comm.). She says that she contests the idea of frontiers, and does not believe in theories of indigeneity. Acknowledging that such thinking is somewhat utopian, Manrique still insists that “breaking down barriers opens one up to the world.” Such a philosophy of openness has no doubt partly been nurtured by Manrique’s own life experiences, working in many parts of the globe. She calls herself a “citizen of the world” and says that her identity is linked to whichever place she is currently inhabiting. On her return to Spain in 2003 she says that she found herself confronted with ignorance, particularly in relation to Africa. And this was another inspiration for her decision to found FCAT, which she calls her “life” (pers. comm.). Like many founders and directors of film festivals, she is a

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Figure 5.2 View of Morocco from Tarifa, Spain

passionate, eccentric individual, driven not by money but by a vision and sense of purpose. In FCAT’s original incarnation, in Tarifa, where it was founded in 2004 and ran for eight years before moving to Cordoba in 2012, it differed from other African film festivals in Western Europe through its proximity to the African continent. Tarifa is the southernmost town in continental Europe, separated from Morocco by only the 14 kilometers of the Strait of Gibraltar—a treacherous strait policed by southern European governments seeking to protect their nations from illegal African immigrants. Tarifa is known by the global community as a windy tourist spot for kite surfing, and among most Spanish people as a border city from where much tragic news about illegal immigration emanates. Manrique interestingly decided to harness the idea of this Andalusian town representing a point of both closeness and separation of Europe and Africa in her founding of the festival. Furthermore, she found in the historical hybridity of Tarifa one of the most powerful examples of how difficult it is to establish who and who is not “indigenous” to any place, anywhere in the world. As Michaela Pelican notes, discourses of indigeneity are “highly politicized [and] subject to local and national particularities” and their application produces “ambivalent, sometimes paradoxical, outcomes” (2003: 52). In fact, it is examples from Africa that have been largely responsible for disrupting reductive definitions of the concept. In relation to the UN’s process of finalizing the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Pelican says: [T]he African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) of the African Union issued an advisory opinion in 2007. It contended that, in the African context,

122 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals the concept of “indigenous peoples” differed considerably from its meaning on other continents and that a universal definition was neither useful nor required. (2009: 56)

Pelican’s own research among the Mbororo people of Cameroon shows how international and local definitions of indigeneity may contradict each other. As she says, “although internationally recognized as an indigenous people, the Mbororo are locally considered strangers, migrants, and latecomers with limited rights to land and resources” (2009: 53). Similarly, one of Manrique’s goals with FCAT in Tarifa appears to have been to challenge a particular version of indigeneity in this context, and Tarifa was both an ideal and difficult place to make this ideology manifest. Tarifa is one of those peninsula towns in current-day Spain that historically was contested territory between North African Arabs and European Christians. However, the contemporary narrative of who the town “belongs” to is attributed very clearly to white Christians through the celebration, on monuments, of its 1292 reclamation by “Guzmán El Bueno,” who fought for the King of Castile, Sancho IV. The town’s name is, however, Arabic (from Tarif bib Malik, the Berber leader of the attack on the town in 710, which saw it transition to Islamic North African rule for almost six centuries); historians also believe that “Guzmán El Bueno” was Arab and that in the sixteenth century there was a campaign to whitewash and Christianize his background. Evidence of the whitewashing process in Andalusia is ubiquitous, but the North African influences cannot be erased—they are in the faces of the people, in the architecture, the food, the statues of women wearing Berber dresses (such as the manto y salla), and in the tiled images of Christ, which blend Arab and Christian influences. The Senegalese filmmaker Moussa Sene Absa recognizes the thoroughly mixed origins of the region when he says: To be in Tarifa is to be at the end of Europe. . . . So it is a very symbolic point, geographically speaking. But also symbolic in terms of the way this little city is connected to us [Africans]. . . . The first impression is that I don’t feel like I’m in Europe. . . . It’s something in the air, in the faces, in the architecture, in the light. (pers. comm.)

Some of the complexities of Tarifa as a space are also hinted at in poetic terms by Ethiopian filmmaker Rasselas Lakew: Tarifa is a special place, a town at the southern tip of Europe that is close to Africa. It has intimate settings. At times doors are closed to keep away the strong winds from visiting. But the winds will come anyway and if not from the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean, and from the northern shores of Africa constantly knocking at the wooden doors. (pers. comm.)

Questioning exclusive white, Christian, Spanish claims on Tarifa and its history was one of Manrique’s strongest motivations for founding the festival. In this sense, the issue of whether she was reaching first-generation Moroccan immigrant audiences was somewhat moot; in fact, Manrique’s argument was a much larger one: that the inhabitants of Tarifa are African. To this point, the festival was described by the Guinean filmmaker Mama Keita as “a mirror facing Africa” (quoted in Olivieri 2011: 80) and by the Malian-Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako as “a bridge that politicians never make” (quoted in Olivieri 2011: 80).

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Crucial to Manrique’s initial conceptualization of FCAT was the notion not of “multiculturalism” but of “interculturalism.” For where multiculturalism has been “too prone to essentialism,” Rattansi argues, interculturalism has become a means “to undercut this essentialist tendency . . . by building a conception of connectedness, interaction, and interweaving between the beliefs, practices, and lifestyles of different (not separate) ethnic groups as part of national cultures that are in constant flux” (ibid.). The most crucial contribution of the concept of “interculturalism” has been to focus attention on differences not only across cultural groups but also within individuals from those groups, thereby destabilizing the rigid and often meaningless dichotomy between the “West” ’ and the “rest,” or “Europe” and “Africa,” and acknowledging the complexities of people’s individual identities (ibid., Khiabany and Sreberny 2014). The idea of “interculturalism” coheres with theories of identity as articulated by, among others, Bhabha (1996), Hall (1996), and Braidotti (2011). These thinkers and activists have sought ways not only to challenge the “European subject of knowledge” (Braidotti 2011: 210), but to refuse to establish a new, falsely unitary subject of knowledge in its place. Braidotti, for example, argues that one way to achieve this is to embrace a nomadic mode of being and thinking that “rests on a nonunitary philosophy of the subject” and that “proposes the fleeting copresence of multiple time zones, in a time continuum that activates and deterritorializes stable identities” (2011: 209). Her proposal involves a “shift away from an epistemological theory of representation to an ontology of becoming” (2011: 214), in much the same way that Bhabha and Hall have reconceptualized identity formation in additive rather than monolithic or hegemonic terms. Manrique can thus be read as what Braidotti calls a “nomadic” citizen and thinker. At the same time, however, FCAT has positioned itself as part of a particular struggle on behalf of “African filmmakers,” whom Manrique has frequently claimed are the “main protagonists” of the festival, resulting in various clashes between FCAT and the Tarifeños.15 FCAT initially began as a muestra, a simple showcase of African films, rather than as a competitive festival (a distinction is made in Spanish). By its fourth edition, in 2007, it had started developing, however, into a highly professional event with large monetary prizes and a focus on workshops and events tailored to contribute to the production, distribution, and exhibition of African film in Spain and elsewhere.16 As Federico Olivieri points out: The raison d’être of this film festival has not merely remained that of showing (and awarding) African films, producing what Diawara critiqued as the “ghettoization” of African cinema at African film festivals (1994: 386). Rather, the FCAT has always shown a motivation to create more professional opportunities for African cinema and its creators, thus trying to fight against the difficulties that this sector faces in the global film industry. (2011: 82)

FCAT is, in this way, characteristic of contemporary African film festivals outside of the continent that pride themselves not only for screening films by Africans, but also for being broader springboards for African filmmakers to develop global careers. Several African film festivals appear to have listened closely to the critiques issued by critics and filmmakers such as Sambolgo Bangré (1994), Manthia Diawara (1993, 1994), and Sakbollé (1994) two decades ago, and to have


transformed themselves from simple festivals screening films into multidimensional platforms for the longer-term support and promotion of African film. For example, Jean-Pierre García says that the African filmmakers attending the Festival International du Films d’Amiens have had two very specific demands of them over the years: training and information. The festival deferred the training request to other institutions, such as film schools. However, in 1991 the festival initiated an informative journal Le Film Africain et Le Film du Sud, whose six issues a year are an invaluable source of information about funding and festival opportunities for African filmmakers, as well as recently released films and those in production. In 1996, the festival also inaugurated Les Fonds de Dévélopment du Scénario (a screenwriting award), each year giving five grants worth 10,000 euros each, to the winners.17 It also awards its winning feature film with 7,500 euros in distribution aid (for distribution in France), 25,000 euros of promotional and publicity support through the CinéCinéma chains in France, and 2,500 euros in subtitling support through Titra Films. “It’s a choice,” García emphasizes, “a cinematographic choice, an ethical choice . . . Because, for us, a festival can’t simply demand films, it has to put something towards the construction of this cinema itself ” (pers. comm.).18 In this way, he echoes the views of arts festival critics in the collection African Theatre Festivals (2012), who insist on the need for Africa-focused festivals, and festivals in Africa, to contribute to African artistic production.19 At the same time, we need to recognize that these funding and support streams may have European agendas that are not aligned with the particular desires of diverse filmmakers and spectators from and in Africa, and that far more research is needed on specific European funding streams and their criteria (see Chapters 1, 2, and 3). What enabled the founding and increasing professionalization of FCAT was, notably, significant local and national funding from left-wing parties during José Luis Zapatero’s period as Prime Minister of Spain, from 2004 to 2011. The Spanish socialist government prioritized bilateral cultural exchanges between Spain and African countries in its Plan África 2006–2008 and Plan África 2009–2012, through which it supported projects promoting a contemporary and pluralist image of the cultural diversity characterizing African societies. As part of Plan África (Plan for Africa), the government created, in 2006, Casa África (Africa House), the first public institution in Spain specifically oriented towards the development of stronger relations between Spain and African nations, especially on the cultural front. From 2006 until 2011, Casa África was one of the main funders of FCAT. Along with Casa África, Spanish government bodies such as the Ministerio de Cultura (Ministry of Culture), the Junta de Andalucía (Andalusian Government), and AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo [the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation]), provided the funding that allowed FCAT both to establish itself and to grow (Olivieri 2011). From the earliest days of FCAT, however, (dis)sensus communis about its focus, its nature, and its value began among Tarifeños. Insistent as she was on “African filmmakers” being the “protagonists” of FCAT, Manrique failed in some ways to understand and anticipate the feelings of her local audience. Through the ensuing conflict, Manrique’s own claims on, and vision for, Tarifa through FCAT would come to be questioned and challenged by different groups of Tarifeños. Part of the

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problem, perhaps, was that Manrique, who only arrived in Tarifa in 2003 to start the festival, was not herself seen as “indigenous” to this space. Furthermore, while some members of her team lived in Tarifa, others did not, commuting instead from France, Senegal, and other cities in Spain (such as Madrid and Seville). Many of them could also be called “itinerant” workers who—because of the erratic funding structures of festivals—had to move on to work for other festivals after FCAT season. This seems to have led to resentment among some Tarifeños, who felt that the FCAT team did not adequately understand the Tarifa context or their own work and concerns. Tensions erupted, for example, at the 2010 edition of the festival after a parallel educational event, involving a private screening of a film made jointly by groups of local schoolchildren from Tarifa and from Larache, Morocco. The film’s perspective was very much aligned with the festival’s own political views, as a “denunciation of the frontier in the Strait of Gibraltar, a denunciation of the fact that African men, women, girls, and boys are dying in the Strait” (Nieves García Benito, pers. comm.). The screening was not publicized, however, in any festival literature, either online or printed, something that event organizers were angry about. The event’s audience was thus completely comprised of Tarifeños—the schoolchildren who made the film and their families and friends. The screening demonstrated to outsiders, such as myself, that many Tarifeños are, and have been for years, invested in establishing material encounters with Africans on the other side of the Strait, and that it was not only FCAT that was involved in such activities. Furthermore, whereas the festival was perceived to be involved in a much broader struggle on behalf of “African filmmakers,” Tarifeños had a much more limited, but focused, conception of “Africanness,” one related precisely to the proximity of themselves to the North Africans on the other side of the Strait, in Morocco—paradoxically, Manrique’s initial inspiration for founding the festival there. As one Tarifeño teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, told me in an interview: “We live daily with a transnational vision of life. Because the kids living here, more than knowing that they live in Spain, [know] they live in front of Africa” (2010, pers. comm.). Eroding the idea of a neat Spanish national identity, and emphasizing the importance of spatial proximity to a definition of indigeneity, the teacher claimed that Tarifa schoolchildren are “far more accustomed to hearing about Morocco than they are about the Basque country or Catalunya simply because it’s there, it lies there. It’s within their vision” (ibid.). But she expressed dismay that FCAT had not deemed the screening worthy of inclusion in their main program, and also lamented that the Moroccan children involved in making the film were not able to come to the screening because, she claimed, FCAT had not taken the trouble to organize visas for them: “If FCAT really wanted that binding, that bonding [between the local people on both sides of the Strait], it could happen” (ibid.). Both groups—the festival organizing team and the Tarifeños working with Moroccans—thus seem to have ignored their own ideological proximity, their shared definition of “indigeneity,” and how they might have worked in concert rather than in competition. A very different kind of (dis)sensus communis also started to manifest itself around FCAT from its earliest days. During Zapatero’s leadership, Tarifa was run


by a coalition of two left-wing parties: Zapatero’s PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) and the IU (Izquierda Unida; United Left). The economic crisis of 2008 brought additional scrutiny to the coalition’s public expenditures, and in 2009, the PP (Partido Popular)—the main national right-wing opposition party—argued that, through its support of FCAT, the coalition was squandering money on a festival that, it claimed, achieved nothing for tourism or for Tarifeños. The PP motioned instead for funding support for what it called “traditional” festivals, such as ornithology gatherings and cattle fairs (Terán 2009). An opinion article by the local press also argued that FCAT was a “waste” of Spanish public funds, and questioned whether the festival’s goal was to “teach Spaniards how to start living in underdeveloped conditions similar to those seen in the African films” (Ledesma 2010).20 During FCAT 2011, held June 11–19, anonymous posters challenging FCAT and encouraging fellow Tarifeños to join in appeared on the walls all over the small town. They need not have bothered: by the end of the summer 2011, the PSOE had been defeated by the PP. Along with the election of Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing party came fundamental changes to the Spanish administration’s cultural and international priorities. The previous national and local support for FCAT all but disappeared, leaving the festival struggling for survival, after eight very successful years. As a result, the festival’s nomadic founder-director, Mane Cisneros Manrique, exercised her nomadism once again, moving FCAT from Tarifa to Cordoba, hoping that this city would provide greater economic and political support from the local administration, the Ayuntamiento de Córdoba (Cordoba City Hall). Nevertheless, FCAT still lost a large proportion of its funding; having operated on an average annual budget of approximately 450,000 euros, it had to survive on a 240,000-euro budget when putting on its first edition in Cordoba in October 2012.21 This funding situation clearly signals that projects like FCAT, which promote the benefits of intercultural exchange and broaden people’s understanding of the complexities of indigeneity and identity, are simply no longer a priority for the Spanish government. As Manrique points out, while the government was prepared to allocate 700,000 euros to a traditional guitar festival in Cordoba aimed at the older generations, it refused to give 50,000 euros to FCAT, which attracts a much younger, more diverse audience (pers. comm.). This is the conservative social, political, and economic climate within which many African film festivals in Western Europe are having to operate today. New Transnational Trajectories for African Film and Filmmakers In the northern hemisphere summer of 2012, it was not only FCAT whose future was in danger. Director of the Africa in the Picture film festival in the Netherlands, Heidi Lobato, posted this on the festival’s website: Is this the last year of Africa in the Picture? The Amsterdam Art Council has advised the municipal executive to no longer support the festival in the coming years. That would not only put a further professionalization at risk, but it would also mean the

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end of a unique festival which attracts more visitors each year, which is an international meeting place for film makers and film fans, and it would mean the end of an organization which not only stands for diversity but also puts it into practice. (2012)

A significant part of the problem with current Western European film funding is that foreign ministries tend to see “development” and “culture” as they relate to Africa as synonymous. This means they are far more likely to support projects on the African continent and to ignore the African presence in their own countries. According to Heidi Lobato (2012), “24 percent of the Amsterdam population is African and/or African descendant” and yet, while Africa in the Picture is the only African film festival in Holland, it “receives only 1.8 percent of the 82.6 million euros that makes up the total art and culture budget Amsterdam has reserved for cinema.” Lobato—who was born in the West Indies, has African heritage, and is a Dutch citizen—insists that she, like many others living in the Netherlands, is “both European and African.” In the 2005 festival brochure she reminded readers that Africa “is not limited to only one continent” and emphasized that African diasporan identities are central to the rich tapestries of North and South America, Europe, Surinam, and the Caribbean (p. 13). Nigerian art curator Okwui Enwezor similarly argues that it would be dangerous to “set Africa in aspic” (2008: 164) by assuming there is an easy distinction to be drawn between those who live and work within Africa, and “the others who have developed a taste for exile, those we give the title diasporan, but whose Western Union remittances still reach their targets back in the mother country, where entire families depend on them” (ibid.). Enwezor thus conceives of “Africa” as both a spatial reality and a series of “intellectual and cultural infrastructures . . . [that] are being dismantled, displaced, and dispersed across the world” (2008: 163), and in defense of continuing to work under the umbrella term “Africa,” however problematic, he argues: In a global sphere in which the instruments of cultural legitimation increasingly are being dispersed and the totalizing construct of a center is becoming an anachronism, and as more focus moves in the direction of Asia, African artists, curators, and intellectuals cannot risk the kind of complacency that tells them that their identity is a weakness. (ibid.: 164–5)

As Enwezor says, “It is a frightening prospect to think about renewal of the aesthetic and critical conditions of contemporary African art without addressing these issues” (ibid.: 163), without broadening our definitions of “Africa” to include its diverse diasporas. At the same time, as the cuts to the funding of African film festivals reveal, many Western European governments (along with ordinary citizens, such as the Tarifeños who protested against the existence of FCAT) do not recognize African diasporas as fully a part of their own citizenry. Indeed, a report published by the European Network Against Racism22 in February 2013 suggests that both old and new forms of racism and exclusionary behavior are on the rise across Europe in the wake of the economic crisis. As Chibo Onjyeji says: “Over the years, annual Shadow Reports of the European


Network Against Racism (ENAR) have consistently pointed to a rising trend in old racist behaviours and new manifestations of racism in the European Union” (2013: 31). Along with anxieties brought on by the economic crisis, Shannon Pfohman believes that, “In an era of mass movement, when ‘national identity’ and ‘national values’ are ever more fluid and contestable, fear and uncertainty are projected onto minorities, migrants, and anyone else who can be labeled as ‘other’” (2013: 23). She makes a distinction between “institutional racism” and “popular racist culture” (2013: 17), and the potential value of African and minority film festivals is implicit in her argument that “Civil society has a vital role to play in challenging the racism which is embedded in the architecture of our states” (2013: 28). Ultimately, she argues that “we need legal efforts, community actions, interracial contact, education, and the mobilization of civil society and of racial minorities themselves to influence racist and xenophobic attitudes and to advance the anti-racist agenda” (2013: 28). African film festivals outside the continent, such as FCAT, have played, and can continue to play, a role in such antiracist activism. There are questions we must continue to ask of each of them, however, to assess whether they are part of, or an antidote to, such problems. How do these festivals define “Africa”? Do they picture Africa, African film, and African filmmakers as something altogether discrete from ordinary life in Nantes, Amiens, Montreal, or Milan, or do they insist on telling the messy historical and contemporary stories that bind Africa to their own sites? Do they tackle their region’s implication in slavery and colonialism in Africa? What is their position on African immigration? How do they define identity, as something fixed or as something always in the process of becoming? Who do they imagine, understand, and work for their audiences to be? And, in the final analysis, can these festivals be characterized, via Stuart Hall, as “cultural strategies that can make a difference . . . and can shift the dispositions of power”? (1996a: 468) At the same time, with China’s growing investments in African countries such as Zimbabwe and Zambia, and a more assertive African diaspora community in places such as Brazil (Bamba 2007, 2014), any perspective that remains wedded to the determining power of European countries over their former colonies in Africa starts to feel remarkably out of date and anachronistic. In an interview with the blog Africa is a Country, philosopher Achille Mbembe argues that Europe has increasingly provincialized itself in relation to the African continent: Europe has developed over the last 25 years or so an attitude of containment in the sense that the biggest preoccupation has been to make sure that Africans stay where they are. The fixation with the question of immigration has jeopardized to a large extent the development of more dynamic relations between Africa and Europe. The obsession with boundaries and visas, the emergence of racism in most parts of Europe, the strengthening of right wing parties in the context of an economic crisis that is quite obvious—all of that has been detrimental to the development of productive and mutually beneficial relations between Africa and Europe. Europe has tended to withdraw into herself . . . Meanwhile, we have seen the extent to which new actors, such as China, India, Turkey, Brazil and a few others have tried to play a role in the on-going geopolitical reconfiguration that is on the way.23

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This geopolitical reconfiguration is also leading to new transnational and intercultural partnerships and exchanges in relation to the audiovisual sector. The AsiaAfrica program inaugurated in 2008 at the Dubai International Film Festival, curated by South African Nashen Moodley, is one example of the development of new centers of gravity for African filmmaking outside of Africa. And while the Tokyo African Film Festival is currently the only dedicated African festival within Asia, more are bound to follow, given the many recent collaborative projects that have emerged between Asian and African filmmakers, from the “Forget Africa” program initiated by the 2010 IFFR (discussed in Chapter 3), to the special relationship that has developed between the South Korean and African film industries. South Korean filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung, for example, has continued to support Rwandan filmmakers through his production company, Almond Tree Rwanda, since making the acclaimed film Munyurangabo (2007);24 and three filmmakers from Africa were the recipients of the Jeonju International Film Festival’s Digital Project in 2008. In Latin America, Flavio Florencio’s pioneering African film festival circuit Africala—which began in Mexico in 200725—is increasingly complemented by new African film festivals on the South American continent, particularly in Brazil, the country with the largest African diaspora population in the world (see Bamba 2007, 2014). These recent examples of “Africa” and Africans on the move are beyond the scope of this project, but they leave scholars with a great deal to explore in the future. What is clear, however, is that the new generation of African filmmakers and curators are far more aware of their place in a mobile, shifting world, as well as confident of their place within Africa, and that if Western Europe refuses to acknowledge their presence, they will go elsewhere.26 It is important to mention here that, along with the rise of “international” film festivals on the continent, which I describe and analyze in the forthcoming chapter, the past few years have also seen the founding of some new, very dynamic African film festivals and African film ventures on the continent that are complementing, if not rivaling, FESPACO’s importance. These include the founding of the Luxor African Film Festival in Egypt, in 2011 and the Colours of the Nile Film Festival in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2013. South African filmmaker Sara Blecher speaks particularly passionately about Colours of the Nile, which is currently curated by June Givanni. Like FESPACO, Blecher says, this festival gives African filmmakers from around the continent a chance to meet one another and share their experiences, as well as consider ways of possibly working together in the future. What makes these Africa-based African film festivals different from African festivals outside of the continent is their focus on fostering material and professional networks within the continent. As a 2009 study commissioned by ARTerial Network on the African creative industries notes: one of the major obstacles for artists and cultural professionals in Africa [is] the persistent lack of funds specifically allocated to support travel. African artists frequently only meet colleagues on European or American stages as the cost of travelling within Africa is so high. This means that it is often easier for Africans to collaborate with European artists rather than with those within Africa. (du Plessis, El Bennaoui and Mayitoukou 2009: 72)27


Beyond African film festivals, Nigerian filmmaker Peace Anyiam-Osigwe has created an African version of the Oscars through her African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) in Nigeria, founded in 2005, which is playing a crucial role in defining the aesthetics of African film in the twenty-first century (Anyiam-Osigwe 2013). Far from simply being an event for glitz, glamor, and celebrity, the AMAA is using its power and visibility to do something African filmmakers to date have largely failed, collectively, to do: lobby African governments to invest more in filmmaking. A roundtable organized by AMAA at TIFF 2013 initiated action on this front—another example of the imbrication of “local” and “international” activities in a globalizing world.28 Finally, outside of the continent, African film and art curators and African filmmakers and artists often continue to bear the representational burden of having to speak “for” Africa (see Barnett 2006, Harney 2008: 161, Thackway 2014). From her experience of programming African films both in Sweden and South Africa,29 Swedish-Ethiopian curator Katarina Hedrén makes a useful distinction between the nature of curating films by Africans on and beyond the continent: The biggest difference is that while you promote African film in Europe . . . you promote film that happens to be African here [in Africa] . . . So it’s not automatically African film but is much freer. . . . In Sweden, where I’m from, you sometimes feel you have to—even if the idea is to challenge perceptions—you sometimes end up challenging in a way that you actually speak to the perceptions that you actually want to challenge. And you bring up the same issues. So I would say that you’re freer in a way here. There’s much less fuss around being African in Africa than there is in Europe! (pers. comm.)

Hedrén here gets to the heart of the problem of any attempt to categorize “African film” in lieu of the preferable, neutral idea of “films made by Africans” or—in her terms—“film that happens to be African.” Many of the anxieties that curators working outside Africa experience over how to represent Africa and its peoples fall away when one steps onto African territory, where one can (mostly) take for granted that people understand what it means to be African. This relative “freedom,” as well as the desire to move beyond FESPACO’s restricting mantra of “African films for Africans,” is perhaps one of the reasons behind the phenomenon of the rise of “international” film festivals on the African continent, a phenomenon that I analyze in the next chapter.

6

The Rise of “International” Film Festivals in Africa

“Africa” in the Context of Festivalization As I write these words, in London, myriad festivals are underway: a traveling version of the Irish music celebration known as The Other Voices Festival is taking place at Wilton’s Music Hall; the Spill Festival of Performance—a celebration of “radical live work” in experimental theatre and art—is on in east, south, and central London; the London Latin Music Festival La Linea claims to have brought the “who’s who” of contemporary Latin musicians to the city; the Underbelly Festival is advertising circus and cabaret entertainment in a rather unusual venue—an “upside-down purple cow”; and the Argentinian Film Festival is offering a fix of films about football, wine, and other aspects of Argentine culture. If I start to look further afield, I find more festivals beyond London, such as the 46th annual Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering, a celebration of Northumbrian music, food, history, language, and crafts. In fact, I find myself surrounded by advertisements for festivals wherever I go: the Rose Festival in Morocco; the Dubai Shopping Festival; a cherry-picking festival in Lebanon; Las Fallas Festival of the Torches in Valencia, Spain. The African continent and its cultures have not escaped this global phenomenon of festivalization. Since the late 1990s, new cultural festivals of all kinds— including international film festivals—have proliferated in Africa, sometimes enduring, sometimes fading away as quickly as they appear. A recent initiative by ARTerial Network1 called AFRIFESTNET,2 launched in 2012, has responded to this proliferation of cultural festivals by attempting to create a festival network based on the African continent, and currently lists about 160 festivals through its database.3 A similar initiative, called the Africa Vision Exchange (AVE), was launched almost simultaneously by African film festivals based outside of the continent, which also rapidly increased in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Chapter 5).4 The proliferation of Africa-based festivals has been the subject of recent debate through the well-known journal and website Africultures, based in France, which


devoted a special issue to the theme in 2008, although film festivals are notably absent from the discussion. The editor of the issue, Ayoko Mensah, asks: Haven’t festivals and biennales become the showcases and springboards of contemporary African creativity? In these past few years, has their number not exploded astonishingly? But to what ends? And according to what kind of logic? Very little work has been done on this question and it seemed urgent to us to propose a critical approach to the “festivalisme” that is sweeping the African continent. (2008: 8)5

Two strands of interpretation are offered by participants in the Africultures debate: on the one hand, they fear that festivalization might be a symptom of “a global situation that is privileging the spectacularization of culture” (Vincent 2008a: 12); on the other, they suggest that the increase of festivals in Africa might be seen as an example of resistance to Eurocentricity and to the marginalization of African art in the global marketplace (Vincent 2008a: 15). As these thinkers imply, the global phenomenon of festivalization raises important questions relevant also within African contexts: Is this phenomenon a sign of the democratization of a certain kind of culture, or is it also a symptom of a neoliberal capitalist world that will tolerate the visibility of certain kinds of culture just as it continues to marginalize those who cannot satisfy the market’s hunger for expansion? In other words, do festivals offer alternatives to citizens, or do they in fact disguise a lack of alternatives (Tang 2011, Moeran and Pederson 2011a, Boum 2012)? The latter question invokes the contradictions of capitalism, what Arundhati Roy has called the “dual orchestra” in which protest turns into “crisis as spectacle,” a distraction from the things for which that protest supposedly stands (Adesokan 2011: 166–7). To begin to grapple with these complex questions as they relate to Africa, it is necessary first to chart the transition period between the founding of festivals focused on African filmmaking in the late 1960s, such as FESPACO and JCC, to the founding of the new wave of internationally focused film festivals in the late 1990s (see Appendix 1 for a full list of film festivals in Africa). Most contemporary film festivals in Africa call themselves international, although a few are dedicated to screening only African films. The older festivals have also felt the pressure to reinvent themselves in this new era. As I argue in Chapter 4, the assassination of Sankara in the late 1980s brought dramatic changes to FESPACO, which began to engage in a form of what Bayart (2000) calls “extraversion,” the leveraging of a certain type of international relationship. Similarly, Ruoff argues: “The current identity of the JCC remains up for grabs as some argue for a return to its politicized roots—a place where directors, critics and audiences take stock of Arab and African cinema and debate its future—while others are swayed by the commercial success of [the] Marrakech [International Film Festival, founded 2001], modelled after Cannes, with its mix of glamour, commerce and international stars” (2008: 50).6 In the section that follows, I focus on the development over time of the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa because its evolution from 1979, when it was founded, to its position today as what many consider the most professional international film festival on the continent, provides a fascinating example of one process of “internationalization” in action.

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The Journey of the Durban Film Festival towards Internationalism The close relationship between film festivals and the ideals of anticolonial political resistance in Africa did not come to an abrupt end after the 1960s, but continued right through to the late 1980s. The center of gravity for resistance shifted, however, to those parts of the continent where political independence had only recently been won, or had not yet been won: southern Africa. While the newly independent Mozambican government cannot be said to have created a conventional film festival in 1975, its Kuxa Kanema project (meaning “birth of cinema”) had the same goals as many film festivals originating in Africa: to create local audiences for local films, and to support the production of local cinema (Loftus 2012). President Samora Machel set up the National Institute of Cinema to produce newsreels, but also orchestrated the screening of these films throughout Mozambique in a kind of permanent, country-wide film festival, with the help of vans and 16mm projectors. However, as the documentary Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema (2003) shows, by the late 1970s Mozambique had been caught in the destabilizing crossfire of the frontline wars initiated by the white supremacist governments in apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe). The latter two countries became the sites of the birth of new film festivals on the continent at this time, with the founding of the Durban Film Festival in South Africa in 1979 (it was renamed “Durban International Film Festival” in the 1990s) and the Frontline Film Festival in Harare in 1987 (whose name changed over the years).7 The opening speeches at the 2013 Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) conjured the spirit of resistance that gave birth to the festival, which many now consider the most important on the continent in terms of the international standards of its curation and organization, and its commitment to creating professional, global filmmaking opportunities for Africans.8 The apartheid past and the festival’s role in challenging it was consistently invoked in these speeches. Councillor Loganathan “Logie” Naidoo (the Speaker of the eThekwini Municipality)9 recalled the earliest days of the festival, which was founded by a group of (mostly white) intellectuals led by Ros Sarkin and her husband, Professor Teddy Sarkin, as an underground, antiapartheid event in 1979 at the then–University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal). Born in 1938, Sarkin was the first director of the festival. She was a fervent antiapartheid activist (she later became an ANC member) who believed in the power of film to evoke attitudinal and thus political change in South Africa. Her vision was to create a serious, “high quality” film festival showing both local and international films—many with political themes—to a multiracial South African audience. She seems to have largely succeeded in terms of her programming goals, but her dream of overcoming the racial segregation of South African cinemas did not wholly materialize.10 In an interview with Keyan Tomaselli in 1984, Sarkin explained the festival’s origins as follows: The Festival arose spontaneously out of the Durban Film Circle, which is a film society. At the time the Circle was on the point of closing down as we were down to 10 members, but we made the decision to get it going again. Eighteen months later we

134 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals had a very large membership. We then organized a small festival at the University of Natal. It was similar to the London Film Festival in its opening year, since that too started with only 6 or 7 films. In any event, it was a success and set off a spark which made the annual event possible. (Sarkin 1984: 17)

At the second edition of the festival in 1980, a total of 41 films were shown in 120 screenings at the West Kine cinema complex in central Durban. While the festival was bookended by less political fare—it launched with French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s eighteenth-century historical drama Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) and closed with Bob Fosse’s Palme d’Or-winning All That Jazz (1980)—much of its program offered audiences films that would have challenged their class, racial, and, in particular, gendered assumptions. With the commercial cinemas in Durban trotting out feel-good Hollywood movies such as the Ali McGraw picture Just Tell Me What you Want and Clint Eastwood in Bronco Billy, and with South African television (which had been introduced to the country only in 1976) programming the most anodyne and apolitical content to white and black viewers alike,11 it is not difficult to imagine the impact of films such as Marigolds in August, Alhambrista, and Manila: In the Claws of Darkness12 on festival audiences. The regular film reviewer for the Natal Mercury newspaper, Lynne Kelly, praised the festival for its courage in screening the latter three films, which, she notes, “all generate awareness of man’s desperation when deprived of the right to employment and human dignity.”13 Of the three films mentioned above, Marigolds in August—adapted from Athol Fugard’s play by South African filmmaker Ross Devenish—was the only South African film screened at the 1980 festival. This fact references both the international focus of the programming from the festival’s earliest days, but also the paucity of politically conscious South African filmmaking during apartheid. The play and film versions of Marigolds in August compassionately tell the story of two black gardeners in South Africa who are struggling to find employment. While apartheid is not explicitly mentioned in the tale, it is the unspoken backdrop to it. The film came to the Durban Film Festival after winning international acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded the Bronze Leopard and Special Jury Prize and was bought by several European television channels. Perhaps as a result of its characteristically Fugardian focus on human relationships rather than political institutions, the film went on to win several awards in South Africa, and even to enjoy a commercial release.14 Nevertheless, as Kelly pointed out, it forced white South Africans to experience their society “through another set of eyes,” to experience the “black reality” that Devenish lamented was “very much neglected.”15 The film was reported as being one of the best attended at the festival.16 With very few politically challenging South African films to draw on, the festival continued to prioritize what it called “Third World” films over the years, and Kelly argues that “An important aspect of an international film festival is that it offers a wealth of insight into alien lifestyles, particularly in films from the Third World.”17 Often the matrix of gender and class injustice were the subject of these films, and writing about the Philippine film Bona, Kelly praises it for revealing “a segment of a society in which women are servile” and for vividly highlighting


slum living “and the resilience of the poor in the survival ratrace.”18 What has been apparent from the earliest days of the programming of the festival, however, has been its special focus on films that upset both traditional representations of women and conventional gender relationships. At the 1980 festival, a last-minute addition was renegade British director Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, about a man exasperated with his woman’s flirtatious ways. By 1982, the program had an even clearer focus on unusual women, with films such as Awake from Mourning, a documentary about a group of black women in Soweto who formed the Maggie Magaba Trust to engage in self-empowerment projects; Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev’s feature film Montenegro (1981), about a rich, bored housewife in Sweden who ends up having a passionate affair with a Serbian immigrant; and the German film No Mercy, No Future, by director Helma Sanders-Brahms, which tells the story of Veronika, a schizophrenic Christian woman who wanders Berlin, giving her body to men in the belief that they are Jesus. No Mercy, No Future was initially banned by the Directorate of Publications, the main film censorship body in South Africa at the time, forcing Sarkin to take the issue to the Appeal Board in Pretoria, along with the support of a psychiatrist and lawyer. She won the appeal on the basis that the film “was being shown as part of a serious symposium on film censorship,”19 reflecting a common tendency during the later years of apartheid for events that were deemed “intellectual” to be exempted from censorship on the basis that they would not attract large audiences. As Tomaselli points out, a 1974 amendment to censorship rules in South Africa replaced “differential censorship,” based on people’s race, with a new way of categorizing people, emphasizing the “specific place” where people watched films. In 1980, these rules were amended once again, focusing exemptions to censorship on the “probable viewer,” who was defined as “the mature, serious-minded filmgoer who will see the film in proper perspective” (quoted in Tomaselli 1988: 16–17). The Appeal Board in Pretoria frequently overturned decisions by the Directorate of Publications on the basis that certain “films would not be ‘widely screened,’ would be linked to academic discussions and that ‘sufficient latitude must be allowed for political debate, criticism and pleas for change’” (ibid.). It is thus not incidental that in the year Sarkin won the appeal to screen No Mercy, No Future (1982), the festival had returned from the West Kine multiplex to its original home, the Elizabeth Sneddon theatre at the University of Natal. This was not on account of its not having been commercially successful at the West Kine complex, however, as an article assessing the 1980 festival reveals: The multiracial festival of 41 top international films proved that the so-called apathetic Durban audiences will turn out in their droves for high quality entertainment. The cinema complex was generally crowded with people from all walks of life and, according to Mrs Sarkin, it reached beyond the borders of Durban with people coming regularly from as far afield as Pietermaritzburg and Eshowe.20

Contemporary newspaper reports reveal that the festival was extremely popular with spectators, with Sarkin noting very large audiences, even for the 10 p.m. screening slot,21 and pointing out that the festival “may have even made a small


profit towards next year’s festival.”22 In fact, the popular success of the Durban Film Festival—as well as those festivals held in Johannesburg and Cape Town from 1976 onwards—was so threatening to the commercial film sector that one of the main film distributors and cinema chains in South Africa at the time, SterKinekor, decided that it too needed to run a film festival (Sharp 1984: 19–20). Publicity manager for Ster-Kinekor at the time, Bill Sharp, claimed that film festivals were “cashing in” on their “special dispensation” to show uncensored films and argued that a festival audience was not an “elite” one: “They got their exemption on the basis that they were working for an exclusive select audience but we knew that wasn’t the case eventually. Everybody from the village plumber to the academic went to watch the movies, some of them for quite the wrong reasons. Because they heard there were bare boobs and that sort of thing. So in that way we were discriminated against” (Sharp 1984: 19, my emphasis). Sarkin dismisses such claims as “ridiculous,” arguing that “The film festivals limit the number of screenings and 2 screenings in a 400-seat cinema is, after all, the same as a preview, and no different from the previews which the commercial distributors themselves hold frequently on a Sunday evening” (1984: 18). Indeed, as popular as the Durban Film Festival was with a certain audience, the film festival business model simply does not allow them to operate as commercial, profit-making enterprises, and Sarkin had to secure the future of the festival. The return to the University as the festival venue thus seems to have had two sources. The first was financial, related to Sarkin’s recognition that, given that the festival only received a “small annual grant from the [Durban] City Council,” it needed the University to assure its “permanence” (1984: 17). The second was that, as the discussion of censorship practices above indicates, universities provided a safe (albeit elite) haven to some extent during apartheid, as “serious” spaces in which it was easier to avoid censorship (Tomaselli 1988: 27–8). Sarkin had nevertheless proved during the festival’s short run at the West Kine multiplex that there is no clear ontological distinction to be drawn between “high” and “popular” culture, and Tomaselli argued at the time that her “contribution to popularising what François Truffaut calls ‘difficult’ cinema has been profound” (Sarkin 1984: 17). In 1982, Sarkin invited the British film critic Derek Malcolm to the festival in an attempt to broaden its international scope. In an article for the Natal Mercury titled “What’s the point of film festivals?,” Malcolm insists on the equivalence of the festival expert and the ordinary spectator. Noting first that he has attended no fewer than 247 film festivals, Malcolm argues: But [festivals] exist not just for experts and buffs and mad film critics like me. They exist for ordinary people too—those who just like going to the cinema and want to see films from outside their own small corner of the world. Films which extend their own received experience and tell them something new.23

Accordingly, Malcolm’s main critique of the 1982 Durban Film Festival was that it was not reaching a sufficiently diverse audience; despite Sarkin’s attempts to broaden the festival’s audiences, the majority of the festival’s spectators were white. Malcolm thus argued that “[o]ne of the chief functions of next year’s Durban Film


Festival should be to organize a full-scale season for blacks in the townships.”24 Malcolm apparently offered to help the festival organizers putting together this season, featuring leading black filmmakers from around the world, but only if he could “be assured that you will work to extend the boundaries of the festival to the black areas.” The problem Sarkin was facing was that, although cinemagoing had been a popular black pastime in the late 1940s and 1950s (Dovey and Impey 2010), by the early 1980s the apartheid government had succeeded in closing down most cinemas in the black areas. The 1980s was also a time of fatigue and frustration for many black South Africans, with the charismatic young Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko having been murdered while in police detention just a few years previously, in 1976, and with violent tensions between police and black schoolchildren creating havoc in many communities. As I have noted, Sarkin’s ideal audience for the festival was a broad and multiracial one, and she had, in fact, been attempting to expand the festival beyond central Durban since its third edition, in 1981, but had faced considerable difficulties, the extent and nature of which she describes here: [In 1981] we ran a Festival at the Umlazi Cinema [in the township of Umlazi], where the management are very helpful, but the facilities were not really suitable for a film festival. Although we tried to encourage the people in Umlazi to see films that they do not normally have an opportunity of seeing, we realized that the cinema itself was inaccessibly located on the outskirts of the township. The next year we held the Festival at the Mangosuthu Technikon. Again we had problems. I was white and a woman and the whole environment was very politicised. The students questioned our objectives in holding a festival, and asked why we had the right to use the sports hall when they themselves didn’t have access to it. Eventually . . . the students gave the Festival their blessing. However, it was very difficult to reach the wider community. The network for communicating with people is very difficult. I think that as much work went into that one week Festival as went into the whole main Durban Film Festival that year. We had other problems as well such as whether we should use Council buses or not? Who we should have on our committee? Would Umlazi Councillors be acceptable? There was hesitation and trepidation at every point. (1984: 17)

Sarkin has also recounted in interviews that there were many confrontations with the apartheid authorities in the early years of the festival when they attempted to screen films in the black townships. Recalling one experience, she says: “The police came one day and they wanted to break the projector, but my husband Teddy said if they did that, it would be front-page news, so they went away” (Kriedemann 2009). However, the fact that these screenings are not mentioned in the local “black” newspaper of the time (Ilanga Lase Natal), whereas the festival occupied center stage in the local “white” newspaper (the Natal Mercury), reveals that these screenings simply did not resonate with black South African township audiences in the way they did with the predominantly white South African city audience. Another major problem for the festival at the time were the international boycotts against South Africa, which had begun in 1961 and were generally supported by the major anti-apartheid liberation organizations, such as the ANC and AZAPO


(the Azanian Peoples Organization), the umbrella organization of the Black Consciousness Movement. The international audiovisual sector stepped up its protests in the early 1970s, with the British Association of Cinematography, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) formalizing a policy in 1971 to refuse screenings of their films in segregated cinemas in South Africa. When television was introduced to South Africa in 1976, the organization Equity in Britain immediately banned the selling of its television programs to South Africa.25 An interesting debate on the cultural boycotts arose across two issues of The SAFTTA (South African Film and Television Technicians Association) Journal in 1984 and 1985 in relation to the Durban Film Festival. In 1984, the white American filmmaker Robert Mugge explained why he had eventually agreed to allow the festival to screen his film Black Wax (1982), about the African American musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron. His conditions were as follows: “1. All screenings were multiracial, 2. Special screenings were held in the black community, and 3. The film was not cut or censored in any way (including Gil’s song, ‘Johannesburg,’ his discussion of the rape of Africa by white people, and his declaration of support for ‘bloody’ resistance in South Africa)” (1984: 16). To Mugge’s amazement, the film not only passed government censorship but was also very positively reviewed in the press (ibid.). He argued that independent filmmakers should ignore the boycotts because “serious and provocative films” can assist “the forces of resistance in an oppressed country” (ibid.). In the following issue of The SAFTTA Journal, the AZAPO National Publicity Secretary Imrann Moosa argued, in contrast, that: “It follows naturally from the isolation campaign that we are not in favour of the Festival” (Moosa 1985: 8). But Moosa’s argument was not solely based on the principles of the boycott. Like Malcolm, he critiqued the festival for what he saw as its restricted audience: The Festival is the hangout of trendy liberals. It is not a question of vital importance because hardly anyone in a mass movement like AZAPO has been to something like it. . . . We would have no problems with the festivals if they were aimed at the broad masses, because they would expose a large number of us to films which we would otherwise not see. . . . The organisers of the Festival, because of who they are and their class-race background are going to find it difficult to do this. It will always be a question of them taking films to Umlazi and not the people of Umlazi hosting the Film Festival and doing their own thing. . . . What one would have to do on a practical level is communicate with community organisations. . . . But for the Durban Film Festival committee which is made up of the “trendy left” to take films to Umlazi is a classic example of paternalism. (Moosa 1985: 8–9)

Sarkin responded in the same issue to Moosa, agreeing with his analysis of the festival’s problems and contradictions and welcoming collaboration with AZAPO, saying that the “Durban Film Festival would be happy to simply make films and projectors available to a suitable organisation which is able and willing to arrange for them to be shown under their own auspices and for their own funds” (Sarkin 1985: 9). Despite the tremendous impact the Durban Film Festival had on its inner-city spectators over the years,26 it remained a close-knit university affair with a majority white audience. As the South African government stepped up its control of the


media in the late 1980s under the states of emergency, one can also see the festival becoming marginalized in the “white” press, with the limelight once accorded it by the Natal Mercury waning. By 1987, features about the festival were mostly assigned to the Woman’s Weekly Supplement of the newspaper, giving the impression that the festival was a small event aimed at bored housewives rather than one with the international reach Sarkin had consistently sought. Nevertheless, the festival managed to struggle along through the final, apocalyptic throes of apartheid, and into the young post-apartheid period, although it was forced to contract in scope. When Teddy Sarkin passed away just after the 20th edition of the Durban Film Festival in 1998, Ros Sarkin handed the directorship over to the newly created Centre for Creative Arts (CCA) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which now runs four annual festivals: the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF); Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience; Poetry Africa; and Time of the Writer.27 During the 12 years (2000–2012) that Peter Rorvik directed DIFF in his position as Director of the CCA (from 1999), the festival professionalized itself, adding “international” to its name. As Rorvik told me in an interview: [The festival] had a bit of a lull period so when I came in, in 1999, it was very small, I think there were 22 films. . . . Everything took place at the Elizabeth Sneddon theatre [at the University of KwaZulu-Natal] at that time. I think that first year, 1999, maybe there was one film director who attended . . . but it was quite low key and in fact a number of advisors to the Centre for Creative Arts had said to me . . . “Look, of all of the festivals that are going on [at the CCA], this film festival doesn’t seem to be doing very well. Why don’t you let this go and concentrate on the [other] festivals?” . . . But . . . we’ve managed to grow that festival into something very vital and important. It was a very important festival in the early years during the 70s and 80s and I think we’ve now moved it into a new dimension that really suits the way the country has moved and not just the country but the continent. It has become an important platform for South African cinema, the launch of new South African film, as well as African film. (pers. comm.)

After some overlap with the Cape Town World Cinema Film Festival, which ran from 2002 to 2006, DIFF emerged as the most important international film festival in the country,28 winning for itself the support of not only provincial government (specifically the Department of Economic Development & Tourism of KwaZuluNatal), but also of national government, through the National Lottery and the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Arts and Culture and the main national film body. Just as FESPACO became a way of attracting visitors to the city of Ouagadougou, one cannot ignore the fact that DIFF was purposely framed as a way of contributing to the economy of Durban and the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa, which previously had little in the way of audiovisual infrastructure, in contrast to Johannesburg, “the television center of South Africa,” and Cape Town, “the hub for commercial [advertising] productions” (Rorvik pers. comm.). At the same time, the addition of “international” to the festival’s name was no doubt strategic in terms of attracting global funding.29 In his welcome in the 2012 program, Rorvik celebrates the fact that the festival “now show[s] 175 films in a total of 293 screenings.” Former DIFF manager and


curator Nashen Moodley calls DIFF “one of the few truly international festivals in Africa. We do focus on South African and African cinema, but the selection is truly international” (quoted in Kriedemann 2009). The festival is also “truly international” in terms of the visitors it attracts, with filmmakers, festival organizers, and curators from around the world annually converging on Durban for the festival’s 10 days. The international programming and attendance has been facilitated by the savvy way in which DIFF has repositioned itself on the international film festival calendar. As Rorvik says: The way in which we have scheduled the timing of the Festival is perfectly situated in July so a lot of the selection is done after the Rotterdam and Berlin festivals and we are normally able to find funding to go and attend and then watch four/five films a day, go groggy on films, come back and make our selection from that. Then possibly go to Cannes which is just before the festival and if we can get one or two top winners and present them in our festival it is an achievement. (pers. comm.)

Rorvik thus points to three factors that have distinguished the specific “internationalism” of DIFF from many other film festivals on the continent that call themselves “international”: first, the international selection of films; second, the live presence of so many filmmakers from all over the world at the festival which, he says, “enriches the experience for the viewer”; and third, the live presence of so many people from the international film industry, which makes the festival “an important networking opportunity, a meeting, a gathering point for industry” (pers. comm.). Many also consider DIFF the most significant film festival in Africa today in terms of the professional opportunities it provides to African filmmakers. These opportunities have been enhanced through the addition of “Talents Durban” (introduced in 2008), a training initiative for young African filmmakers that DIFF runs collaboratively with the Berlin Film Festival,30 and the Durban FilmMart, which was initiated in 2010.31 DIFF’s equivalent focus on international expansion and building the African film industries makes it distinct from its coeval Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF), founded in Egypt in 1976. The only Africa-based festival to enjoy FIAPF accreditation, CIFF would seem to have somewhat standardized itself to global norms in a way that many other Africa-based international film festivals have not. Rorvik proudly notes, for example, that, in his last year of directing DIFF (2012), [w]e premiered 17 South African feature films . . . alongside, I think, about 25 South African documentaries and 25 short films and if we can find that match of showing all the best of the South African films, the cream of the African films and the cream selection from around the world I think that was the objective for film selection. (pers. comm.)

Nevertheless, DIFF’s focus on internationalizing itself does raise questions about what may be lost or overlooked in the process. Audience research I conducted at DIFF from 2008 until 2013 clearly revealed the class hierarchies that continue to exist at the festival, with poorer people in the township areas not prioritized, despite “outreach” programs at venues such as the Ekhaya Multi Arts Centre in


the township of KwaMashu and the Albert Luthuli museum, about an hour’s drive outside of Durban, in a small town called Groutville. These programs are often badly organized and, as a result, mostly attended by children (even if the films are not appropriate for children). While DIFF’s screenings at its central city venues (the Suncoast cinemas, the Blue Waters Hotel, the Musgrave Centre, and the Elizabeth Sneddon theatre) are attended by multiracial audiences—one barely sees a white face at the screenings in KwaMashu and Groutville. The problems and inequalities that existed in Sarkin’s era thus continue today, two decades after the formal end of apartheid. Such problems are not restricted to DIFF, however; many film festivals in Africa struggle with a disjunct between their relatively wellorganized programs in central, middle-class venues, and their poorly organized or nonexistent “outreach” programs in impoverished areas, symptoms of the social hierarchies and inequalities entrenched through an era of neoliberal capitalism. “Art” in an Era of Neoliberalism and Internationalism: The Proliferation of “International” Film Festivals in Africa from the Late 1990s De Valck argues that even at the most avant-garde of contemporary film festivals around the world, the imbrication of art and commerce is increasingly foregrounded (2014). She suggests, in this respect, the usefulness of applying the concept of “trade fairs” to film festivals (2007: 17). Similarly, in a recent, edited book, Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries: Fairs, Festivals and Competitive Events (2011), scholars mostly in the field of Business Studies offer comparative analysis of various trade fairs, tournaments, festivals, and FCEs (field configuring events). There is an assumption here that festivals will always be connected to commercial trade and industry—to the market. The authors do acknowledge, however, the “seemingly oxymoronic” term used to describe the field with which they are concerned—that of the “creative industries” (ibid.). As they point out, there is in this term the grafting of a humanistic concept developed in eighteenthcentury England—that of the “creative arts”—with the pejorative concept of the “culture industry,” developed by the Frankfurt School in the post-WWII period to describe what they saw as the indoctrination of the masses via cultural products “carefully tailored” from above (ibid.). The term “creative industries” was first used in policy and education circles in the mid-1990s in Australia and the United Kingdom, and then spread to other parts of the world, as the commercialization of human creativity grew (ibid.: 2). Neoliberal incorporation is also evident in the ways film is consistently addressed or spoken about in our contemporary world. There has been an industry turn in film studies, and jobs that focus on media rather than film studies, and “mass media” rather than “small media” have proliferated. In negative terms, this may be seen as part of a global shift towards the instrumentalization of the arts and education, with its positivistic emphasis on quantitative and financial outputs. More optimistically, it can also be seen as part of a movement towards a rematerialization of film studies (Lobato 2012), and towards a rapprochement between film and media studies (Dovey 2010a), in which scholars are recognizing the need


to locate film analysis within ever wider historical, geopolitical, sociological, and industrial vistas, moving between the close analysis of individual films and the ways in which films circulate through various channels, thereby accruing different kinds of value—critical, popular, economic, cultural, and social. The study of film festivals, recently constituted as a field of academic study at the intersection of media, film, cultural and globalization studies, is vital to this rematerialization of film studies, and to that shift in approach away from the treatment of media as coherent “texts” that are to be interpreted only by the “expert” scholar (De Valck 2007). Researching film festivals can help us to see how and why particular films become canonized and how communities of taste are formed. At the same time, film festivals have to be seen in all their contradictions as another dimension of the global system of neoliberal capitalism. As many scholars have noted, film festivals make manifest competing and overlapping definitions of film: film as “artistic expression” and film as “economic product for trade” (Porton 2009: 23–106; De Valck 2007: 17; Wong 2011: 26). This imbrication of creativity and commercialization at film festivals raises several important questions. Is this a positive recognition of the economic basis to all cultural production, whether reified as “art” or not? Or is it, in a more sinister sense, related to what art historian Jeannine Tang attributes to “capital’s globalization . . . alongside the push towards the creative industries by governments worldwide, and coinciding with the rise of economic neo-liberalism” (2011: 74)? How do we use André Allix’s insight, from Business Studies, that as the number of fairs and festivals increases, “their importance declines” (Moeran and Pederson 2011a: 31)? Is the increase in festivals a sign of the centralization or the marginalization of a certain kind of “culture”? Do festivals have democratic value or are they shopfronts tailored by politicians and organizations eager to create an image of national unity and hide or quell dissent (Boum 2012)? Or are they, disturbingly, all of these things? These questions take on a particular charge when considered in African contexts because of the specific history of Africa’s economic and political relationships with Europe and the US. Although transatlantic slavery and European extraction of resources from Africa during colonization provided the capital that allowed markets in Europe and the US to grow, these historical injustices were overlooked at the moment of independence for many African countries. In the wake of decolonization in Africa, and at the height of the Cold War, “Western” global financial institutions and nongovernmental organizations orchestrated a situation in which African countries became economically dependent on Europe and the US, paradoxically through a combination of aid and high-interest-rate debt. Discourses around development and trade have consistently gone hand in glove when it comes to Africa since, as Dambisa Moyo points out, “Aid costs money. And unless it’s in the form of grants, it has to be paid back, with interest. This point would later come back to haunt many African states” (2009: 16–17). Moyo offers a useful breakdown of the various kinds of foreign aid that have been disbursed since the July 1944 Bretton Woods conference in the US, which brought together “700 delegates from some forty-four countries . . . to establish a framework for a global


system of financial and monetary management” (2009: 10). According to her, the differences in foreign aid can be assigned to seven decades: Bretton Woods in the 1940s; the era of the Marshall Plan in the 1950s; the decade of industrialization of the 1960s; the shift towards aid as an answer to poverty in the 1970s; aid as the tool for stabilization and structural adjustment in the 1980s; aid as a buttress of democracy and governance in the 1990s; culminating in the present-day obsession with aid as the only solution to Africa’s myriad of problems. (ibid.)

Maintaining strategic geopolitical interests during the Cold War and the period of decolonization in Africa were dressed up as aid and altruism, and saw “Western” aid to Africa increase from a mere $100 million at the start of the 1960s to $950 million by 1965 (ibid.: 14–15). After the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, many African countries found themselves mired in the global recession, with extortionate oil and food prices (ibid.: 16). For example, inflation rose from 3 percent in 1970 to 116 percent in 1977 in Ghana, and from 8 percent in 1970 to 101 percent in 1979 in DRC (ibid.). Under Robert McNamara’s leadership of the World Bank from 1973, the Bank changed its focus from infrastructure lending to poverty-oriented aid, and by the end of the 1970s, Africa had received roughly $36 billion in foreign loans (ibid.: 16–17). The inability of African and other countries to repay high-interest-rate loans in the early 1980s demanded a new focus to foreign aid. Accordingly, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervened in African economies with economic stabilization programs and structural adjustment programs (SAPs). The SAPs started to be implemented across most African countries from the late 1970s onwards, ensuring that Africa was now fully in the grip of a rapidly neoliberalizing world, in which the privatization of state organizations and the marketization of human activities were the priorities. Much of the discourse growing around the justification for these programs argued, in line with a general global shift in economic theory from state centralization to a laissez-faire system, that “the market can do better than the state at allocating resources to different segments of society” (Logan and Mengisteab 1993: 4; see also Moyo 2009: 19–20). Critics of the SAPs questioned whether their disadvantages—such as “shrinking domestic credit and money supply, higher interest rates, and devalued currency”—would not outstrip their “potential benefits” (Logan and Mengisteab 1993: 1). Many now feel that the costs did outweigh the gains, particularly when one considers the falling standards of living of ordinary people. Saddled with huge debts and less money in the coffers, African governments were forced to cut back drastically on social welfare, health, and education. This led to wide-scale urban unrest in the 1980s as poverty increased, despite the fact that, by the end of the 1980s, “developing” countries had received $1 trillion in aid (Logan and Mengisteab 1993: 7, Moyo 2009: 22). As SAPs led to the impoverishment of African countries in the 1980s, the presence of European and North American development and aid agencies on the continent paradoxically grew. An era of “poverty porn” in the visual representation of


Africa also began to take root after the 1985 Live Aid Concert organized by Bob Geldof, during which “public discourse became a public disco” (Moyo 2009: 26). Although some of this campaigning helped lead to the historic decision by the G7 countries in 2005 to write off £30 billion in debt from poor countries (Elliott and Seager 2005), it did not help turn the tide on a situation in which European and North American embassies and development agencies fully established their ambiguous power and influence on the continent (for specific examples related to “cultural” development see, for example, Granqvist 2004: 33–52, and Bryce 2010). The ways that African nations have become increasingly hamstrung by the double bind of development aid and debt have inspired Africans to search for homegrown solutions and strategies to combat poverty and develop self- sufficiency (Moyo 2009). In 2010, Nigerian billionaire and founder of the United Bank for Africa, Tony Elumelu, coined the term “Africapitalism,” which he defines as follows: Africapitalism is the philosophy that the African private sector has the power to transform the continent through long-term investments, creating both economic prosperity and social wealth. . . . It is also a call to action for us Africans to take responsibility for our own development and for non-Africans to evolve their thinking about how best to channel their efforts and investments in the region. (quoted in Hirsch 2013)

Many argue that central to the success of Africapitalism is the involvement and investment of the global African diaspora, which is estimated to consist of 140 million people (Kayode-Anglade and Spio-Garbrah 2012: 1). Organizations such as AFFORD (African Foundation for Development), initiated in the UK in 1994,32 have responded to the problems of non-African development organizations by pioneering the concept of “diaspora-development,” in which the myriad contributions of the African diaspora (whether through family remittances, investment, or social enterprise) are foregrounded as crucial to the continent’s future. The concepts of “Africapitalism” and “diaspora-development” have developed alongside the popularization of the idea of an “Africa rising,” an Africa with a growing middle class, although this idea is often used as a marketing ploy, a way of attracting business and investment in Africa, rather than necessarily reflecting current realities. A leading African blog and news site, Africa is a Country, has questioned whether the “Africa rising” discourse is justified and has enlisted the help of philosopher Achille Mbembe to tease out some of the shadows of the current optimism about the continent. Mbembe acknowledges that it is true that “the highest rates of economic growth we have witnessed over the last ten years have happened in Africa”; at the same time, however, he refers to the contradictions of these “advances,” noting the continued lack of infrastructure, high rates of unemployment, the growing wealth gap, and the political conflicts that are still underway in many contexts across the continent.33 Furthermore, in the wake of Europe’s economic crisis, other countries—such as China and Australia—have stepped into the postmillennial African terrain, leading to renewed debate about the effects of foreign intervention in the continent, whether framed as altruistic or commercial.


But what does this have to do with the proliferation of film and other cultural festivals on the continent? A great deal, we find, when we start exploring the contact zones of discourses, ideas, funding sources, people, and films at these events. A closer look at some aspects of the “international” film festivals in Africa initiated from the 1990s onwards suggests that something different has been going on in many of these cases, compared to the “global emergence of film festivals in Asia, such as the Pusan and Singapore film festivals” which have been “closely related with Asia’s position in the international economy and the rise of ‘Asian cinema’ in the global film industry since the 1990s” (Ahn 2012: 7). For while Africa’s position in the international economy might be slowly changing, there has been no rise as yet of “African cinema” in the global film industry or international image economy. The Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) The Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) is symbolic of many of the possibilities and problems of the new wave of “international” film festivals in Africa and their relationship to the neoliberal capitalist global order. The current CEO/ Director of ZIFF, Martin Mhando, describes the reasons for the founding of the festival as directly related to the liberalization of Tanzania’s economy and to the SAPs introduced to the country: Up to the 1980s, cinema had been a very virile, active environment in Tanzania. Tanzania had 53 cinemas until 1990 but after the IMF structural adjustment started, [the SAPS] basically removed any kind of subsidy in the arts and of course even in food, so all the cinemas [died]. . . . During the socialist era, [film] distribution was organized by a national company . . . and so we had actually calculated that any time the entry fee to a movie grows above $2, then cinemas would collapse, and of course it happened. Immediately after the subsidies were removed, the entry fee became I think something like $3 and that’s it, nobody went to the movies. . . . [A]s soon as the conditionalities came in, in many ways people did not have enough money to do anything else beyond basically living. So all the money they could have spent on anything else, they would have spent to buy food which now lost its subsidy as well. So food was much more expensive and therefore any extra money that people had was spent on food. (pers. comm.)

When cinema owners saw that people were no longer able to afford to come to the movies, they started converting their cinemas into supermarkets, their best opportunity at the time to make an income.34 By 1996, Mhando says, all of the cinemas in Tanzania had collapsed. At the same time, although there was television in Zanzibar (although not on mainland Tanzania), “very few people had their own sets, the rest were kind of communal sets” (pers. comm.). The idea to create ZIFF arose precisely to fill the gap in film-viewing culture.35 ZIFF was the brainchild of a small group of people, such as Emerson Skeens, an American who had lived in Zanzibar for many years and was a fluent Swahili speaker,36 a Danish woman, Annalisa Anderson, who was a “constant visitor to


Zanzibar,” as well as several Tanzanians (Mhando pers. comm.). It was set up as a nonprofit organization (of which the film festival was one part) in March 1998, and the first edition was held that July (Slocum 2009: 149). It is also important to note that ZIFF was founded in the wake of the 1995 Tanzanian elections, the first multiparty elections the country had experienced since independence; the agenda on which the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party won was the ongoing liberalization of the Tanzanian economy (ibid.: 138–9). The superimposition of the cultural and the economic that was a feature of global discourses in the 1990s thus found expression in local discourses around the need to both celebrate and commodify Tanzanian cultural heritage. According to Mhando, for Skeens the festival was to be framed primarily as “a tourist event . . . a business thing.” Anderson, Mhando says, saw a festival as “an opportunity to develop [the] culture of watching films . . . a place where alternative films are going to be shown.” To Mhando, “the real essence of the Zanzibar Festival . . . was [the] advocacy element that was brought in”; what excites him most about the festival is the way that, as an NGO, the ZIFF can act as “an advocacy tool for the arts,” developing “social awareness” (Mhando pers. comm.).37 In these different perspectives about the role and importance of ZIFF, one finds a (dis)sensus communis that is evident across many aspects of the festival. The fact that cultural and economic discourses do not necessarily sit comfortably together at ZIFF is evident particularly in the printed materials that have been produced by the festival over the years. In the 2013 ZIFF catalogue, Chairman Mahmoud T. Kombo’s welcoming address creates an oxymoronic counterpart to CEO/Festival Director Martin Mhando’s greetings on the opposite page. Kombo makes a plea to “all Zanzibar and Zanzibari businesses,” and to “Hotels and Tourism businesses” and “Advertising agencies” to “utilize” the “platform” of the ZIFF to “maximum” effect (p. 6). His emphasis on tourism and commerce, and his business jargon, are in striking contrast to Mhando’s humanist, poetic discourse focused on ZIFF as a place of “sharing the values of justice, freedom, love and harmony in our history of maritime relations” (p. 7). Almost every page of each ZIFF catalogue bears these conflicting narratives and discourses—with “outreach” programs for children and people living in villages outside Stone Town (Zanzibar’s capital)38 listed opposite advertisements for the swankiest hotels in Zanzibar, far beyond the purchasing power of most Zanzibaris and thus appealing to foreign tourists and their image of Zanzibar as an exotic island.39 Mhando points out, however, that ZIFF contributes hugely to the economy of Zanzibar . . . Once a taxi driver stopped his car to ask me for the festival dates confiding to me that he had spent three months of very poor income but mindful that he would make three times the amount of money he makes in a month from the two weeks of ZIFF. (2013: 2)

One needs to weigh up the short-term economic gains of tourism with the potential long-term financial and social losses. It is possible to witness a tragic change in Zanzibar as the island’s economy becomes further and further entrenched in tourism. Between 2007, when I was first in Zanzibar, and 2013, when I was most


recently there, the island has increasingly converted itself into a shop-front for foreign consumption. Many locals with whom I spoke lamented the situation, and the way the natural beauty of the island is being destroyed and overrun by the activities of tourists, such as the Full Moon parties that attract hordes of young people to the north of the island.40 Mhando points out that “when tourists come and when they spend more than four days in Zanzibar, they get bored because there’s not much to do. . . . But when they come to ZIFF, they have ten days of activity so that’s the reason why ZIFF gets so many tourists” (pers. comm.). Perhaps the kind of activities that ZIFF promotes—engagement with organized screenings and music events within the more urban quarters of Stone Town—could thus be seen, more optimistically, as a way of encouraging a more responsible, eco-friendly tourism.41 Attracting international tourists is one way to understand ZIFF’s brand of “internationalism.” Its curatorial approach is another. Unlike FESPACO, which puts its programming emphasis squarely on African films (although it has included limited diaspora and international sections since the late 1980s), ZIFF has consistently sought to live up to the word “international” in its name. Although the festival’s icon is the dhow (a local sailing boat), signaling a regional identity based on Indian Ocean cultures, in terms of curatorial approach, Mhando says that what is important to ZIFF is to “include as many perspectives as possible” in the festival (pers. comm.). Far from only featuring works from East Africa or countries bordering the Indian Ocean, ZIFF screened films from 48 countries in 2013. Mhando characterizes the inclusion of films from Slovenia, Jordan, Cap Verde, and Thailand not

Figure 6.1 A dhow (sailing boat), the icon of the Zanzibar International Film Festival


as aberrant to the festival, but as “new voices of a shared history” (ibid.). This curatorial approach may sound suspiciously close to the flattening concept of “world cinema.” However, Mhando has broken ranks with certain other festivals on the continent, such as FESPACO, by actively and enthusiastically programming local video movies from the Nollywood spin-off industry known as “Bongowood.” He sees this as a way, he says, “to build the culture of quality within bongo movie productions,” thereby remaining wedded to international standards around film “quality.” However, he argues that ZIFF is highly respected by the Bongowood filmmakers for these very reasons, and that when Bongowood star actor Steven Kanumba passed away in 2012 at the age of only 28, “they buried him with his ZIFF medal; they actually made the casket open so you could see that star that was given to him as the best actor. Now that tells you how much the festival is held in respect by the [Bongowood] film industry” (ibid.). In this way, Mhando implies that Bongowood filmmakers aspire to the same “global professional standards” Garritano suggests characterize the aspirations of video moviemakers in Ghana (2013: 102). Is it possible, however, to exempt ZIFF from Ayi Kwei Armah’s charge that many festivals in Africa operate like “destructive tropical storms” rather than as “gentle, life-giving, daily rain” (quoted in Gibbs 2012a: 41)? Today, Zanzibar still has no properly functioning cinemas. Mhando’s attempts, with British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, to restore the art deco Majestic Cinema in Stone Town have not yet materialized (Smith 2011). In a visit to this cinema in 2013, I sat amidst a handful of Zanzibari men and watched a grainy, pirated copy of Naked Weapon (2002), which kept breaking down. It was difficult to imagine the vibrant culture of “going to the show,” described so evocatively in Laura Fair’s historical account of film-going in Zanzibar in the 1950s-1980s, and at the heart of which were Bollywood films (2010a, 2010b). Today, as many Zanzibaris have told me, they simply stay at home and watch television, especially imported programs from Britain and the US. For Mhando, ZIFF thus has to work on several cultural fronts. It needs to recognize that cinema-going is no longer a widespread popular leisure activity in Zanzibar and to use other forms of culture to attract local audiences. Referring to tensions with donors who have questioned why there is a musical component to ZIFF, Mhando says My argument . . . with the presence of music in the festival is that I recognize the fact that any social event in the African context involves music, constantly. Even if you go to a funeral the first thing you do is you’ll all be singing. You go to a child naming ceremony, it will have dancing and music. . . . And so when we have films at ZIFF without the music component, literally, we get only 50 percent of the audience, sometimes even less than that because people are pulled in by the musical component. The musical component is that important to that culture to the extent that, for example, we made a conscious decision that we would not charge people to come and watch films because it is our role as a festival to enculture people into watching films but we will charge for people to come to the music component and people felt comfortable with that. (pers. comm.)

Mhando thus uses locally popular forms of culture, such as music, to attract audiences to the festival, but as a Tanzanian with global experience,42 he also has a


Figure 6.2 Th e Old Fort, Stone Town, Zanzibar, the main venue of the Zanzibar International Film Festival

vision of how he feels elements of the local culture need to change. Much of this vision has a strong age and gender component, with programs focused on training for women and children. He is particularly proud of what ZIFF has achieved through its Children Panorama program, which brings 2,000 Zanzibari children to screenings at the festival every year.43 Mhando notes that, unlike in schools, where teachers may be women “but the kids who have the power are the boys,” in the festival space “most of the time it is the women, the girls, who speak more than the boys” because “they feel the comfort of actually being outside the confines of a power relationship” (ibid.). His feminist vision here is aligned with that of the founder/director of the International Images of Women Film Festival in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose inspiration for initiating this festival was not only to screen films by women from around the world, but also to empower the local women who come to the screenings to decide which aspects of their local culture they wish to maintain, and which they wish to transform. This internal impetus towards change is desperately needed in African contexts ambushed by foreign development and aid organizations, which may be out of touch with local cultures and mostly concerned with promoting their own work (see Dovey, McNamara and Olivieri 2013). Although in support of festivals working as “social advocacy” projects, Mhando acknowledges the problems with relying on development funding. He laments the difficult financial position in which ZIFF currently finds itself, with its total budget down from $400,000 (in 2004–2005) to $200,000 (in 2014). The main issue, he


says, is with the short-term nature of funding from European and North American donors: In 2009 the last of the 3 key donors HIVOS ended its 6 year funding term. Just before that in 2008 the Prince Claus Fund had ended its funding to ZIFF, while in 2007 the Ford Foundation had ended its 10-year support of the organization. . . . An argument has been made that such a policy of propping an organization by so much and then dropping it like a hot potato is an example of bad donor leadership. . . . No donors are ever criticized, because beggars seem to have no rights especially when you can tar an organization with that black brush of corruption, irresponsibility or poor management practice. (2013: 1)

Mhando’s critique of the erratic nature of development aid funding here touches on a much larger problem concerning the majority of film festivals in the world, not just those in Africa: their commercial unsustainability. Except for a handful of “A-list” film festivals, which fund themselves through a mixture of public money, corporate sponsorship, and accreditation/box office returns, most film festivals in the world need to be thoroughly subsidized to survive. Nashen Moodley, formerly the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) manager and currently the director of the Sydney Film Festival (SFF), notes that it was a major new professional challenge to switch from working on a festival (DIFF) where “box office income made up a very tiny proportion of the budget” to a festival (the SFF) “where box

Figure 6.3 The former Cine Afrique in Stone Town, Zanzibar, now used as office space


office income is integral to the survival of the film festival, which of course adds a lot more pressure” (pers. comm.). There is a different kind of pressure, however, for those organizers of film festivals in Africa where donors have to be constantly courted and placated. There has recently been an interesting shift in ZIFF’s funding situation, however, that is indicative of the direction in which many global, “international” film festivals seem to be moving. ZIFF’s traditional European and North American development aid funding has been replaced by major sponsorship from Zuku, an Africa-based satellite television station with more than 85 channels. With its $100,000 a year donation to the festival (from 2012–2021), Zuku has essentially secured the future and stability of ZIFF. At the same time, however, given the current dire climate of cinema-going in Tanzania, one might cynically argue that Zuku is simply prolonging the demise of ZIFF, and live cinema-going, while using the festival to publicize its own rise to prominence. Curating “Indigeneity” at “International” Film Festivals in Africa It is critics’ exasperation with the disjunct between film festivals and the lack of regular cinema-going on the continent that has hardened into a strand of critique of international festivals in Africa based on two perceptions: their failure to foreground and celebrate African (as opposed to international) creativity; and their failure to leave lasting local legacies. This is the position adopted by many contributors to a recent collection on African theatre festivals (Gibbs 2012), in which Ahmed Yerima asks of festivals: “They come, they go. What do they leave behind?” (quoted in Gibbs 2012b: xiii). Many critics lament what they see as the squandering of public funds on these events, which they feel are designed more to publicize the work of governments, development organizations, embassies, and other institutions than to contribute to the social, cultural, and creative lives of ordinary people in Africa (Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri 2013). I have encountered this kind of critique at festivals I have attended across the African continent, where my fieldwork has shown that local participants are particularly attuned to the identities of the people founding, funding, and running the festivals. As Goerg points out in relation to festivals more generally in Africa: “The varied identity of the conceptualizers and organizers occupies a determining role in the playing out and the perception of the festival” (1999a: 7).44 Indeed, at the Amakula Kampala International Film Festival (AKIFF) of Uganda, which ran from 2004 to 2012, it seems that audiences’ concern that the festival was not sufficiently engaged with local, Ugandan content stemmed from their perception that it was an imported event because it was initiated and run by foreigners, the American filmmaker Lee Ellickson and the Dutch art historian Alice Smits.45 The views expressed by Ugandan participants at the festival chime with analysis of colonial-era festivals in Africa, where a “fundamental element” of the festival was the “cleavage between organizers and participants, between officials and the masses” (Goerg 1999a: 8–9, my emphasis).


At a seminar I ran at the 2010 AKIFF to find out what Ugandans thought of the festival, one local participant, an arts journalist, said: The first time the film festival came around, I felt compelled to tell people that an international film festival is coming to town. [. . .] It was exciting, to me, that a festival was coming to town. . . . You get introduced to things like new Indian cinema, that sort of thing. But then over the years, I’ve become worried about the whole thing—the thing about importing a festival—a cinema festival here, in much the same way that Doha has imported Tribeca film festival, you know and turned Doha into an extension of another international film festival that has grown elsewhere. So for me the challenge now would be a stronger representation of indigenous film form, because, well fine, the Uganda movie focus looks more to me like tokenism. I don’t think our local filmmakers—the pillars of local filmmaking—are well represented at the festival.

This critique of film festivals that are “imported” into new places is relevant to several recent (ad)ventures on the continent. For example, in February 2010, the Tarifa African Film Festival (FCAT) of Spain was hired by AECID (a governmental body inscribed within the Spanish Foreign Affairs Ministry) and Casa África (an organization created by the Spanish government in 2006 to develop stronger relationships between Spain and African countries) to participate in the organization of the first African Film Festival of Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanishspeaking sub-Saharan African country. The Festival was held in 2010 and 2011, as part of the annual activities of the two AECID cultural centers of Malabo and Bata, the two main cities of Equatorial Guinea. Filmmakers from across Africa who attended the festival were dismayed, however, by the lack of interest in cinema shown by the local people, which seemed to prove that one cannot simply import a form of foreign culture and expect it to be instantly popular.46 Another participant at my AKIFF seminar, a filmmaker, offered similar critique to that provided by the arts journalist when he said: Seven years of Amakula, honestly. At first, it was important for them to show all these foreign films and for me to see how these films are made, but seven years down the road, I’d rather people like film funders, distributors—you know, people who are going to offer me distribution, are coming to the festival.

A strong consensus emerged through these local participant responses within which they felt the organizers of AKIFF were alienated from the local culture and had “imported” an “international” film festival. While the participants expressed a certain degree of interest in international film culture, they made it clear that their primary interest was the development of the local, Ugandan film industry. This response can be explained in part through the fact that the majority of AKIFF’s participants were aspiring young filmmakers.47 The AKIFF organizers, who periodically dropped into the seminar I was running, argued that they did support Ugandan filmmaking and that the reason they could not show more Ugandan films was that the “quality” of these films was not good enough. AKIFF programs reveal that Ugandan filmmakers were indeed well


represented throughout the nine editions of the festival.48 In fact, Smits and Ellickson have been among the loudest proponents for the recognition of the creativity of Ugandan “VJs” or video jockeys, who creatively translate foreign films into Luganda for local video hall audiences (either live, or through dubbing). Smits has even made a documentary film about the VJs, called The Video Crusades: Tugenda Mumaso!, and in the impressively large 2008 AKIFF catalogue, Ellickson and Smits outline the festival’s extensive work with VJs as follows: Since its inception in 2004 Amakula Kampala has worked together with video hall owners and VJs to present each year a selection of the festival films translated into Luganda in the video halls. While we began to work with 10 video halls we now have expanded the festival to include over 30 video halls in the 5 departments of Kampala, rotating every year to different halls. . . . Over the years VJs have become very popular with the audiences of the local video halls, and some of them are real stars. Competition among VJs is fierce. To make this competition more visible Amakula Kampala started in 2005 organizing the VJ Slam which has become a popular event in the festival. The final is held during the opening of Amakula in the Video Halls in an outdoor space, this year Kamwokya Market. (p. 301)

It seems, then, that the main issue that emerged at AKIFF was related not so much to issues around the festival’s support for local filmmakers, but rather around the identity politics of who was controlling AKIFF. My fieldwork revealed that Ugandans wanted to claim the festival for themselves; they were deeply invested in the question of the future of the festival, and there was much behind-the-scenes talk about how they could appropriate the festival for their own ends, or start their own festival. As it stands, the future of AKIFF hangs in the balance; according to a post on the Ugandan arts blog kampala1ne (run by journalist Moses Serugo), this is because Ellickson and Smits have refused to hand over the festival to Ugandan leadership.49 Incorporating Audiences in Film Curatorial Practices in Africa Two principles of curation have emerged from my discussions and interviews with many “international” film festival directors and curators based on the African continent: the need to challenge local audiences with new ways of looking at and thinking about the world given the dearth of alternative audiovisual content in cinemas and on television, as well as the still-irregular access to the Internet; but also a need to meet the audience halfway when it comes to curating films, thereby encouraging a healthy (dis)sensus communis. Two contemporary “international” film festivals on the continent are pointedly attempting to foster (dis)sensus communis within their curatorial practices: the Rwanda Film Festival (RFF), founded by Rwandan filmmaker Eric Kabera in 2005; and the Dockanema Film Festival (DFF) in Mozambique, a documentary film festival founded by Mozambican filmmaker Pedro Pimenta in 2006. The current director of RFF, Congolese-Rwandan Romeo Umulisa, sees the future success of the festival as dependent on two things: “taking it to the next level, making it


become not only a hub for African films but for international films”; and the incorporation of local, Rwandan audience perspectives in the conceptualization of the festival’s shape and meaning. He emphasizes that RFF needs to establish “strong credibility” both in the eyes of international organizations and of locals, but also recognizes that meeting both of these criteria is not always an easy task. Umulisa laments the fact that, given the dearth of a history of cinema-going in Rwanda (see Cieplak 2010), Rwandan audiences have “been spoiled by action films, Hollywood-type, hero-type [films]” watched on television. He argues, however, that “before [Rwandans] can open to learning about new things, I need to satisfy them their way.” He thus includes within his programming of RFF the two types of films that the majority of Rwandans most enjoy: Hollywood films and Rwandan films. “I don’t want to take that away from them,” he says, “but I also want to bring them something new,” in the form of less-accessible international content that will allow the filmmakers in the audience in particular to “see all sorts of things so that they can explore more choices, even go beyond the traditional way of making films, and express their voice to the highest point” (pers. comm.). Even when it comes to the selection of Hollywood, Rwandan, and international films, however, Umulisa refuses to engage in exclusive programming and instead attempts to incorporate the views of locals. He spends a great deal of time discussing films with people in Kigali to gather a sense of their tastes and interests, and at the 2013 RFF he pioneered a feedback form so that “the audience themselves can also actually give their opinion.” He uses these forms not to give an award, “but to learn more and to know what I need to do better in the coming edition.”50 Umulisa also attempts to screen every single Rwandan film submitted to the festival—the officially accepted ones within the main festival program, and the others in cafés and bars—to give exposure to a broader group of local filmmakers. He says: [I]f somebody didn’t have a chance to be selected, or be either in the official selection or competition, I still want them to feel that it was worth their time to take the five minutes to fill in the online form and send the film to [the festival].

Umulisa thus has a broad understanding of what constitutes “quality” cinema, and he encourages local audiences and filmmakers to help him define this. He also has ambitions to incorporate the Rwandan diaspora—the “huge number of international Rwandans born outside of Rwanda coming back now but who have been in touch with other cultures”—into the future of RFF and into the generation of new, more complex Rwandan identities and “improved” films. In fact, his own inspiration for becoming involved in the festival was his insider-outsider status, as a Congolese-Rwandan who has also spent significant periods of time in Germany. While he does not want the memory of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to dominate the festival, he acknowledges at the same time that—having not been in Rwanda in 1994—he feels a certain sense of “responsibility” towards the country, given its history, and that he will be pleased if the festival can help with reconciling Rwandans with one another after their horrific past (pers. comm.).51 Pedro Pimenta, founder, director, and curator of the Dockanema Film Festival (DFF) in Mozambique, conceives of his festival quite similarly to the way that


Umulisa imagines RFF. Pimenta’s conceptualization of DFF is fully grounded in the context in which he is from and in which he is working—a poverty-stricken context in which there are only three cinema screens for a population of 25 million people, and where local television and Internet access is extremely limited. This means, Pimenta says, that “in Maputo you very, very rarely find something of interest, intellectual interest” (pers. comm.). He thus describes DFF as one of the rare moments [audiences] are able to engage in a full week of exposition of issues that they won’t see for the rest of the year anywhere, treated in a very particular way, with a strong point of view from the filmmakers . . . with many of the filmmakers being there. (ibid., my emphasis)

But simply because DFF is a rare moment does not mean that it is severed from all forms of popular culture in Mozambique. Indeed, one of the great attractions of the festival, Pimenta says, is that it allows people to engage in one of their favorite pastimes—talking. The Q&A sessions after screenings are “very popular because people love talking about things, talking, talking, talking.” Pimenta’s main guiding light with his curatorial practice, then, is selecting films with themes that he believes will resonate with his audiences but also provoke them into discussion. He always chooses controversial opening night films because this “establishes a tone for the rest of the festival.” Where many film festivals do not have a discussion on the opening night but rather a party, Pimenta insists on both (ibid.). In contrast to Umulisa’s open programming approach, Pimenta does acknowledge that he is “often called a dictator” because he insists on controlling the programming, even though he may draw on the advice of colleagues and friends. But it is a source of pride to him that he is “able to defend” and “to explain . . . every single film of the eighty I’ve been screening on an annual basis.” His selection of films ranges from “auteur” documentary to television documentary to documentary video art. The choice to make the festival a documentary one was not linked to any pedagogical impulse, but rather to recognize the history of filmmaking in Mozambique, where documentary became the film form of choice by Samora Machel with his “Kuxa Kanema” project, with which Pimenta was involved.52 While Pimenta feels that it is very important that he show films from all over the world, he also says: “I make a point of showing every single film made in Mozambique, and everything I know of made about Mozambique from other countries. . . . People will make a priority to see films dealing with Mozambique, whether they are Mozambicans or not.” The popularity of Mozambican films at DFF mirrors the popularity of Rwandan films at RFF, showing that people in local contexts enjoy seeing themselves and their stories on the screen. There are, in fact, so many Lusophone films produced each year in the world that Pimenta notes that he “could easily do a Portuguese-speaking documentary film festival.” But he clearly states that he does not want it to be “reduced” to that, and ensures that at least half of his program (40 films) is “international.” He speaks with equal excitement about Mozambican-focused films such as Guerilla Grannies and international films that have deeply moved him and Mozambican audiences, such as the Chilean film Nostalgia de la luz, in which Patricio Guzman places into


counterpoint the work of scientists at an astronomical base and the searching of old ladies for the bones of their loved ones, the disappeared. In support of his international programming and international vision in general, Pimenta says: “[Africans] have to connect. And quickly. Get out of your own ghetto. There’s a world outside. Take your place in the world. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses in this world around us. That’s the only way I think” (pers. comm.). While the international aspirations and vision of director-curators such as Umulisa and Pimenta are inspiring, French-Burkinabé journalist Claire Diao points to the fact that, in practice, many “international” film festivals on the African continent simply do not have the resources to do what “international” film festivals do elsewhere. Diao has spent several years traveling the festival circuit, looking at what kinds of cultures are being initiated through the new wave of festivals on the African continent.53 From her attendance at film festivals in Benin, Algeria, Morocco, Rwanda, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Reunion, and South Africa, she notes that the way many festivals use the word “international” is expedient rather than accurate. Since these festivals do not have anything close to the budgets of “A-list” international film festivals, by calling themselves “international” they create expectations that cannot be fulfilled. She argues: The fact is they cannot invite a lot of filmmakers and producers from abroad, so sometimes they are stuck in a kind of international programming which has . . . not that much artistic direction. And so I think the most interesting festivals I’ve seen [in Africa] are those that focus on their own country’s local production and try to build something. I think of Madagascar, and thanks to their festival, there is a new wave of filmmakers in the country. They started with 10 filmmakers, and now there are around 300. (pers. comm.)

Diao is referring to the Rencontres du Film Court Madagascar, a short film festival founded in 2006, and supported by the International Organization of Francophonie. Diao says that she sees “a real will” on the part of Africans to develop “their own stories, their own actors, local shooting” (ibid.). Russell Southwood, CEO of Balancing Act,54 confirms Diao’s point that there is a coexistence within many African countries of a desire for local, homegrown film narratives and a desire for improvement in the technical quality of films. At a panel on film festivals at the 2013 Cordoba African Film Festival in Spain, Southwood referred to a recent market research survey conducted in Nigeria in which 17 percent of people surveyed wanted improvements in acting in Nollywood films, 19 percent wanted production-quality improvements, and 48 percent wanted improvement in the storylines. Diao’s critique of certain “international” film festivals in Africa lacking “much artistic direction” is relevant, for example, to the now-defunct Kenya International Film Festival (KIFF) (which ran from 2006 to 2012), and highlights why it is important that festival organizers and curators alike take the authorial, creative work of running and shaping a festival seriously. It became clear through my fieldwork at the 2010 KIFF that the programming had been a haphazard affair, with many of the films screened at the festival not even vetted by a curator or committee


beforehand. The audience-centered perspective—that spectators will bring their own interpretations to bear on any film—cannot be used as a justification for careless curatorial practices. The most creative curators, in my view, are constantly thinking about their audiences’ possible desires and needs, whether through “training their imaginations to go visiting,” or through actual conversations with a broad range of people. Rather than adopt a didactic tone towards audiences, these curators tell stories, help audiences to make connections, and frame the selected films in such a way that audiences understand the broader contexts and constellations of the program. However, as Mhando, Umulisa, and Pimenta all suggest, film curators in certain contexts—particularly those where a certain kind of cinema-going is not a regular pastime—also need to incorporate a sense of audiences’ popular preferences as a way of attracting their participation. Pimenta ultimately defines Dockanema as a “space of freedom” for African audiences. He says: So many times, I say okay, I’ve done it, it’s enough, I’m not doing it again. And then people start, on the street, they ask me, is [the festival] going to happen, please make it happen, so you sense it is something they cherish. . . . And during the festival they seem to feel that there is a platform there that allows them . . . like a catharsis, a space of freedom. . . . Whoever wants to come in knows there’s no ruling party . . . it’s about freedom, you are entitled to say whatever you want to, debate. And you see people going [breathes deeply] in the debate. (pers. comm.)

The intense incorporation of considerations of actual audiences into curatorial approaches is still relatively rare in a global film festival context dominated by IFFR founder Hubert Bals’s motto of finding audiences for films, rather than finding films for audiences (De Valck 2007: 188). Clearly many curators working on the African continent find the latter an important part of their work, however, and a way of making African audiences feel engaged with the creation of the festivals themselves. Despite the difficulties of sustaining these ventures due to the lack of resources, they remain rich with possibilities for the reinvention of film festival form and curatorial practices precisely because they are not overshadowed, as are the “A-list” film festivals, with expectations of what a film festival should be. One needs to note, however, that the key to the popularity of festivals such as Dockanema is the relative independence and informal working conditions of their director-curators. Pimenta, who says he has never received a “cent” of help from the Mozambican government, remarks: “If I was a more sell-able person I would probably get more support” (pers. comm.). He refuses to compromise his independence over DFF by accepting state funding, allowing government officials to influence everything from the film program to the speeches on opening night. On the other end of the spectrum in Africa, one finds whole swathes of festivals engineered by governments. Several Moroccan commentators have argued, for example, that their government’s creation of a flurry of festivals seems suspiciously less about the arts and more about the state’s desire to brand itself and the country, and thereby quell valid critique of its oppressive behavior towards its own citizens (Belghazi 2006, Boum 2012, Bouhmouch 2013). These critics adopt an identical position on what they call


the “festivalization of arts and culture” in Morocco since 1956, when the country gained its independence from France. Today the Moroccan Ministry of Information and the National Tourist Office advertise 150 cultural festivals and moussems (traditional fairs honoring a saint) (Boum 2012: 22). This represents an elaborate attempt at simultaneously depoliticizing and aestheticizing cultural identity: The Arab-identified state would recognize difference, but only in non-political terms: Berbers, for instance, were seen not as people with historical grievances against the state, but as people with striking dance steps, attractive clothes and jewelry, and beautiful casbahs. (ibid.: 23)

In this context, festivalization has been “a key method of managing dissent, blunting the force of social movements and sanding the political edges off of new forms of cultural expression—all while polishing an image of Morocco as liberal and fun-loving for outside consumption” (ibid.: 25). Belghazi sees the hundreds of festivals in Morocco as “momentary happenings in the lives of cities” and draws on Bella Dicks’s (2003) and David Harvey’s (1989) arguments about the neutralization of political resistance through bourgeois control of urban, cultural spectacles and “signature ephemera” to critique the “carnival mask” that “cushions the negative effects of economic policies” and behind which “hides social inequality” (2006: 100). This critique equips us with important tools for making distinctions between different festivals: the degree to which one institution or funder of the festival (a state government, or otherwise) exploits a festival (or, indeed, many festivals) to promote and brand itself; the degree of independence of the festival directors/ curators; and the degree to which a festival is open or closed to the public. In the next chapter, drawing again on my fieldwork at festivals in Africa, I take a closer look at some moments from contemporary film festivals on the African continent to assess their respective relationships to, and definitions of, their publics, the forms of (dis)sensus communis that have arisen at and around them, and how they negotiate an “international” focus with the demands of their immediate, material, local contexts.

7

Festive Excitement and (Dis)sensus Communis in Action at Two Film Festivals in Africa

A

focus on the “international” dimensions of film festivals in Africa may lead analysts to overlook the way their intensely localized, domesticated elements do not necessarily correspond neatly to conventional definitions of film festivals, as “glittering showcases for films and people” and “vital nodes for global film industries” that “attract widespread global attention” (Wong 2011: 1). A group of very original film festivals on the African continent is contributing to disruption of the standard definition of a “film festival” that seems to be settling in all too easily within the scholarship. For all the contradictions that these festivals may exhibit (see Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri 2013), they have rich potential to redefine local and international curatorial practices and discourses, as well as our understandings of the meanings of films. At the same time, any audience-centered approach to a festival drawing on ethnographic methods will reveal the degree to which all film festivals are potentially unique through the spontaneity through which (dis)sensus communis may be conjured at them, thereby revealing a very different image of the festival from the one that may be marketed to the world. I want to start with just such an example, drawn from my fieldwork at the 2013 Durban International Film Festival (DIFF), that shows the extent to which festival and film meanings are not stable, but constantly redefined by specific audiences. I will then move on to an analysis of the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival, searching for signs of dissent amidst the overwhelming “consensus” produced through this unusual festival—the only annual film festival in the world that takes place in a refugee camp. Of Bad Report: The Consequences of a Film’s Banning The wind howls along the Durban beachfront, as though it were the setting of a horror movie rather than a surfer’s paradise. It is so strong I can lean against it without falling over. As I push my way along the promenade towards the Suncoast shopping mall, the site of the opening of the 34th Durban International Film


Festival (DIFF), I think “Surely this is some kind of terrible omen.” People in the South African film industry are already on edge. This year, 2013, the festival is director-less, and the person in charge—Festival Manager Peter Machen—was hired only three months before the event’s scheduled run, from July 18 to 28.1 It is now July 18 and the opening of the festival is upon us, whether the organizers are ready or not. Guests are ushered into one of two screens at the flamingopink Suncoast cinemas housed within the glaringly bright Suncoast Mall, packed with noisy restaurants and—opposite the cinemas—a casino.2 There are emotional reunions in the cinema aisles among regulars of the African film world— filmmakers, festival organizers, and curators—which send popcorn and Coca-Cola flying into the air. Many of us have actually seen each other quite recently, at FESPACO in February/March, Cannes in May, or ZIFF just the week previously. What Egyptian filmmaker Jihan el-Tahri calls the “small family of African film” has been reunited (pers. comm.). The apartheid past and the festival’s role in challenging it is invoked by Peter Machen in his welcome speech. He recalls first coming to the festival as an audience member, 25 years previously, and how it made the world a much larger place. He reminds guests that apartheid was much more than a system of racial oppression, that it was a near-complete system of social control and categorization, stunting people’s imaginations. The implication, by comparison, is the discontinuity between past and present, that the festival is now fully situated within a postapartheid moment, one of openness and freedom. It seems symbolic rather than coincidental, then, that the 34th DIFF is opening on Nelson Mandela’s 95th birthday. South African actress and AIDS activist Hlubi Mboya (the MC) animatedly encourages the audience to get to its feet and sing happy birthday to Madiba (Mandela’s clan name, and a sign of respect), whose photograph is beamed up on the screen. Speeches throughout the evening are consistently punctuated with Mandela quotes which, retrospectively, seems both appropriate and prescient, given that this was to be the last DIFF before Mandela’s passing on December 5, 2013. Eventually it is time for the screening of the opening-night film, South African director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka’s Of Good Report. Before the lights are dimmed, Qubeka speaks passionately about his relationship with DIFF, which has been showing his work since 2008, saying that he has “grown up” in the festival and even met his wife here. The audience applauds and Qubeka leaves the stage. The cinema darkens. An inter-title appears on the screen, reading: This film has been refused classification by the Film and Publication Board, in terms of the Film and Publications Act 1996. Unfortunately we may not legally screen the film “Of Good Report” as to do so would constitute a criminal offence.

There are gasps and outbursts of nervous laughter from those of us in the audience. “Is this a joke?” we start asking each other. “Or is this how the film begins?” We watch in shock as Peter Machen returns to the stage, along with Qubeka. They hug each other emotionally. Machen is crying. At first it seems as though Qubeka is also crying, but then we realize that his cheeks look shiny not from tears but because he has sticky-taped his mouth shut.

Festive Excitement and (Dis)sensus Communis in Action 161

As the filmmakers and actors gather on the stage, weeping and hugging one another in solidarity, the letter DIFF received from the Film and Publications Board (the national body that classifies films, video games, and publications) is read aloud by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Professor Cheryl Potgieter, who has—since 2013—called DIFF her “special project.” I quote from the letter at length since it is vital to understanding what unraveled throughout the rest of the night and the week of the festival: Your application for exemption of films for the Durban International Film Festival was received on 10th July 2013 by the Board and referred to a classification committee on the 15th July [I later find out that the Festival was contacted at the last minute—in early July—by the Board, whose concerns had been raised by the synopses of some of the films when the official festival program was published online]. After having read the synopses, seven of the films were recommended for classification and the films were referred to the classification committee on the 16th July 2013 and below was the decision relating to the title Of Good Report. According to the classification committee, at 28 minutes 16 seconds, the classification process was stopped based on the fact that the film contained child pornography. According to the Film and Publications regulation 16.1, if the classification committee discovers child pornography during any classification process of a film, game or publication, the classification process shall be stopped. The committee therefore unanimously agreed that this was child pornography and refused classification based on the following scene . . . [when] Nolitha is depicted for the first time in a school uniform in Parker’s grade 9 class. In the South African school system, grade 9 includes children aged 14–16 years therefore giving further evidence that Nolitha is under 18 years of age. . . . [I]t is clearly depicted that a minor has engaged in sexual conduct with an older male and has participated during the sexual conduct, therefore 1 and 2 of the definitions of child porn in paragraph 4 [of the Film and Publications Act of 1996] applies to this film. This movie has therefore been refused classification and all copies must be either surrendered to the police or destroyed. In terms of the Film and Publications Act of 1996, the production and distribution of child pornography are criminal offenses.3

It is a strange experience to listen to this letter without having seen the film. People are whispering to one another: “But is there pornography in the film or not?” Images of what the film might contain start swirling in my imagination, somewhat contradicting IFFR founder Hubert Bals’s saying that: “A film that is not screened is dead” (quoted in De Valck 2012a: 25). To the contrary, the film is sprouting into macabre life. After Potgieter finishes reading the FPB’s letter, we are assured that the actress, Petronella Tshuma, who plays the role of Nolitha4 in this fictional film, is 23 years of age. It is now clear to everyone in the audience that the identified scene in the film cannot constitute child pornography in any technical sense. What has been identified as such by the FPB is a fictional story about a consensual sexual relationship that develops between a male teacher and his female school student, acted by people over the age of 18. At this realization, the mood in the cinema shifts from outrage to incredulity. One can feel a strong sensus communis developing in response to the FPB’s decision. Does the FPB really believe that a


fictional tale with actors over 18 years of age can be generically classified as child pornography? As South African film scholar Keyan Tomaselli pointed out at a public meeting convened later in the week by film industry groups to discuss the issue,5 the FPB committee that banned the film was not to blame, but rather the Film and Publications Act of 1996, the guidelines by which all censors have to abide. The problem, he insisted, was of a legal, not political nature, and an unpublished position paper he distributed at the meeting stated that: “The issue goes to the core of our democracy and how legislation is formulated, to serve what policy, which constituencies, for what reason and with what effect” (Tomaselli 2013: 6, my emphasis). The problem with the Act, as Tomaselli noted, is that it criminalizes fictional representations of sexual activity involving people under the age of 18, even though the legal age of consent in South Africa is 16. Thus, under current South African law, it is legal for a 17-year-old to have a consensual sexual relationship with a 30-year-old in real life, but a fictional representation of the same relationship on film is illegal! (ibid.: 5) As DIFF manager Peter Machen argued at a different, public meeting later during the festival, this time with members of the FPB,6 “the real pornography in [South African] society is poverty and inequality,” thereby drawing attention to the paradoxical relationship between reality and fiction in South African law. The Film and Publications Act of 1996 enables the government to police a serious societal issue—older male sexual exploitation of much younger women— by scapegoating audiovisual, fictional representations of it, rather than dealing with the behavior itself. The FPB, however, did not seem to realize the irony of its action—that by censoring fictional representations of a real social issue, via the 1996 Act, it was engaging in a double silencing of it. Instead, it remained wedded to a belief in the unmitigated mimetic impact of audiovisual representations on audiences, a legacy of colonial and apartheid anxiety about African audiences. The logic behind the 1996 Film and Publications Act amounts to this: “If South Africans see this film about a consensual sexual relationship between a schoolgirl and her teacher, they will be encouraged to mimic it.” It would have been useful for the 2013 DIFF opening night audience to have been able to engage in a discussion about the history of the FPB, the Film and Publications Act of 1996 and its 2009 amendments, and current censorship practices in South Africa (such as the introduction of the Protection of State Information Act in 2012) to contextualize the banning of Of Good Report. Such a discussion would have noted that the FPB’s decision was not unusual, but in fact linked to a long history across the African continent of the infantilization and moral supervision of a homogenously constructed “African audience” by colonial powers, a history that I describe in Chapter 4. This history reveals that representations of violence and sexuality were the particular targets of such laissez-faire and more formal colonial censorship practices, and that—in many cases—these principles of censorship were carried across into the postcolonial era. Such a discussion would also have emphasized the continuity between apartheid censorship and the banning of Of Good Report. For, as Tomaselli pointed out at the industry meeting, the case bore remarkable parallels with the banning of the Afrikaans movie Debbie in 1965 on account of its representing a young, unmarried Afrikaans girl becoming


pregnant, something that horrified the censors and that they felt would not happen in real life (Tomaselli 1988: 124–5, 2013: 8). Along with policing African audiences, what lurked beneath the FPB’s decision on Of Good Report was an anxiety about the representation of “devious” sexuality by Africans. As Machen pointed out at the public meeting with the FPB during DIFF, the FPB censored Of Good Report while allowing the screening of non-African films with equally explicit and confrontational sexual content. Perhaps, he suggested, what had implicitly determined the decision on Of Good Report was a policing of African sexuality and its representation on screen, something that also has a long history across diverse African contexts, both in the colonial and postcolonial eras (see Tcheuyap 2011: 178–205). An explanation from Qubeka about his motivations and vision when making the film also would have been useful to the 2013 DIFF opening night audience. Instead, he sticky-taped his mouth shut in what amounted to a sensational form of “protest.” An explanation would have helped the audience, the majority of whom had, of course, not seen the film, to consider the director’s position not on “child pornography” (which the film was clearly not), but on “pornography,” which the OED defines as “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” Hearing the director’s views would also have helped the audience to start assessing whether he intended to offer critique of the teacher’s abuse of his professional role, or was drawing on formal cinematic techniques to attempt to make the viewer take pleasure in the sexual manipulation of the young female character. While the inclusion of pornography or formal techniques to make the viewer enjoy the exploitation of the young girl would not have merited censorship, the public discussion of them would have been a productive way for the audience—in the absence of having seen the film—to begin to think about its position on such complex questions. Instead, the first person to speak after Potgieter left the stage was Dr. Lwanzi Manzi, who introduced herself first, as Qubeka’s wife; second, as one of the executive producers of the film; and third, as a medical doctor currently working in the Emergency Unit at Somerset Hospital in Greenpoint, Cape Town. Invoking the subject matter of the film, rather than the way the director had stylistically dealt with that subject matter, she said: The subject matter that has been covered in this film is something that I see every single day. If we are going to be censored then I suggest that the Ministers of Education, that our President, that all people that are involved in the schooling system, that all of the people who are involved in the social welfare of our youth also be banned and be censored. [People applaud.] Just because they don’t want to see it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I see it happening every single day. You can have your 16 Days of Activism, you can have your Day of HIV/AIDS on the 1st December, you can have your Women’s Day, you can have your Youth Day. But these things are happening every single day. When you go home after your 16 Days of Activism, I am there at half-past twelve in the evening in the Casualty Unit while a 14-year-old is busy having a miscarriage and bleeding to death. When your 1st December is over, and you’ve had your expensive conference, and you’ve eaten and you’ve drank, and

164 Curating Africa in the Age of Film Festivals everybody’s talking about how HIV/AIDS [words drowned out by applause], I am there at four o’ clock in the morning with a 13-year-old who has somehow managed to get themselves to hospital so they can have an abortion. . . . We shall not not talk about it. . . . And you will see it. And we will engage in this conversation whether you like it or not.

Manzi tells us that she is speaking on behalf of Qubeka, who will not be talking this evening. Indeed, even during the after-party, Qubeka keeps his mouth stickytaped shut. This substitution of wife for husband, woman for man, and doctoras-witness for filmmaker-as-artist was a fascinating move, particularly when one considers the role Qubeka has set for himself within the South African film industry, and the ways in which his work has been recognized by film industry experts. For while Qubeka’s films have been praised for their commentary on the pressing post-apartheid issues to which Manzi referred in her address—such as corruption, HIV/AIDS, violence against women and children, and poverty—he has been marked apart from certain other South African filmmakers who deal with similar topics because of his stylistic innovativeness. On announcing and justifying his choice of Of Good Report as the opening night film for DIFF 2013, Machen said: “Of Good Report does so much more than simply telling a South African story—the film redefines the local filmmaking landscape and extends the language of African filmmaking while acknowledging the rich history of global cinema.”7 In the same announcement, Qubeka describes the film as “a passionate homage to classic film noir” and as “a serial killer origins story.” Many reviews of the film point to its macabre humor. Also revelatory in terms of Qubeka’s relationship to filmmaking is the following statement he made to Variety magazine: “I intend to bring anarchy, mayhem, and dissent to an industry [the South African film industry] I feel is a sleeping giant. I want to tear the whole rule book to shreds and say to younger filmmakers, ‘Let your soul pilot your endeavors’” (quoted in Stedman 2013). When asked what linked the five films Qubeka had selected for a new program strand at DIFF 2013 called “The Films that Made Me,” he said that, although the films are extremely different, the thread amongst them all is that their directors were “mavericks” (ibid.). Qubeka was speaking here as an auteur, as someone with a singular, rebellious vision of what he thinks cinema should be, not as a political activist making a film about gender rights in the new South Africa, as Manzi suggested. The emphasis on the importance of innovation and experimentation in filmmaking, and of the political right to freedom of expression and imagination, was eclipsed the moment Manzi took the floor and imparted her testimony to the opening night audience of what was happening in actuality in South Africa. She spoke in moving and emotional terms about her own work with young female victims of abuse; she did not once refer to her husband as a creative and inventive filmmaker, pushing the boundaries of stylistic and intellectual engagement. She focused only on the bravery of his topical interventions into what is happening in contemporary South African society. In this way, the film started to change form, without it even having been seen by the audience. It started to transform from what Qubeka had previously envisioned as “Little Red Riding Hood, told


from the wolf ’s perspective,”8 to the “voice” and champion of the abused young women of South Africa. Manzi’s speech served to frame the film—for whenever we would have a chance to watch it—not as a work of art or entertainment, but a slice of harsh South African reality, as a responsive and responsible piece of documentation. In this sense, Manzi tacitly situated the film within a tradition of human rights filmmaking, where what is deemed important is “information and testimony rather than art and entertainment” (Blazevic, quoted in Torchin 2012: 1). The human rights or activist film, according to Leshu Torchin, “functions as a truthful narration of a situation, presented with the intention of bringing about beneficial change” (2012: 2, my emphasis). Manzi’s speech set the tone for the discussion of the film throughout the rest of the festival, too. I constantly found myself in discussions with people who live in Durban about the extent of the problem of sexual manipulation of young girls by older men in South Africa. The phenomenon of the kwapenny (the Zulu term for “sugar daddy”), where older men groom young women for sex in exchange for money and gifts, is—many people told me—pervasive and largely unpoliced. I am not denying that this is a vital topic of conversation and that it was a positive social and political advancement that the controversy around the film brought it to the foreground. However, the more specific issue that Of Good Report appeared to be raising as a film was the right to freedom of expression, and the relationship between reality and the imagination, in South African law. Paradoxically, it was precisely in Manzi’s testimonial terms that the FPB’s decision was also articulated, referring as it did to elements from Of Good Report—a fiction film—as “evidence,” as though film has a transparent relationship to reality. Manzi’s testimonial account and the FPB’s decision both cohere with a long- standing instrumentalist imperative (encouraged by certain European film funding bodies) that has demanded that filmmakers from Africa represent “reality” rather than imagination in their films (see Bryce 2010). As Cameroonian director JeanPierre Bekolo has noted with irony, he has been approached no fewer than three times by funding agencies offering him the money to make a film about the Rwandan genocide. But why, he asks, would he necessarily want to make such a film?9 Such gestures are based on a kind of racism and exceptionalization of Africa that would see the continent as the manifestation only of a base and bodily materialism and not as composed, as every other continent in the world, of millions of diverse individuals with distinct imaginative approaches to their daily lives. When I finally had a chance to see Of Good Report, the word “evidence” danced in my mind, bizarrely incompatible with the emphatic dramatic techniques and stylizations that Qubeka uses in abundance precisely, it would seem, to distance the spectator from reading it through the genre of testimonial social realism. Notably, there is provision in the amended Film and Publications Act of 2009 for cultural productions and publications that include explicit sexuality and violence, but only if they fall within the following three groupings: (a) bona fide documentary, (b) are of “scientific, literary or artistic merit,” or (c) are “on a matter of public interest.”10 The sense of anxiety here about what is and is not real or true is palpable in the language. What is the difference, for example, between a “documentary” and a “bona fide documentary”? How can “scientific” merit be judged in the same category


as “artistic” merit? Who decides what constitutes a matter of “public interest”? The sensational banning of Qubeka’s film, and the sensational response to it on opening night, unfortunately precluded some of the more interesting conversations that might have surrounded the film at DIFF 2013 about its generic status (as film noir and thriller), its “artistic” merit, and its fictional representation of urgent social and public issues. Nevertheless, by the end of DIFF 2013, on account of the activism of the festival organizers, filmmakers, and participants—who held several public meetings over the course of the festival to formulate an appeal to the FPB’s decision—the FPB overturned its decision and unbanned the film, which as a result was able to be screened on closing night. At this moment, Of Good Report found itself reincorporated into the world of film, with Qubeka becoming the recipient of a new award created by DIFF—the award for Artistic Bravery. Soon after, the film commenced its journey around the world, to places where it would be appreciated for its artistic rather than political merits, for its cinematic intertexuality rather than its ambiguous fictional relationship to a pressing social issue in South Africa. Even in neighboring Namibia, the film was praised not for its social engagement but for its relationships to internationally renowned filmmakers and films. HansChristian Mahnke, the curator and organizer of AfricAvenir’s film series, which premiered the film in Namibia on January 25, 2014, said: I look forward to Windhoek audiences seeing this superb film, this provocative thriller, this adaption and processing of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 “Lolita”, in Quentin Tarantino style. One, because of its artistic craft. Two, because it puts cinema from Africa where it belongs: At centre stage! (press release)

And yet, paradoxically, the (dis)sensus communis that arose around the film in the location of its production, South Africa, no doubt contributed to its ready incorporation into the international film festival circuit afterwards, thereby consolidating its artistic merit not within South Africa, but outside. The film, after all, had had an unremarkable world premiere at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival in February before the controversy at DIFF 2013 arose in July. This controversy, when taken out of its immediate context, became a marketing tool for the film and for other festivals, converting a local sociopolitical issue into a product to be bandied around the global market. Of Good Report went on to be part of the prestigious “Discovery” section at TIFF 2013, part of the official program of the 2013 London Film Festival, as well as of the 2013 Africa International Film Festival of Calabar, Nigeria (where it won the Best Film award, despite causing controversy over nudity), and of the 2014 Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles. It was also the opening night film of Film Africa 2013 in London. As one film critic noted after the opening night of DIFF 2013, “Needless to say, everyone will watch the film as soon as it’s cleared” (2013).11 South African filmmaker Jean Meeran says: “I want to be banned too, really. . . . Yes, because that’s when you know you’re doing something of value” (quoted in Engel 2013). What is most interesting about Of Good Report is not how its banning contributed to the consecration of a new filmmaking star in Qubeka (although it


did do that, too), but rather how the film touched a nerve within the context in which it was made. Similarly, the banning of the film was a reminder that DIFF is also “doing something of value” within the South African context. One cannot simply chart the festival’s history as a smooth transition from an underground, anti-apartheid event in the 1980s into a glossy, international event today (see Chapter 6). The shock of many of the official speakers at the opening ceremony of DIFF 2013 was registered precisely through comparison between the present, post-apartheid moment and the oppressive, apartheid past. Potgieter, before reading the letter from the FPB, said: “I never thought that on the 18th July 2013 I would have to read a letter as follows.” And Firdoze Bulbulia, one of the producers of Of Good Report, said: “In 1980 I was detained during the dark old days of apartheid. I can’t believe in 2013, when we talk about a New South Africa, on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s birthday, that we are being censored.” For a brief moment, the (dis)sensus communis around Of Good Report brought to the surface issues that had previously remained latent within South African society: continuities between the apartheid past and the post-apartheid present; (mis)understandings about the relationship between reality and the worlds of fiction and the imagination; and clashing systems of epistemology and morality when it comes to the realm of (African) sexuality and its depiction on screen. While people will continue to debate whether the successful journey of Of Good Report beyond the controversy at DIFF 2013 was earned or not, there is no doubt that it raised, and continues to raise, vital questions that are also relevant to this study: to what extent the “public” nature of festivals has the potential to keep the dialectic of (dis)sensus communis alive, thereby challenging authoritative power; and to what extent the material, local aspects of “international” film festivals make them always accountable to their participants, and rooted in particular spaces where films cannot be aestheticized as they are when they depart this context. Exchanging Palmes d’Or for Golden Palms: Film Festivals as Co-Habitation I arrived in Madrid at around 11 p.m. the night before the journey and checked into a no-frills airport hotel. I was so nervous and excited that I couldn’t calm down sufficiently to sleep. I knew people who had taken the journey before, but no one who was going this year, 2013. I would be traveling with—as well as visiting— strangers. And I would be traveling to a part of the world—southern Algeria—that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK strongly advised staying away from, due to the threat posed by AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). As a result, to quell my parents’ fears, I had had to go digging in the more remote corners of the Internet for a form of travel insurance that covered ransom fees as part of its offerings. Anxious not to miss the chartered Air Algeria flight from Barajas Airport in Madrid, the next morning I arrived an hour earlier than the appointed meeting time at the designated gathering area (the organizers had not yet been able to confirm which check-in counter we would be allocated). To my great relief, I saw a man wearing a FiSahara Film Festival T-shirt, surrounded by what looked


like bags of film equipment. I went to introduce myself in my stilted Spanish. His name was Jorge, and he was the official cameraman for the festival. He had been to the festival several times, and spoke passionately about it. From that moment— the moment of meeting Jorge and discussing our mutual interest in the Western Sahara—the festival began for me. As more and more people—equally passionate about the Sahrawi cause—gathered around us, my excitement grew. What I was feeling was “festive excitement” created not through “violations” of a festival program (Witz 2003: 10), but rather through a sensation of rare, consolidated consensus. All 100 or so people gathered there—the majority Spanish, but also American, Korean-Brazilian, Israeli, Moroccan, Finnish, Peruvian, Zimbabwean, Japanese-American, South African, and Sahrawi—had a clear mutual goal: the liberation of occupied Western Sahara from Moroccan control. If, as Harry Triandis says, “There is a constant struggle between the collectivist and individualist elements within each human” (quoted in Rosenau 2003: 16), in this moment of gathering, collectivist purpose seemed to be triumphing over individualist desire. This is not to say that everyone was to experience the festival in identical terms, or that a range of other motivations and desires did not accompany its activist agenda. It is simply to note that if a festival is a kind of partly choreographed, partly improvised piece of live theatre, other emotions and responses were overwhelmingly suppressed here in a performance of transnational, activist solidarity. During the week of the festival in the Sahrawi refugee camp of Dakhla, in southern Algeria, I repeatedly experienced this solidarity, this consensus, through what I felt and observed, and what was expressed to me directly in interviews. Primed by Leslie Witz and the idea of (dis)sensus communis to seek moments of dissent and disruption in order to understand any festival, I kept encountering excessive consensus instead. For all people’s inevitably diverse, double-pendulum-like experiences of it, what seemed fundamentally to unite festival participants—both local and foreign—was the desire for a free Western Sahara. FiSahara is a festival that is unwaveringly focused on mobilizing an eclectic, international support base to realize local, domestic goals. I had wanted to attend FiSahara for many years, since first learning about the Sahrawi cause through a film screening of the documentary El Problema (2010) and a photography exhibition about FiSahara at the 2010 Tarifa African Film Festival in Spain, which has, since its origins, aligned itself closely with the Sahrawi cause. I had been shocked to learn that there is, in the Sahara desert, a roughly 2,000-km wall called “The Berm” guarded daily by 100,000 Moroccan troops and surrounded by 10 million land mines. This wall was built in the 1980s by King Hassan II, the regent of Morocco from 1961 to 1999, to ensure that the Sahrawi people, whom he had chased out of their native Western Sahara into refugee camps in Algeria in 1975, would not easily be able to return. On November 6, 1975, Hassan II had gathered 300,000 Moroccans in what he called the “Green March,” to move from the north to the south of the country to take over the Western Sahara, which—as former colonizer Spain departed—the King suddenly announced had always been a southern province of Morocco. Morocco clearly wanted access to the Western Sahara’s rich phosphate deposits (which were first discovered in 1949) and to fishing and oil drilling rights off the coast of Western Sahara.12 But this was no


simple unilateral act of colonization. The US and Morocco have a strategic alliance, based on Morocco’s status as the most “West-friendly” country in the Maghreb. And it is France’s veto at the United Nations (UN) Security Council that has long prevented the UN from taking action against Morocco; too many economic interests are at stake for France to risk its close relationship with its former colony.13 Almost 40 years since the Green March, the Sahrawi refugee camps in wilayas (districts) surrounding the town of Tindouf in southern Algeria still exist and are home to roughly 160,000 people, some of whom have grown up in them, some of whom have grown old in them, largely forgotten by or unknown to the rest of the world. For the Sahrawi who stayed in Morocco-occupied Western Sahara, it has been a tenuous existence, with frequent reports from activists, journalists, and filmmakers of police brutality and even torture.14 Western Sahara has, accordingly, been called the world’s last colony. Overshadowed by the more newsworthy Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Sahrawi have perhaps struggled to raise international awareness of their cause because their story does not fit neatly into the African liberation movement handbook: in this case, the colonizer is African. One of the only times when the world appears to take any notice of the Sahrawis’ plight is during the annual FiSahara Film Festival (Festival Internacional de Cine del Sahara), the only annual international film festival in the world that takes place in a refugee camp (Corcuera pers. comm.).15 While the trend in Africa is towards “international” film festivals, very few deserve this title if participation as well as programming is taken into account (Diao pers. comm.). In contrast, FiSahara’s raison d’être is to bring together Sahrawi people with participants from as many different countries as possible to work towards the liberation of Western Sahara. Conceived by the Sahrawi themselves, this annual festival was given life in 2003 through the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and activists, mostly from the Hispanophone world, in conjunction with the Polisario, the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in exile.16 The inspiration for creating the festival was a single film, and one that could not be more transnational in its focus: Peruvian filmmaker Javier Corcuera’s documentary La Espalda del Mundo/ The Back of the World (2000), which navigates its way across the globe, from children made to work in quarries in Peru, to inmates on Death Row in Mississippi, to Kurds exiled from Turkey for their political beliefs. Several Sahrawi people saw this film while visiting Spain and were so moved by it that they invited Corcuera to make a documentary about their plight. Instead of making a film, however, Corcuera—along with several others, including Pepe Taboada and Willy Toledo— came up with the idea of holding a film festival in the refugee camps, becoming yet another filmmaker-turned-festival-organizer. The central idea motivating the creation of the festival, Corcuera told me, “is a renewal of solidarity with the Sahrawi.” After almost four decades of struggle, there has been an erosion of activist will in the past few years, he says. The festival is “helping to reinvent that solidarity and communication” through a fresh, exciting event (pers. comm.). While Corcuera’s dream is to hold a film festival in a free Western Sahara, FiSahara itself has consistently maintained that it is a temporary venture, the only film festival in the world that is actively and explicitly working towards its own “extinction” (Simanowitz and Santaolalla 2012: 124). One of its aims is to raise such a degree


Figure 7.1 S ADR Minister of Culture Khadija Hamdi welcomes South African poet and activist Keorapetse Kgositsile to the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival

of international exposure for the Sahrawi cause that international civil society will put more pressure on the UN and various state governments to act against Morocco, thereby bringing an end to the conflict. In this respect, FiSahara is as much a “media event” as a film festival, although the press that attends is mostly local, from Algeria. FiSahara is, in essence, an activist or protest event, but one that is held under volatile, dangerous conditions, unlike the majority of “activist” film festivals, which take place far from the dire situations depicted in the films screened.17 Actor, filmmaker, and activist Javier Bardem, who attended in 2008, calls it “nothing short of a miracle” (Simanowitz 2013) and Israeli filmmaker and activist Guy Davidi, who brought his film Five Broken Cameras (codirected with Palestinian Emad Burnat) to the 2013 edition, praised the organizers for being “brave people” and “pioneers”: I admire [the FiSahara organizers]. It’s walking on a thin line all the time for them. Because they have a responsibility that, in a way, they can’t really take. . . . Not just on little things, but also on big things. Imagine if someone gets very ill, what would they do? We’re in the middle of the desert! So . . . it’s not a film festival, it’s an activist film festival. . . . It returns to the idea that films have to mean something when they are screened. And in festivals, normally when you go watch films, you learn things, you get excited, but they’re not going to hit you in your life . . . And then when you go to this kind of festival, every film is selected not because it’s the best film necessarily—I mean, it is important, but that’s not the idea—it’s how the film impacts on the community, and how you can use it to create a change within the community. And for you as a filmmaker it brings tremendous meaning. . . . Everything becomes much more meaningful. It’s like historical events happening. (pers. comm., my emphasis)

Davidi’s definition of an “activist film festival” is slightly different from that put forward by certain film festival scholars (see Iordanova and Torchin 2012). In her


introduction to the collection Film Festivals and Activism, Torchin assumes an automatic connection between activist film festivals, the “human rights film,” and the concept of testimony as “a transformative ‘speech act’ that occasions beneficial change” (2012: 1). While Davidi also refers to the notion that films screened at activist film festivals will have impact and bring about change, he does not emphasize the idea of “human rights” but rather the creation of meaning and history in a specific place amongst people who are gathered live. A materialist imperative underlines Davidi’s perspective; his point is that the screening of certain films in particular contexts with particular audiences may make more sense than their screening in other contexts. There is a Ghanaian proverb that says: “It is better to see for oneself than to be told.”18 This proverb encapsulates the experience offered to the international participants of the FiSahara, where—unlike at film festivals where the program is made up completely of human rights films—the act of witnessing is not as dependent on the watching of films (a form of being told) as it is on the live, human interactions and experiences within this embattled part of the world. The organizers put the emphasis on the difference of the experience—from one’s ordinary life, and from an ordinary film festival. As our chartered Air Algeria aircraft descended towards the military airport of Tindouf in southern Algeria, I had a distinct feeling of distance. The colors of the desert sands were not nearly as monotonous as I had imagined them from photographs; they were cumin, paprika, fennel green. The four-hour drive in convoy through the desert from Tindouf to Dakhla, more than 100 miles away, reinforced this sensation of distance, of being far from home, in a completely strange place. We drove in the darkness, in uncomfortable 1970s buses donated to the Sahrawi by the Basque people of Spain, who share the Sahrawis’ fervor for self-liberation. With no streetlights, the starry sky provided the only illumination, and our driver had to keep swerving to miss connecting with camels. Even though we arrived at around one o’clock in the morning, much of Dakhla’s 30,000-strong population—including the youngest children—were waiting to give us a warm welcome. We were divided into single-sex groups of five people and introduced to our Sahrawi family for the week, who took us back to their jaima (a large tent that is the centerpiece of each homestead) and served us dinner. For most international participants, the experience of living with a local family was the highlight of the festival. As Corcuera says, “[FiSahara is] a festival of convivencia [co-habitation]” (pers. comm.). In fact, international guests are completely dependent on the hospitality of the Sahrawi. Without their guidance we would have been completely lost in the maze of jaimas that are the main feature of the camps, whether in the night or day. We spent the majority of our time with our respective “families,” mostly chatting in the jaima in broken Spanish, or bits of French, English, and Hassaniya (a version of Arabic) over endless cups of sweet, frothy mint tea, lulled by the sounds of the desert: the Sahrawi flags on the jaimas flapping in the dry wind; the foamy popping of the mint tea—bittersweet—as it settles; the music of sand shifting through sandals as we walked. There was mutual curiosity about one another’s lives, and a great deal of gratitude expressed by the Sahrawi to us for making the long journey to come and learn about their situation.


Figure 7.2 A jaima in Dakhla

International interest in FiSahara could, cynically, be interpreted as a kind of adventure tourism (Kishore 2013: 735). As Davidi said, “I knew it was going to be an adventure, but I didn’t know of what sort” (pers. comm.). One of the 2013 participants, a Finnish woman called Saila Joutsio, runs her own small travel agency, Oy Scorza Ltd, specializing in trips to unusual places. However, the fact that Joutsio only had two takers for this trip surely says something about its nature. And how does one distinguish and define individuals’ most intimate desires and motivations? James Gibbs decries the easy route of “always assuming people are motivated by self-interest” (2012c: 26), or—rather—only by self-interest, even in cases where they are undertaking risks to their physical welfare. The majority of the roughly 100 foreign visitors to FiSahara 2013 were activists who work year-round for the Sahrawi cause. If anyone who came on the trip thought it was going to be only an exciting adventure, they were soon proven wrong. From the beginning of the trip, María Carrión—the executive director of the festival since 2013—warned everyone that the festival team would be reliant on our help with carrying and transferring the heavy film equipment they were bringing with them. Many of us foreigners, unaccustomed to the local food, also became ill during the festival and, in the 35-degree-celsius heat, were bound to the jaimas to be cared for by our “families.” The local hospital, which we visited during the stay, is extremely basic and, had anyone become seriously sick, there would have been little treatment available. Corcuera remembers how the return journey of the first festival in 2003 was like a “walking hospital,” given how many people were ill (pers. comm.).


Rumors abounded at the 2013 festival that Salma Hayek had been invited, but that—unlike Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, who have attended—declined the invite when she learned of the conditions under which one has to live. This is not adventure tourism where one is treated to luxury. There are only two “restaurants” in Dakhla, if they can be called that: a small café situated in Dakhla’s only oasis of golden palm trees; and a tiny hole of a pizzeria, recently opened by some Sahrawi women. Being a Muslim society, no alcohol is served or allowed in the camp. As a result of its very particular aims, FiSahara is as far from a conventional film festival as one might imagine, and its idiosyncrasies took some of the 2013 international guests by surprise, revealing differences in people’s understandings of the meanings and purpose of a film festival, and fissures in the consensus that had existed at the festival up until that point. Wim Brouwer, one of the programmers of Amnesty International’s film festival Movies that Matter, a human rights festival based in Amsterdam that supports FiSahara, expressed skepticism about whether FiSahara could even be called a “film festival”: It’s more a festival with all kinds of activities, from a cultural parade with clowns till the evening with film screenings. When I think about a film festival, I think [of something] orientated towards screening good films and having Q&As with directors and all the people involved in film. And that’s not the case [with FiSahara]. (pers. comm.)

Brouwer is correct that the FiSahara does not hold Q&As; the visiting directors simply give an introduction to their films. He is also correct that the festival is not very well scheduled, with basic information often lacking—a symptom of an activist event, almost completely voluntarily run and under difficult circumstances. One could take issue, however, with Brouwer’s assumption that what universally constitutes a “good film” is a certain level of technical and aesthetic quality. Rather, we might consider again Teshome Gabriel’s claim that film style “is only meaningful in the context of its use” (1979: 89), and Davidi’s argument that “films have to mean something when they are screened.” The program of FiSahara 2013 offered 47 films, of all genres, ranging in length from two minutes to two hours. The films were screened at two venues: the outdoor pantalla desierto (desert screen) and the indoor pantalla club (club screen). At both venues there is no seating, and audiences—including Polisario ministers—have to sit on the ground. There were several technical problems during the screenings, but people waited patiently while they were being fixed. FiSahara film programmers have usually sought an “equilibrium” between socially conscious cinema and spectacular, entertaining films (Corcuera pers. comm.). However, in 2013 María Carrión emphasized in her opening speech a renewed emphasis on human rights films, raising some questions about the future direction of the festival and whether an externally imposed human rights agenda will override the Polisario’s focus on Sahrawi political solidarity. The films that were undeniably the most popular at FiSahara 2013, as well as those that were given prizes, were not human rights films per se, but those that were related in some way to the Sahrawis’ struggle for independence. These were the screenings that were packed with people of all ages, sitting on the hard ground


for hours. The opening night on October 9 was a marathon of intense films about people’s struggles against oppression in different parts of the world: The Runner (52 minutes), My Makhzen and Me (43 minutes), and Five Broken Cameras (142 minutes). When I first saw the program I wondered whether the Sahrawi, involved in their own struggle for almost four decades, would stay for all three films. Not only did they stay for the entire program, however, but they were also completely engaged, constantly waving their national flags and breaking into liberation songs, or applause, when a film expressed something that meant something to them. For example, in The Runner, they clapped when Sahrawi activist Saleh Ameidan returns to the occupied territories to visit his ill father; and when the film refers to the Gdeim Izik protest camp of 2010,19 which was brutally suppressed by the Moroccan government, a young man started a political chant, which drowned out the film for a while. Safia Abderahman Lehbib, who came all the way from the wilaya of Smara for the festival, told me that her favorite film was My Makhzen and Me because it was good for the Sahrawi to see that ordinary Moroccans are fighting against the same power as they are (pers. comm.). A young woman called Galia Ebdadi, who is studying psychology at a university in Algeria, told me that she liked Five Broken Cameras the most because it showed her that “the Palestinians are like our people—they are dying” (pers. comm.).20 While some Sahrawi spectators I interviewed said that they are as interested in light entertainment films as they are in political films (for example, a young man called Takiyo Luali), Oscar-winning blockbusters such as Life of Pi and Asterix and Obelix did not inspire anything like the enthusiasm that the struggle films did. What was occurring here was a complex form of identification with film—a kind of sensus communis—that cannot be reduced to psychoanalytic interpretations of the universal viewing subject,

Figure 7.3 S ahrawi participants at the opening ceremony of the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival wave an SADR flag


to formal or generic analysis, or to “folk culture” (Andrew 2010). Such consensus is perhaps most productively read through Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological approach to understanding how ordinary people make meaning out of films, which “includes the recognition and acknowledgement of spectator life conditions, experience and cultural history, elements of existential conditions, enclosed as a constitutive element of meaning production” (Kishore 2013: 744–5). In contrast, for film professionals such as Wim Brouwer, “it’s more about film” itself, one step removed from life (pers. comm.). Brouwer’s perspective was contradicted, however, by some of the visiting filmmakers, for whom the important element of the festival was not their films winning prizes for technical and aesthetic mastery, but rather having meaning for the Sahrawi people. Davidi, whose film Five Broken Cameras won the special jury award, was astounded that he even won a prize, coming from Israel, particularly since his Palestinian codirector Emad Burnat had not been able to attend FiSahara: I was very excited [to win the award] because I’m in a foreign country—Algeria—an enemy country to Israel, I’m illegal from the point of view of Israel . . . even though I hold a Romanian passport, I’m still not allowed. (pers. comm.)

What the prize signified to him was how in the Sahrawi refugee camps “they were opening their hearts, their arms, with no judgment, a bit of surprise, curiosity, and saying more Israelis should come” (ibid.). Davidi was told by the SADR President, Mohammed Abdelaziz, that he was the first Israeli to visit the camps, and during the festival, Abdelaziz publicly encouraged Israelis and Palestinians, Sahrawis and Moroccans, to work together to overcome their oppressors. Davidi says that FiSahara was the most powerful festival experience that he has had with his film outside of Israel and Palestine, because “It was actually doing something . . . this

Figure 7.4 A white camel symbolizes peace at the closing ceremony of the 2013 FiSahara Film Festival


whole constellation together made it something very historical, something you never meet in a festival” (ibid.). The particular form of sensus communis created at FiSahara over the decade of its existence to date thus appears to be the result of a live, materialist imperative, the result of the co-habitation that this festival encourages, and the way it aims to convert international solidarity into lasting, local change. It is worth recalling here Terry Eagleton’s insistence that “no significant social change is even conceivable” without “the notion of solidarity” (1990: 354). The creation of sensus communis, then, cannot necessarily be seen as reactionary, as ignoring important differences, or as inherently less politicized than dissent.

Conclusion

In the suburb of Rubaga, one of the least affluent parts of Kampala, Uganda, a “film marathon” is under way in one of the city’s estimated 2,000 kibanda (video halls), wood-and-tin shacks that usually serve up English league football matches and “VJed” Hollywood, Bollywood, and kung fu films five times a day to packed audiences. The “film marathon” has been organized by Dutch art historian Alice Smits and American filmmaker Lee Ellickson as part of the Amakula Kampala International Film Festival, which is now (in 2010) in its seventh year. The marathon consists of three films: a contemporary film from Cameroon (Mah Saah-Sah), a “classic” film from Ghana (Heritage Africa), and the first part of a film made by Smits herself in Uganda—The Video Crusades: Tugenda Mumaso! It is Smits’s film that is now playing in the dark, stuffy venue in Rubaga; in Luganda, it is about the video halls themselves—about how popular they are with Kampalans and how the Ugandan government is supporting a controversial union that is attempting to force them to conform to health and safety standards their owners simply cannot afford. The video hall is filled with people, but their eyes are glazed over. They are clearly not finding this indignant, worthy film about the type of place in which they are currently sitting very interesting. Smits is at a different festival venue and so is not there to see when some audience members ask the projectionist to take off The Video Crusades and put on a Chuck Norris film instead. Cindy Wong argues that audiences do not “participate in programming decisions” at film festivals (2011: 54). She also acknowledges, however, that “among writings on festivals, audiences often have been overlooked or read simply as reliable sources of income and abstract statistics or groups to boost attendance numbers” (2011: 10). Festivals have largely been analyzed, instead, from film industry perspectives. Through the examples of (dis)sensus communis at a range of film festivals I have focused on throughout this book, I have attempted to complicate Wong’s statement by showing the extent to which festivals are multi-authored entities, influenced equally by their organizers, their curators, and their “professional” and “ordinary” participants. Similarly, through exploring the (dis)sensus communis that has arisen around the screenings of particular films at festivals, I hope to have revealed that the meanings of films are contingent on the contexts in which they are shown, and are—in this sense—coauthored by their filmmakers and spectators. Studying how films are produced and made can tell us one thing, and close textual analysis of films can tell us another, but if we are serious about also


incorporating broader, more diverse publics into film scholarship, to democratize our aesthetic judgments of film and understand the diverse, dynamic nature of “taste,” then we need to begin with what Ramon Lobato calls a “distributioncentred model of film studies,” which asks: “who is the audience? How are they constructed as such? What are the material limits that determine which texts are available to which audiences?” (2012: 6) Taking film festivals as the site of this study has allowed me to participate in one kind of distribution- and exhibitioncentered model of film studies, making audiences part of my focus. African screen media scholarship also remains relatively impoverished when it comes to the question of film viewing cultures in Africa, and the diverse spectators of films by Africans. This book has explored one kind of context in which films are exhibited and viewed in Africa, and the environments in which “African film” was initially curated into existence—film festivals. I have used the “liveness” or “festive excitement” of this context as a heuristic device to analyze the (dis)sensus communis that has arisen around particular films, or kinds of films, and in response to the ways that “Africa,” “African film,” “African filmmakers,” and “African audiences” have been curated. In doing so, I hope to have suggested the value of future scholarship in exploring the (dis)sensus communis that occurs in other live, communal viewing contexts, particularly on the African continent—such as multiplex and other cinemas, makeshift video halls, and people’s homes and courtyards. At the same time, in our digital era, definitions of what constitutes “liveness” are rapidly changing, even in places where Internet penetration remains low. A new generation of filmmakers, curators, and spectators in and from Africa are engaging differently with the world, through their general embrace of the digital sphere, and this has significant implications for the definition and value of “liveness” that festivals have traditionally embodied. As Auslander notes, “the idea of liveness is a moving target, a historically contingent concept whose meaning changes over time and is keyed to technological development . . . liveness describes a historical, rather than ontological, condition” (2008: xii–xiii). While remaining deeply invested in the experience of liveness offered by theatre in particular, Auslander at the same time opposes “reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized” in which, he says, “the common assumption is that the live event is ‘real’ and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real” (2008: 3). The arrival, in 2013, of a completely new kind of festival, related to a form of regional African filmmaking—the first Online South African Film Festival—joins other recently created online festivals around the world in unsettling festivals’ typical relationship to publics situated in one discrete time and place. Initiated by the VOD platform AfricaFilms.tv, presided over by veteran South African filmmaker Ramadan Suleman, and curated by Lesedi Moche (also director of the Encounters Documentary Film Festival in South Africa), the first Online South African Film Festival ran from July 18 to September 22, 2013 and offered viewers the chance to rent or buy 150 rarely accessible South African films and television series. While analysis of this festival is beyond the scope of this project, I mention it because it suggests rich sites for future research: the production of new kinds of “liveness” at the interface between film festival and online realms.

Conclusion 179

All the festivals, or editions of festivals, on which I have focused have related in some way to the continent, peoples, filmmaking cultures, or concept of “Africa.” I have attempted to confront the relatively Eurocentric nature of much film festival scholarship to date (although that aspect is changing), as well as the overwhelming focus on film festivals with “A-list” status. In this way, I hope to have contributed to making the field more globally representative. At the same time, I have deliberately kept my definition of “Africa” and the structure of the book broad and loose, in the hope of not falling into the trap of appearing to suggest that a distinction can be drawn between “Africa” and the rest of the world. This, I have argued, would turn the continent into an exception and deny both its equality with and integration into the rest of the world, as well as many Africans’ own global aspirations. My diachronic studies of particular festivals in specific contexts are intended to reveal the degree to which it is impossible to say anything definitive and conclusive about the nature of “African film,” “African curators,” “African filmmakers,” “African audiences,” or “Africa” itself. Such homogenizing categories, I hope to have shown, are simply not useful to a form of scholarship that wishes to take the dynamism and specificity of actual, material contexts and unique individuals into account. Thus, while using “Africa” as the broadest of guides, I have attempted at every point to undermine any suggestion that this is a fixed or unitary site. One could ask, then, why I even attempted to use “Africa” as a guide at all, in lieu of—for example—doing an in-depth, diachronic study of one particular film festival in one site, as Bikales (1997) and Dupré (2012) have done of FESPACO. This is because, after 15 years of working with and researching film festivals and films by Africans, I felt that it was possible to highlight certain trends in the way “Africa” has been curated in different contexts, and by different groups of people. It was according to these trends that I created the loose geographical and chronological typology that structures this book: the curation of “Africans” at the world fairs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the general absence of films by Africans and filmmakers from Africa at the festivals with “A-list” status; recent attempts to rectify this absence by curating “Africa,” “African film,” and “African filmmakers” through one-off mega-shows such as the 2010 IFFR’s “Where is Africa?” program; the gradual development of more sophisticated curatorial attitudes to films by Africans at “A-list” festivals, which are increasingly hiring curators with relevant knowledge and incorporating films by Africans into their broader programs; the way the first colonial “film festivals” in Africa attempted, yet failed, to curate a particular kind of “African audience” into being; the way FESPACO has focused on curating “African audiences” for “African films”; the proliferation of African film festivals beyond Africa since the late 1970s, which have—somewhat paradoxically—used this umbrella term to curate not a singular version of “Africa” or “African film,” but rather the diversity and heterogeneity of the continent; and the rise of “international” film festivals across the African continent from the late 1990s onwards, which—unlike FESPACO and more recent African festivals—do not curate “African audiences” for “African films,” but rather attempt to curate and create diverse relationships between “local” and “international” spaces and ideas. I hope that the material presented in the book also suggests and inspires many other typologies and avenues for analysis, however. Given its broad scope, it has


necessarily been a preliminary study, a way of attempting to construct some kind of framework and, I hope, some useful theory for future research. Film festivals have been, in many ways, the unacknowledged enablers and mediators of an entire body of scholarship in the field of film studies, making certain films accessible and acceptable to scholars and others not. Today, it is time for film scholars to foreground the role film festivals have played in defining a certain kind of study, and object of study, in the field. By adopting a “curatorial approach” towards the study of film—by looking at films through the lens of film festivals—we can broaden our critical understanding of how the field came to be constituted in the ways it did, and of how it might change. Film festivals make apparent how cinematic canons have been framed and reframed for and by particular, situated publics, rather than having any a priori value. At the same time, as scholars we need to recognize also the role that we play as curators—shaping and contextualizing films for others, whether in the university setting or beyond. Adopting a “curatorial approach” towards our academic work will, I hope, lead us to be more aware of, and open to acknowledging, our own criteria of judgment. I hope it will also make us recognize the advantages of attempting to train our imaginations, and our bodies, to “go visiting,” thus incorporating the democratic value of (dis)sensus communis into our work, rather than simply exalting our taste above the taste of others. This process will bring us into contact with diverse, actual spectators of African films, and of films in Africa, compelling us to move beyond interpretive repertoires limited to the “ivory towers” of university spaces. One might argue that access to film festivals and to such “ordinary” spectators paradoxically requires the “ivory tower” funding of these same university spaces. More positively, however, we could argue that making film festivals one of our sites of research will privilege scholarship emerging from the African continent itself (where the majority of these festivals take place, and where most African spectators are of course located); will encourage new avenues for audience research within the (arguably more accessible) digital sphere (through online film festivals, and audience responses to festival films through social media); and will inspire more collaborative research, given the complex, multidimensional nature of festivals.

Appendix 1

Film Festivals in Africa

Dr. Bouchaib El Massaoudi

Galeshewe, Motheo Seleke Kimberley, South Africa

2003

2004

Aluta Film Festival

Amakula Kampala International Film Festival

Period

Nov

Nov

March/April

Sep

Human rights and social issues documentaries

Website

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/Aluta-Film-Festival/ 165889343444084/

http://www.africanbamba.org/

http://www.africanstudentfilm festival.com/

http://www.africafilmfest.org/

http://afifdok.org/

http://www.addisfilmfestival .org/

http://www.abujafilmfestival .org/

Nov (main http://www.amakula.com/ festival); throughout year (cinema caravan)

Oct/Nov

Jan

Films by African March-July students

African films

Documentary

Documentary

Motheo Seleke African and diasporan films

Abdoulaye Gaye

Type All films

Kampala, Uganda Alice Smits & Lee Alice Smits & All films & throughout Ellickson Lee Ellickson Uganda

Thiaroye, Senegal AfricanBamba

2012

Keith Shiri (Artistic Director)

Dr. Bouchaib El Massaoudi

Kebour Ghenna

Fidelis Duker

Current Director

Adaobi Obiegboi Adaobi Obiegboi

AfricanBamba Human 2012 Rights Film and Arts Festival

2012

Lagos, Nigeria

2013

Khouribga, Morocco

Kebour Ghenna

African Student Film Festival

2009

Afifdok (Festival international du film documentaire de Khouribga)

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Fidelis Duker

Founder

Different cities in Chioma Ude Nigeria

2007

Addis International Film Festival

Abuja, Nigeria

Location

Africa International 2011 Film Festival (AFRIFF)

2004

Ended/ Founded Suspended

Abuja International Film Festival

Festival Name

Film Festivals in Africa

182 Appendix 1

2011

2012

2011

2014

1976

2008

Anansefest

Arusha African Film Festival

BeninDocs (International Festival of First Documentary Film)

Bojanala Film Festival

Cairo International Film Festival

Cape Town & Winelands International Film Festival

Wakefield Ackuaku

Cape Town and Stellenbosch, South Africa

Cairo, Egypt

Bojanala, Rustenburg, South Africa

Leon van der Merwe

Kamal El Samir Farid Mallakh & others

Bojanala District Bojanala Municipality District Municipality

Leon van der Merwe

Films by Ghanaian students

All films

All films

Films & workshops for out-of-school youth

Documentaries, particularly by Africans

Hakika African films Entertainment

Wakefield Ackuaku

Porto Novo & Farah Clémentine Farah Cotonou, Benin, & Dramani Clémentine & Paris, France Issifou & Dramani Issifou

Arusha, Tanzania Akpor Otebele, Mary Birdi, & Roland Adjovi

Accra, Ghana

Nov

Nov

March

Nov

Sep

(Continued)

http://www.films-for-africa .co.za/

http://www.ciff.org.eg/

http://www.bojanala.gov.za/ 3rd-annual-bojanala-filmfestival/

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/Benindocs-festivalinternational-du-premierfilm-documentaire/204509486 267687/

http://arushaafricanfilm festival.com/

March/June http://www.ananseman.com/ (thirteen months of screenings on Ghana-TV before awards in late June)

Appendix 1 183

2004

2007

Ciné Droit Libre

Cinéma Nachia

Maputo, Mozambique

2006

1979

1997

Dockanema

Durban International Film Festival

Écrans Noirs

Lagos, Nigeria

Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa

Accra, Ghana

Eko International Film 2010 Festival

1999 Encounters (South African International Documentary Festival)

Environmental Film Festival of Accra

Yaoundé, Cameroon

Durban, South Africa


2002

Semfilms

Founder

African films

Films by young Moroccans & Africans

Human rights films (particularly by Africans)

Type

Claudia D’Andrea Kwesi Owusu

Nodi Murphy & Lesedi Oluko Steven Markovitz Moshe

Environmental films

Documentary

Supple Hope Obioma All films Communications Opara Limited

African & diaspora films

Peter Machen All films

Pedro Pimenta Documentary

June Givanni (Artistic Director)

Simohamed Fettaka

Luc Damiba

Current Director

Bassek ba Kobhio Marcel Épée

Ros Sarkin

Pedro Pimenta

Abraham Haile Biru

Tanger, Morocco Simohamed Fettaka

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, & seven other cities (including Abidjan, Ivory Coast & Dakar, Senegal)

Location

Colours of the Nile film 2013 festival

2013


Festival Name

June/July

June

Nov

July

July

Sep

March

Nov/Dec

June (and other times)

Period

http://www.effaccra.org/

http://www.encounters.co.za/

http://www.ekoiff.org/

http://www.ambafrance-cm .org/Festival-Ecrans-Noirs/

http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/ index.php/diff-home/

http://www.afrifestnet.org/en/ node/117/

http://www.coloursofthenile .net/

http://www.cinemanachia .com/

http://festivalcinedroitlibre .blogspot.co.uk/

Website

184 Appendix 1

2001

2013

2009

Festival de Cinéma Image et Vie

Festival du Film de Masuku (Nature & Environment)

Festival International du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel du Burundi (Festicab)

Festival International 2010 du Cinéma Numérique de Cotonou (FICN)

Rabat, Morocco

2004

Festimaj

Cotonou, Benin

Bujumbura, Burundi

Libreville and other parts of Gabon

Dakar, Senegal

Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

FESPACO (Festival 1969 Panafricain du Cinéma de Ouagadougou) Gilles Lemounaud

Michel Ouédraogo

Yirgashewa Teshome

Dangbe Cinema

Léonce Ngabo

Polycarpe Tchiakpe

Feb/March

Nov

Nov/Dec

Nature & environment films

All films

All films

Dec

April/May/June

Aug

June

Films by students May/June up to age of 30

African films

All films

Documentary

Léonce Ngabo Films made in Africa; African productions or co-productions

Nadine Otsobogo Nadine Otsobogo

Le Groupe Image Le Groupe et Vie Image et Vie

Gilles Lemounaud & Anne-Claude Lumet

Alimata Salembéré & others

Linkage Arts Resource Center

Libreville, Gabon Initiated by Imunga Charles Mensah Ivanga with support of l’Institut Français (Gabon) & l’Institut Gabonais de l’Image et du Son (IGIS)


2006

Ethiopian International 2006 Film Festival

Escales Documentaire de Libreville

(Continued)

http://www.dangbecinema .com/

http://www.festicab.org/ (site undergoing maintenance)

http://www.festivaldemasuku .com/

http://www.imagetvie.org/

http://www.festimaj.fr/

http://www.fespaco-bf.net/

http://www.ethioiff.com/

http://www.institutfrancaisgabon.com/index.php/prog ramme-culturel/cinema/252escales-documentaires-delibreville-8eme-edition/

Appendix 1 185

2008

1964

2004

2014

Festival International du Film sur les Droits Humains

FIFAK (Festival International du Film Amateur de Kelibia)

FiSahara (Festival Internacional de Cine)

Independent Mzansi Short Film Festival (IMSFF)

Fédération Tunisienne des Cinéastes Amateurs (FTCA)

Omar Louzi

Jean Odoutan

Village Titan (ILOI)

Founder

Pretoria, South Africa

Tunisian and international films

Human rights films

María Carrión All films

Ghassen Jemaia

Omar Louzi

Period

June

April/May

Aug

June

Jan

Films from Africa Oct & especially the African “islands”

Type

Jean Odoutan All films

Alain Gili

Current Director

Jarrod de Jong & Jarrod de Jong Short films Jacques Brand & Jacques Brand

Dakhla, Algeria Sahrawi Arab (Sahrawi refugee Democratic camp) Republic (SADR) with Javier Corcuera, Guillermo Toledo, José Taboada

Kelibia, Tunisia

Rabat, Morocco

Ouidah, Benin

2003

Festival International du Film de Ouidah (Quintessence)

Location

Reunion Island


Festival International 2003 du Film d’Afrique et des Iles (FIFAI)

Festival Name

http://www.imsff.co.za/

http://www.festivalsahara.org/

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/Festival-Internationaldu-Film-Amateur-de-K%C3% A9libia-FIFAK-TUNISIE/138 494026232281?ref=ts&fref=ts/

http://www.fifdh.blogspot .co.uk/

http://www.festival-ouidah.org/

http://www.festivalfilmafri queiles.fr/

Website

186 Appendix 1

Johannesburg, South Africa

2012

2006

2000

Jozi Film Festival

Kenya International Film Festival

Lagunimages (Festival International de Film, documentaires et de télévision du Bénin)

Cotonou, Benin

Nairobi, Kenya

Ouagadougou & Baba Hama & Banfora, Burkina Alain Edouard Faso Traoré

Journées 2012 Cinématographiques de la Femme Africaine de l'image (JCFA)

2012

Tunis, Tunisia

Journées 1966 Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC)

Nov

March

http://www.jccarthage.com/ eng/

http://irepfilmfestival.com/

http://www.wcoz.org/typo graphy/126-women-filmakersof-zimbawe-profile.html/

All films

Documentary & television

Dec (biannual)

Oct/Nov

Feb

(Continued)

http://associationlagunimages .org/

N/A

http://www.jozifilmfestival .co.za/

Films by & about March (biannual) N/A women

African & Arab films

Charles Asiba All films

Brendon Burmester, Shareen Anderson, & Lisa Henry

Baba Hama

Mohamed Mediouni

Monique Mbeka Noudeou Phoba Noelie Houngnihin

Charles Asiba

Brendon Burmester, Shareen Anderson, & Lisa Henry

Tahar Cheriaa

Documentary

Tsitsi Films about Aug Dangarembga women, & positive male role models (in “New Man” section)

Jahman Femi Anikulapo, Femi Odugbemi Odugbemi, & Makin Soyinka

Lagos, Nigeria

2011

Women Filmmakers of Zimbabwe

I-Represent International Documentary Film Festival

Harare & Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

2002

International Images Film Festival for Women

Appendix 1 187

Lusaka, Zambia

Luxor, Egypt

Lusaka International 2012 Film and Music Festival

2011

2005

2001

Luxor African Film Festival

Marrakech Biennale

Marrakech International Film Festival

Marrakech, Morocco

Marrakech, Morocco

Nairobi, Kenya

2006

Lola Kenya Screen

Location


Festival Name

Sayed Fouad

Charity Maruta

Ogova Odengo

Current Director

Prince Moulay Rachid under the will of His Majesty King Mohammed VI

Visual arts, cinema, literature, & other arts

African films

African films

Films for children

Type

Mélita Toscan All films du Plantier

Vanessa Branson Alia Radman

Sayed Fouad & the Independent Shabab Foundation

Charity Maruta

Ogova Odengo

Founder

Nov/Dec

Feb/March

March

Sep/Oct

Aug (annual 6-day festival), but also monthly film forum, weekly school outreach & skilldevelopment program, & fortnightly community mobile cinema & media literacy programs

Period

http://en.festivalmarrakech .info/

http://www.marrakech biennale.org/

http://www. luxorafricanfilmfestival.com/

http://www.lifmf.com/

http://www.lolakenyascreen .org/

Website

188 Appendix 1

2003

2006

2008

Rencontres du Film Court Madagascar

Rencontres Internationales du Cinéma et de la Télévision (RECITEL)

Lomé, Togo

Antananarivo, Madagascar

Béjaia, Algeria

Accra, Ghana

Real Life Documentary 2006 Film Festival

Rencontres Cinématographiques de Béjaia


1994

Out in Africa

2011

Yaoundé, Cameroon

Mis Me Binga (Festival 2010 International de Films de Femmes)

Films by women

All films

Documentary

All films

Association Malagasy films of the Short Film Festival, the French Institute of Madagascar, & Rozifilm

Abdenour Hochiche (President); Samir Ardjoum (Artistic Director)

Lydie Diakhaté

Nodi Murphy Films about LGBT people

Narcisse Wandji

L’APCAL, The Jacques Do International Kokou Encounters Film Festival and Télévision du Togo

Laza

L’Association Project'heurts

Lydie Diakhaté

Nodi Murphy

Narcisse Wandji

Dec

May

June

Different dates

May/June

March

(Continued)

http://www.cinetogo.com/ recitel-2013.html/

http://www.rencontresdufilm court.com/en/

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/12emes-Rencontrescin%C3%A9matographiquesde-Bejaia-Alg%C3%A9rie/ 705533829465694/

http://kayelemaproductions. wordpress.com/lydiediakhate-professionalactivities/

http://www.oia.co.za/

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/Festival-Mis-MeBinga/159011200775879/

Appendix 1 189

2005

2006

Rwanda film festival

Semaine Nationale du Film

Freetown, Sierra Leone

2012

2011

2014

2014

2003

Sierra Leone International Film Festival

Slum Film Festival

Sudan Independent Film Festival

Tazama African Women Film Festival

Tri Continental Film Festival

Mohamed Idoumou

Romeo Umulisa

Current Director

Layna Fisher

Layna Fisher

Catherine Musola Catherine Kaseketi Musola Kaseketi

La Maison des Cinéastes

Eric Kabera

Founder

All films

Films on social issues

All films

All films

Type

Johannesburg, Cape Town & Pretoria, South Africa

Brazzaville, CongoBrazzaville

Khartoum, Sudan

Uhuru Productions, Lawyers for Human Rights, and SACOD

Clapcongo

Sudan Film Factory

All films

Anita Khanna Human rights films

Period

Jan

Aug/Sep

Oct/Nov

Aug

April

July

Sep

Claudia Films focused on Jan Haidara-Yoka African women

Talal Afifi

Kibera & The Hot Sun The Hot Sun Films about Mathare, Nairobi, Foundation, Foundation & “slums” & by Kenya Slum-TV, & the Slum-TV “slum” dwellers Embassy of Spain (Kenya)

Livingstone, Zambia

Nouakchott, Mauritania

Kigali & other areas of Rwanda

Location

Shungu Namutitima 2006 (Smoke that Thunders) International Film Festival of Zambia

2011


Festival Name

http://www.3continentsfestival .co.za/

http://www.festival-tazama .org/

https://www.facebook.com/ SIFF.Official/

http://slumfilmfestival.net/

https://www.facebook.com/ SLIFFestival/

http://www.viloleimages.com/

N/A

http://rwandafilmfestival.net/

Website

190 Appendix 1

1998

1999

2008

Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF)

Zimbabwe International Film Festival

Zuma International Film Festival

Abuja, Nigeria

Harare, Zimbabwe

Zanzibar, Tanzania


John Polson

All films

Short films

Nigerian Film Corporation

Dr Danjuma Wurim Dadu

All films that fall within the festival's annual theme

Nigel Munyati & Nigel Munyati All films others (Acting Director)

Emerson Professor Skeens, Annalisa Martin Anderson, & Mhando others

John Polson

Sources: my own research and http://www.afrifestnet.org/en/liste-festival?field_pays_tid=All&field_discipline_tid=6/

2014

Tropfest Short Film Festival (South Africa version)

May

Dec

June

March

http://www.zumafilmfest .gov.ng/

http://www.zifft.org/

http://www.ziff.or.tz/

http://tropfest.com/africa/

Appendix 1 191

Appendix 2

African Film Festivals Outside of Africa

1993

African Diaspora International Film Festival

African Film Festival 2012 Australia

2007

Africala

Flavio Florencio

Sydney, Melbourne, regional Australia

Samira Farah

Samira Farah

Various times

Oct/Nov

Jan/Feb

Period

African films

African films

April/May

Various times

Various times

African March/Oct documentary films

African films

African films

African films

Type

Reinaldo Barroso- African films Spech & Diarah N’Daw-Spech

Flavio Florencio

Niyi Coker, Jr.

Heidi Lobato

Mariët Bakker

Niyi Coker, Jr.

Lizelle Bisschoff

Natascha Gikas

Current Director

Lizelle Bisschoff

Kitty Vincke

Founder

New York (also in Chicago, Reinaldo BarrosoWashington D.C. & Paris, Spech & Diarah France) N’Daw-Spech

Mexico and various South American countries

Saint Louis, USA; Lawrence, USA; Birmingham, USA; Philadelphia, USA; Cave Hill, Barbados; Bridgetown, Barbados; Yaounde, Cameroon; Ibadan & Lagos, Nigeria; London, UK; Bellville, South Africa; Kingston Jamaica

2007

Africa World Documentary Film Festival

Edinburgh (and travels to other parts of Scotland)

Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Location

Amsterdam (and other cities in Netherlands)

2006

Africa in Motion

Ended

Africa in the Picture 1987

1994

Founded

Africa Alive

Festival Name

African Film Festivals Outside of Africa

http://africanfilmfestival .com.au/

http://nyadiff.org/

http://www.africala.org/ web/templates/index .php?page=17/

http://www.africaworld filmfestival.com/

http://www. africainthepicture.nl/ en/welcome/

http://www.africa-inmotion.org.uk/

http://www.africa-alivefestival.de/

Website

194 Appendix 2

Barbados

2002

Barbados Festival of African and Caribbean Film

2007

Hamburg, Germany

Jane Bryce

Burkhard Leber, Ingrid Wernich, Hans-Jörg Heinrich & Alexandra Antwi-Boasiako

Filmgramm Foundation & the Foundation for Somalia

2012

Jokko - Connection

Augen Blicke Afrika

Munich, Germany

toucouler e.V.

Warsaw, Poland and other cities around the country

2011

Afrikanische Filmtage

Berlin, Germany

Guido Huysmans & Guido Convents

AfryKamera African 2006 Film Festival

2008

Afrikamera

Leuven, Belgium

Ingrid Sinclair & Simon Bright

Saarbrücken, Germany and Academy of Fine greater region Arts Saar, Saarland University

1996

Afrika Filmfestival

Bristol, UK

Afrikanische 2001 Filmtage/Journees du Cinema Africain/ African Cinema Festival

2007

Afrika Eye

African films

African films

African films

African films

N/A

Burkhard Leber, Ingrid Wernich, HansJörg Heinrich & Alexandra Antwi-Boasiako

African films

African films

Przemek Stepien African films (Artistic Director)

Academy of Fine Arts Saar, Saarland University

Leni Senger

Alex Moussa Sawadogo

Guido Huysmans African films & Guido Convents

Sinclair & Bright

http://afrikaeye.org.uk/

Oct

Oct/Nov

April

Oct/Nov

Oct/Nov

Nov

N/A

(Continued)

http://www.augenblicke-afrika.de/

http://www.afrykamera .pl/

http://www.xmlab.org/ projects/mediatheory/ mediatheory-2013/ afrikanischefilmtage/

http://www.jokkoconnection.com/

http://www.afrikamera .de/

March/April http://www. afrikafilmfestival.be/

Nov

Appendix 2 195

Portland, USA

1991

2007

Cascade Festival of African Films

Ciné Regards Africains

Stockholm, Sweden

1998

2006

2000

CinemAfrica

Cinémas d’Afrique

CinéSud Festival du court métrage africain

Cozes, France

Lausanne, Switzerland

Tokyo, Japan

Cinema Africa Tokyo 2006

Val de Bièvre, France

Carlow, Ireland

Location

Carlow African Film 2005 Festival

Ended

Cambridge, UK

Founded

2002

Cambridge African Film Festival

Festival Name

Founder

Current Director

Miho Yoshida

Lise Doussin

Tara Foster with the committee

Ade Oke

Estrella Sendra

Type

African films

African films

African films

African films

African films

Festival Plein Sud association

Marion Tessier & others

Period

Aug

March

Various times

Nov

Jan/Feb/ March

May/June

Nov

Short African Feb films

L’Association Alain Bottarelli & African films Afrique Cinémas in Boubacar Samb partnership with the Cinémathèque Suisse

Josette Bushell-Mingo Dina Afkhampour African films & others

Miho Yoshida

Afrique sur Bièvre

Linda Elegant, Mary Holmström, Michael Dembrow, & Joseph Smith-Buani

Ade Oke

Lindiwe Dovey, Rachel Giraudo, Georgina Horrell, Mark Mathuray, & James Suzman

Website

http://www.festival pleinsud.com/

http://www.cinemas dafrique.ch/

http://cinemafrica.se/

http://www .cinemaafrica.com/

http://www.asurb.com/ AsurB/index.html/

http://www.africanfilm festival.org/

http://www.carlow africanfilmfestival.com/

http://www. cambridgeafricanfilm festival.org.uk/

196 Appendix 2

1991

Festival Cinema Africano, Asia e America Latina di Milano

Verona, Italy

Cannes, France

Paris, France

Festival International 2004 du Film Panafricain

FIFDA (Festival 2011 International des Films de la Diaspora Africaine) [The Paris leg of ADIFF]

1982

Festival di Cinema Africano di Verona

Brussels, Belgium

Apt, France

2012

Milan, Italy

Cordoba, Spain (and travels to other parts of Spain through Cinenómada)

Festival des Cinémas 2003 d’Afrique du Pays d’Apt

Festival des Cinémas 2005 Africains de Bruxelles

2004

FCAT - Festival de Cine Africano Cordoba

N/A

Rosella Scandella & Gabriella Rigamonti

Mane Cisneros Manrique

Reinaldo BarrosoSpech & Diarah N’Daw-Spech

Eitel Basile Ngangue Ebelle

Three organizations (Centro Missionario Diocesano, Progetto Mondo MLAL, Fondazione Nigrizia)

African films

African films

African films

African films

African films

African films

Reinaldo Barroso- African films Spech & Diarah N’Daw-Spech

Eitel Basile Ngangue Ebelle

Vanessa Lanari, Giusy Buemi, & Gaiga Stefano

Various organizations Marie Clemm

Aurore Engelen & others

Associazione Centro Orientamento Educativo

Mane Cisneros Manrique

Sep

April

Nov

Nov

April

April/May

Oct

(Continued)

http://fifda.org/

http://www.festival dufilmpanafricain.org/

http://festivalafricano .altervista.org/

http://www.africaptfestival.fr/

http://www.audiovisuel .cfwb.be/index.php? id=6911/

http://www.festival cinemaafricano.org/

http://www.fcat.es/

Appendix 2 197

Founded

Location

Paris, France

2009

1996

2009

Le Maghreb des Films

Lumières d’Afrique

Maine African Film Festival

Portland, Maine

Besançon, France

Hong Kong

Hong Kong Egyptian 2012 Film Festival

2011

Helsinki, Finland

London, UK

Helsinki African Film Festival

2010

Ended

Galway, Ireland

2011

Galway African Film 2008 Festival

Film Africa

Festival Name

Founder

Current Director Royal African Society

Type African films

Kazeem Lawal

N/A

APACA (Association Gérard Marion pour la Promotion des Arts et des Cultures d’Afrique)

Le Maghreb des Films Bachir Hadjadj

Period

May

May

Nov

African films

African films

N/A

Nov

North African Monthly films

Egyptian films Sep

Wanjiku wa Ngugi African films

Global Egyptian Film Youssef Soliman Festival (GEFF)

Wanjiku wa Ngugi

Sarah Clancy, Galway Heike Vornhagen African films One World Centre, and Trisha Galway Film Society, Buddin & Huston School of Film & Digital Media

Lindiwe Dovey, Namvula Rennie & the Royal African Society

Website

http://www.creative ground.org/profile/ african-culturefoundation-maineafrican-film-festival/

http://www.lumieresda frique.com/

http://www.maghrebdes films.fr/

https://en-gb.facebook .com/globaleff/

http://www.haff.fi/ 2013/en/

http://galwayafricanfilm festival.org/

http://www.filmafrica .org/

198 Appendix 2

2008

Paris, France

2009

2007

Sofia Middle East & North Africa Film Festival

Vancouver Pan African Film and Arts Festival

Silicon Valley 2010 African Film Festival

1992

Vancouver, Canada

Sofia, Bulgaria

Silicon Valley, USA

Los Angeles, USA

2013

Nollywood Film Week

New York (and across USA)

Pan African Film Festival (PAFF)

1993

New York African Film Festival

Silver Springs, Maryland, USA

Group of professors and students at UFSC & UDESC (universities in Santa Catarina, Brazil)

African films

African films

Nollywood films

African films

Chike C. Nwoffiah African films

Ayuko Babu

Christa Aretz & Karl Rössel

Serge Noukoué

Mahen Bonetti

African films

African films

Oct

Feb

Sep

May/June

April/May

March

Oct

Ebony Johnson

N/A

African films

Oct

Pozor Company Zdravko Grigorov North African Jan-Feb (Zdravko Grigorov & films Angel Hadzhiyski)

Chike C. Nwoffiah

Danny Glover, Ja'net DuBois, & Ayuko Babu

FilmInitiativ

Serge Noukoué

Mahen Bonetti

TransAfrica, afrikafe Todd Hitchcock & the American Film Institute

Florianópolis and Manaus, Group of professors Brazil and students at UFSC & UDESC (universities in Santa Catarina, Brazil)

Cologne, Germany

2005

New African Films Festival

2009

“Out of Europe” 1992 African Film Festival

2007

Malembe Malembe: Mostra de Cinema Africano

N/A

(Continued)

http://en.menarfest .com/welcome.html/

http://www.svaff.org/

http://www.paff.org/

http://www.filme-ausafrika.de/index.php? id=309&L=1/

http://www.nollywood week.com/

http://www.african filmny.org/

http://www.afi.com/ silver/films/2013/v10i1/ naff2013.aspx/

http://malembe malembe.ceart.udesc .br/apresent.htm/

Appendix 2 199

Founded

Location

Founder

Iyàlódè productions and Auburn Avenue Research Library

Fadhili Maghiya

Françoise Wera & others

Current Director

N/A

Fadhili Maghiya

Gérard Le Chêne

Type

Period

Nov/Dec

April/May

Films by and/ N/A or about women of color

African films

African films

Sources: my own research; http://www.filme-aus-afrika.de/index.php?id=312&L=1/; and http://film.britishcouncil.org/festivals-directory/

Atlanta, US

Montreal, Canada

WOCAF (Women of 2005 Color Arts and Film) Festival

2012

Ended

Cardiff, Wales

1984

Watch Africa: Wales 2013 African Film Festival

Vues d’Afrique

Festival Name

Website

http://wocaf.org/

http://www.watchafrica.co.uk/

http://www.vuesd afrique.com/

200 Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Major International Film Festivals that Support African Filmmaking

1951

1976

1946

2004

1979

Berlin Film Festival

Cairo International Film Festival

Cannes film festival

Dubai International Film Festival

Festival des 3 Continents

Festival Name


Jean Zay, Thierry then French Frémaux Minister for Education and Fine Arts

N/A

N/A

Dorothee Wenner

Current Curator of African Film

Nantes, France

Alain & Philippe Jalladeau

Jérôme Baron

May

Nov/Dec

Feb

Period

Nov/Dec

All films, Dec but focus on Arab cinema

All films

All films

All films

Type

Jérôme Baron Films from Africa, Asia & Latin America

Dubai, Dubai Abdulhamid Nashen United Arab Entertainment Juma Moodley Emirates & Media Organization

Cannes, France

Dr Ezzat Abou Ouf (President)

Oscar Martay Dieter Kosslick

Founder

Cairo, Egypt Kamal El Mallakh & others

Berlin, Germany

Location

Current director(s)

Major International Film Festivals that Support African Filmmaking

World Cinema Fund

Of Special Interest to African Filmmakers

http://www. 3continents.com/

http://www.dubai filmfest.com/

http://www .festival-cannes .com/en.html/

Produire au sud (see http://www .3continents.com/fr/ produire-au-sud/), a training program and workshop

AsiaAfrica Program & Awards

Cinémas du Monde pavilion and its related programs; events at the South African, Nigerian, Kenyan, and North African pavilions

http://www.ciff.org. This is the only FIAPFeg/ (note: there are accredited film festival currently problems in Africa with the website)

http://www. berlinale.de/en/ HomePage.html/

Website

202 Appendix 3

1980

1986

1972

1996

1985

Festival international du film d’Amiens

Festival International du Film Francophone du Namur

Festival International du Film Independent de Bruxelles

Festival Regards sur le cinéma du monde

Fribourg International Film Festival

Fribourg, Switzerland

Rouen, France

Brussels, Belgium

Namur, France

Amiens, France

Martial Knaebel, Magda Bossy & Yvan Stern

Camille Jouhair

Robert Malengreau

Olivier Gourmet

Jean-Pierre García

Thierry Jobin

Camille Jouhair

Nabila Belkacem (Artistic Director)

N/A

N/A

N/A

Nov

Focus on Asian, African & Latin American films

World cinema

World cinema

March/ April

Jan

Nov

Francophone Oct films

Fabien Gaffez All films, & Jean-Pierre but focus García on African, Asian, & Latin American film

Nicole Gillet N/A

Fabien Gaffez

http://www.fiff. ch/en/ OR https:// en-gb.facebook. com/Fribourg InternationalFilm Festival/

https://en-gb .facebook.com/ cinemadumonde/

http://www.fifibruxelles.be/

http://www.fiff.be/

http://www.film festamiens.org/

(Continued)

Les Fonds de Dévélopment du Scénario (a screenwriting award); the journal Le Film Africain et Le Film du Sud (six issues a year)

Appendix 3 203

Amsterdam, Ally Derks Holland

1988

Jonas Holmberg (Artistic Director)

Current director(s)

Ally Derks

Documentary Brett Organization Hendrie of Canada (Executive Director)

Göran Bjelkendahl & Gunnar Carlsson

IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)

Göteborg, Sweden

Founder

Toronto, Canada

1978

Location

Hot Docs Film 1993 Festival

Göteborg International Film Festival

Festival Name

Ended/ Founded Suspended All films

Type Jan/Feb

Period http://www.giff .se/en/

Website

N/A

Documentary Nov films

Blue Ice program (funding and training) for African filmmakers (http://www.hotdocs .ca/funds/hot_docs_ blue_ice_group_ documentary_fund/)

Göteborg International Film Festival Fund, which ran from 19982011 (http://www.giff .se/en/film-fund/)


http://www.idfa.nl/ The Bertha Fund nl.aspx/ (http://www.idfa. nl/industry/idfabertha-fund.aspx/), production funding for filmmakers from ‘developing countries’

Elizabeth Documentary April/May http://www.hotdocs Radshaw films .ca/ (Co-ordinator of Blue Ice program)

N/A


204 Appendix 3

Locarno, Switzerland

Cinephiles in Locarno, who took over the stateorganized “Rassagna del film italiano” in Lugano, Switzerland

Carlo Chatrian (Artistic Director)

Jan

http://www.film festivalrotterdam .com/nl/

All films

Aug

May

Hubert Bals Fund (funding and other support for filmmakers from ‘developing countries’) (http:// www.filmfestivalrotter dam.com/ professionals/ hubert_bals_fund/)

http://www .pardolive.ch/en/

(Continued)

Open Doors (a screening and training program), which sometimes focuses on African filmmakers

http://eng.jiff.or.kr/ Jeonju Digital Project, which sometimes provides funding for African filmmakers

Films from May/June http://www.iffi.at/ Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, & Eastern Europe

Alex Moussa All films Sawadogo (African film advisor)

1946

Locarno International Film Festival

N/A

Gertjan All films Zuilhof & Edwin Carels

Jeonju, Soyoung Kim Ko Suk-man N/A South Korea & others

Helmut Groschup

Rutger Wolfson

2000

N/A

Hubert Bals

Jeonju International Film Festival

Rotterdam, Holland

Innsbruck, Austria

1972

Internationales 1992 (as Film Festival America Innsbruck Film Festival; changed name in 1999)

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)

Appendix 3 205

1976

1976

1932

Seattle International Film Festival

Toronto International Film Festival

Venice Film Festival

Founder

William Marshall, Henk Van der Kolk, & Dusty Cohl

Venice, Italy Benito Mussolini

Toronto, Canada

Seattle, USA Dan Ireland & Darryl MacDonald

London, UK Dilys Powell, James Quinn & others

Location Keith Shiri


Alberto Barbera

Piers Handling & Cameron Bailey (Artistic Director) N/A

Rasha Salti

Carl Spence Dustin Kaspar

Clare Stewart

Current director(s)

All films

All films

All films

All films

Type http://www.bfi.org .uk/lff/

Website


Aug/Sep

Sep

http://www Final Cut program for .labiennale.org/en/ African filmmakers, cinema/ which ran at the 2013 edition of the festival (http://www.labiennale .org/en/cinema/ archive/70th-festival/ final-cut/)

http://tiff.net/ Middle East and festivals/thefestival/ African film program curated by Rasha Salti

May/June http://www.siff.net/ African Pictures Program (initiated in 2013)

Oct

Period

Sources: my own research and http://www.filme-aus-afrika.de/index.php?id=312&L=1/

Please note: I have not included Arab film festivals, or film festivals focused on “Arab cinema” in the list above, since they generally include North African but not sub-Saharan films and filmmakers

1957

London Film Festival

Festival Name


206 Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Black Film Festivals

1998

1995

1986

2007

BFM International

Black Harvest Film Festival

Black International Cinema, Berlin

Black International Film Festival

2009

1997

American Black Film Festival

Founder

Birmingham, UK

Current director(s)

Nadia Denton

Jeff Friday

Kasi Lemmons

Ava DuVernay

Dean Alexander Dean Alexander

Donald Muldrow Griffith

Gene Siskel Barbara Scharres Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Menelik Shabazz

Jeff Friday

Terra Renee

Ava DuVernay

Berlin, Germany Donald Muldrow Griffith

Chicago, USA

London, UK

New York, USA

New York, USA

1998

Location

African American Women in Cinema Film Festival

Ended/ Suspended

Throughout USA

Founded

2013 African American Film Festival Releasing Movement

Festival Name

Black Film Festivals Type

Black films

Black films

Black films

Black films

Black films

Black films

African American films

Period

Website

Oct/Nov

May

Aug

Nov

June

Nov

http://www.biffestival.co.uk/

http://black-internationalcinema.com/

http://www.siskelfilmcenter .org/blackharvest2013/

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/BFM-InternationalFilm-Festival/147334403183/

http://www.abff.com/

http://aawic.org/Home_Page .html/

Throughout http://www.affrm.com/ year

208 Appendix 4

2004

Langston Hughes African American film festival

Seattle, USA

San Francisco, USA

2002

Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute

Adrienne Anderson

Sylviane Rano

International Black Women's Film Festival

Karen Toering

London, UK

Gary, Indiana, USA

Atharina von Flotow

2005

2010

Gary International Black Film Festival

Geneva, Switzerland

Images of Black Women Film Festival

1991

Festival Black Movie

Feb/March

Aug

Black films

Black films

Black films

Jacqueline Moscou

African American films

Adrienne Anderson Black films

Sylviane Rano

Tanya Kersey

Karen Toering

April/May

Oct

April/May

Oct

Oct

Kate Reidy & Maria Emerging talents Jan/Feb Watzlawick and established filmmakers mostly from Asia, Africa, & Latin America

Black films

Harrell D. Williams Black films & Winston G. Williams

Charlotte, North Tommy Nichols Tommy Nichols Carolina, USA

Harrell D. Williams & Winston G. Williams

Hollywood, LA, Tanya Kersey USA

2011

Charlotte Black Film Festival

Austin, Texas, USA

Hollywood Black 2001 Film Festival

2013

Capital City Black Film Festival

(Continued)

http://www.langstoninstitute .org/film-festival/

http://www.ibwff.com/

http://www.imagesofblack women.com/

http://www.hbff.org/

https://www.facebook.com/ Garyblackfilmfest/

http://blackmovie.ch/

http://charlotteblackfilm festival.com/

http://www.capcitybff.com/

Appendix 4 209

San Francisco, USA

Dallas, Texas, USA

2014

2013

1999

2002

1998

Paris Black Film Festival

Portland Black Film Festival

Roxbury International Film Festival

San Diego Black Film Festival

San Francisco Black Film Festival

Texas Black Film 2008 Festival

Current director(s)

Charlon Turner

The Color of Film Collaborative

David Walker

David Small

Ave Montegue

Black films

Black films

Black films

Black films

Black films

Black films

Type

David Small

Black films

Kali O’Ray & Katera Black films Crossley

Karen Huff-Willis

Lisa Simmons

David Walker

Paméla Diop & Paméla Diop & others others

Rhonda Bellamy

San Diego, USA The Black Historical Society of San Diego

Roxbury, Boston, USA

Portland, Oregon, USA

Paris, France

Wilmington, USA

2002

Founder

Quebec, Canada Fabienne Emile Castonguay Colas and the Fabienne Colas Foundation

Location

North Carolina Black Film Festival

Ended/ Suspended

2005

Founded

Montreal International Black Film Festival

Festival Name

Feb

June

Jan/Feb

June

Feb

Different times

March

Sep

Period

http://www.texasblackfilm festival.com/

http://www.sfbff.org/

http://www.sdbff.com/index .html/

http://www.roxburyfilmfestival .org/

http://hollywoodtheatre.org/ portland-black-film-festival-2/

https://en-gb.facebook.com/ ParisBlackFilmFestival/

https://www.facebook.com/ pages/North-CarolinaBlack-Film-Festival/ 152972808069183/

http://www.montrealblackfilm .com/

Website

210 Appendix 4

2012

Sources: own research

Atlanta, USA

New York, USA

WOCAF 2005 (Women of Color Arts and Film) Festival

1997

Urban World

Gabrielle Glore

Iyàlódè N/A productions & Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History

Stacy Spikes

Natalie Morrow Natalie Morrow

Toronto, Canada Fabienne Colas Emile Castongauy & GLOBAL Toronto

Minneapolis, USA

2013

Twin Cities Black 2002 Film Festival

Toronto Black Film Festival

Films by and/or about women of colour

Black films

Black films

Black films

N/A

Sep

Oct

Feb

http://wocaf.org/

http://urbanworld.com/

http://twincitiesblackfilm festival.org/about-tcbff/

http://torontoblackfilm.com/

Appendix 4 211

Notes

Prelims 1. By “guerilla researchers” I mean people who are not bound by academic hierarchies of prestige (from student to professor), and who are unafraid to create their own unconventional sources of knowledge, through attending events, conducting interviews, and pursuing unusual avenues of thought and action.

Introduction 1. For a constantly updated bibliography of scholarship on film festivals, see Skadi Loist and Marijke De Valck’s Film Festival Research Network Bibliography: http://www .filmfestivalresearch.org/index.php/ffrn-bibliography/. Dina Iordanova has also been a pioneer in this field, and her series of (co)edited books on film festivals published by St Andrews Film Studies is an important resource. 2. De Valck (2007), Wong (2011), and Cousins (2013) all seem to concur on this point, as do many of the filmmakers from Africa I interviewed in the course of my research. 3. In this sense, the way Adesokan (2011) speaks of the “shuttling” that occurs between cultural and economic spheres in the global art market is important, but does not adequately recognize how imbricated these spheres in fact are. 4. For a fascinating study of how symbolic and long-term financial value accrue to visual art works (rather than film), see Thornton (2009). 5. Grayson Perry expressed these views in the third of his four BBC Reith Lectures, titled “Nice Rebellion: Welcome In,” which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on October 29, 2013. The lecture series was called “Playing to the Gallery.” 6. See, however, Goerg (1999), Apter (2005), Belghazi (2006), Vincent (2008), Boum (2012), Gibbs (2012), Olaniyan (2012), Andrieu (2013), Barka and Barka (2013), Coquery-Vidrovitch (2013), and Djebbari (2013). It is perhaps symptomatic of historical relationships between Europe and Africa that the discipline that has produced the most scholarly research on festivals in Africa is that of Anthropology (see, e.g., Ranger 1975, Lentz 2001). Recently, the field of African art studies has paid increasing attention to festivals and exhibitions and, in particular, the work of the Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor (see, e.g., “The Twenty-First Century and the Mega Shows: A Curators’ Roundtable” in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art [Spring/Summer 2008]: 152–88; and Ogbechie 2010). 7. Loist and De Valck’s film festival bibliography lists most of the work previously published on film festivals and Africa here: http://www.filmfestivalresearch.org/index.php/ ffrn-bibliography/6-transnational-cinemas/6-3-africa/. Beyond these works, see Vieyra (1969), Tomaselli (1981 and 1984), Diawara (1992a and 2010), Ouedraogo (1995), Givanni (2004), McCain (2011), Caillé (2012), and Dupré (2012).

214 Notes 8. The 2013 Durban International Film Festival held one of the first panel discussions that included reflection on the role film festivals play in the success of films. This panel, held on July 22, 2013, was called “Window to the World—An Insight into World Trends,” and panelists included Stephanie McArthur (HotDocs), Christine Troestrum (Berlin Film Festival), Iwana Chronis (International Film Festival of Rotterdam), Melanie de Vogt (International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam), and Ayuko Babu (Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles). 9. One might assume that if Film Africa had access to the only print, the illegal copying of the film could have occurred at our screening. This would not seem to be the case, however, as the subtitling was not identical. 10. See Lobato (2012: 69–92) for an illuminating discussion of different ways of thinking about piracy. 11. See Wakefield (1962), Preuss (2004), Richards (2006), Hooker (2008), Karpińska– Krakowiak (2009), Abrahams and Wishart (2010), Rasmussen (2010), Roche (2011), Horning (2011), Dorsch (2011), Federici et al (2012), Wynn and Yetis-Bayraktar (2012), Getz (2012), Boum (2012), and Vilenica (nd). 12. De Valck puts the figure much lower, at between 1,200 and 1,900 annually (2007: 105); WithoutaBox, a festival submission platform for filmmakers, claims to work with 5,000 festivals (https://www.withoutabox.com/); Ruoff says there are “several thousand” throughout the world (2012a: 1). 13. Translations from Goerg (1999a) are my own. 14. See the film Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010). 15. This quotation is found on the Cannes film festival’s website, in the section that describes the festival’s history (see http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/about/aboutFestivalHistory.html/). 16. I have conducted approximately 100 interviews with “experts” as well as with “ordinary” festival participants. For a list of the interviews cited in the book, see the Bibliography. 17. I conducted the following surveys in the course of my research: an electronic survey of directors of African film festivals outside of Africa, in 2010 (13 respondents); a paperbased survey of audiences at the 2010 Tarifa African Film Festival (129 respondents), co-conducted with Federico Olivieri; a paper-based survey of audiences at the 2010 Kenya International Film Festival (168 respondents); a paper-based survey of audiences at the 2010 Amakula Kampala International Film Festival in Uganda (66 respondents); a paper-based survey of audiences at the 2013 Rwanda Film Festival (results still being collated); a paper-based survey of audiences at the 2013 Durban International Film Festival (352 respondents); and an electronic survey of “festival” filmmakers from Africa in 2013 (37 respondents). 18. I conducted the following control-group discussions: a two-hour discussion with 20 young women from the Kibera Girls Soccer Academy after a screening of Soul Boy (2010) at the 2010 Kenya International Film Festival (KIFF); a two-hour discussion with approximately 30 local participants at the 2010 KIFF about their views on the festival; and a two-hour discussion with approximately 30 local participants at the 2010 Amakula Kampala International Film Festival about their views on the festival.

Chapter 1 1. Before the advent of the digital era, one might have argued that film had an “aura” in the form of its original print on celluloid. Today, however, the ubiquity of digital copying

Notes 215

means that an “aura” no longer holds in any meaningful way, except perhaps in the rare case of a film existing as a sole copy in archives or through the work of film restoration. 2. See Apter (2013) for a related argument about “world literature.” 3. This is not unlike the impulses of some early ethnographic filmmakers, who instructed “indigenous” subjects to keep all signs of their modern lives out of the frame (Heider 1994). 4. A recent, controversial “restaging” of a world fair in Norway has reignited debate on this topic (Mwesigire 2014). 5. Along with introducing a film festival to complement the visual arts–focused Biennale, the Fascist government initiated a music festival, a drama festival, and poetry competition in the early 1930s (Stone 1999: 190). 6. All three of these films are on YouTube, although without English subtitles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jjZ9U-4nN4/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Kd8Rt3rHvks/, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnZUMMxfJQ4/ 7. It was only in North African countries where colonial control was not as overwhelming that Africans were able to make films in the years prior to this; for example, in Egypt, where a flourishing film industry began in the 1930s, following the country’s 1922 declaration of independence from British military occupation (Shafik 2007). There are a few examples of Africans making films elsewhere as well; for example, the Sudanese filmmaker Gadalla Gubara’s Song of Khartoum in 1955 (see also the documentary about Gubara, Cinema in Sudan [2008]), and Chief William Wilberforce Kajiumbula Nadiope’s films circa the 1930s in East Africa (see Sanogo 2011: 241). 8. Several books emphasize that the production and exhibition of such films continues today (see, for example, Higgins 2012 and Eltringham 2013). 9. Since 2008, film festivals globally have been regulated and accredited (or not) by FIAPF (the International Federation of Film Producers Associations), based in Paris. Festivals accredited by FIAPF are the ones generally known as being part of the “A list”; there is only one “A-list” festival in Africa: the Cairo International Film Festival (founded 1976). As FIAPF says, “Accredited festivals are expected to implement quality and reliability standards that meet industry expectations.” These expectations include strong, year-round resources and structures; international film programming and constitution of juries; professional standards in terms of the printed festival materials; and copyright protection of selected films. The FIAPF does note, however, that it also sees its role as to “support some festivals’ efforts in achieving higher standards over time, despite economic or programming challenges which often stem from a combination of unfavourable geopolitical location, budgets, and a difficult place in the annual festivals’ calendar. This is particularly relevant in the context of the unequal levels of resources and opportunities between film festivals in the Southern and Northern hemispheres.” I am not aware, however, of an African film festival that receives FIAPF support. (See http://www.fiapf.org/intfilmfestivals.asp/.) 10. I had 37 responses to my survey, from filmmakers based all over Africa and in the diaspora, including: Kenya, Morocco, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Senegal, Ethiopia, Ghana, Namibia, Cameroon, Egypt, Mali, Ivory Coast, and Equatorial Guinea. Since the survey focused on African filmmakers’ experiences of film festivals, I circulated it particularly among those filmmakers whose work had recently been screened and lauded at festivals. The survey was created through Free Online Surveys, and a copy is available on request. 11. The relevant question was “Which festival(s) would you be most thrilled to have your film screened at?” The collated response was, in order of preference: Cannes (11); Sundance (10); Berlin (10); Toronto (6); FESPACO (4); Venice (3); Karlovy Vary (1);

216 Notes IDFA (1); Durban (1); Milano African Film Festival (1); Film Africa (1); Tribeca (1). Several respondents left this answer blank, perhaps registering their disenchantment with festivals. 12. It was not until 1972, however, that Cannes transformed its programming protocol from accepting national submissions to active curation (see Gilles Jacob in Latil 2005: 3). 13. For example, one can consider the way the “A-list” film festivals have self-consciously aligned themselves within an annual calendar so as not to clash with one another. The success of the London Film Festival under former director Sandra Hebron, for example, has been partly credited to Hebron’s changing the date of the festival from November to October to better integrate it within the international film calendar (Calhoun nd). 14. Translations from Latil (2005) from French to English are my own throughout this chapter. 15. See http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/cms/55891.html/. 16. The best chance for someone who does not work in the film industry to attend the festival is through applying for a “cinéphile” accreditation. Nevertheless, the festival would remain prohibitively expensive to most, with the cost of hotel rooms increasing dramatically during the 12 days of the festival. I have attended the festival not in my capacity as an academic but as a film professional, thus gaining access to a “market” badge, which provides entry to all the screenings (including industry screenings) as well as the Marché du Cinéma. 17. See http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/cms/55891.html/. 18. See http://tiff.net/festivals/thefestival/theprogrammers/. 19. The “Big Five Festivals” are Venice, Cannes, Locarno, Berlin, and Rotterdam. This label is somewhat of a misnomer now, however, since there are equally important festivals elsewhere, such as the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada, Sundance in the US, and the Busan International Film Festival (formerly called the Pusan International Film Festival) in South Korea.

Chapter 2 1. Loredana Latil says it was the Prix du 50ème anniversaire (2005: 297). 2. See http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/about/whoWeAre.html/. 3. See http://www.quinzaine-realisateurs.com/presentation-h68.html/. 4. See http://www.semainedelacritique.com/EN/historique.php/. 5. The main awards given at Cannes are: the Palme d’Or (for the best film); the Grand Prix; the Best Director; the Best Screenplay Award; the Camera d’Or (for best first film); the Jury Prize; the Best Actress and Actor Awards; the Palme d’Or for best Short Film; the Jury Prize for Short Film; and the Un Certain Regard Award. 6. Bangré is correct that Le Vent des Aures won an award, but it was in 1967, not in 1969; the prize was the Prix de la Première Oeuvre (Prize for First Film). 7. This was the nature of the discussion about Sembene’s film after a screening of it at the conference “Racism, Migration and the Power of Images: African and diasporic cinema in Naples,” held at the University of Naples l’Orientale, Rettorato, October 14–16, 2010. 8. Camp de Thiaroye (1989), for example, won the prize for best film at the Venice Film Festival (Pfaff 1993: 16). 9. Latil (2005: 293) fails to name Cissé and mentions only Mikuni. 10. Diao (2011) notes that nine Africans have been on the Competition jury since the festival’s origins.

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11. For example, neither De Valck (2007) nor Wong (2011) mention the controversy of Cannes 1975 in their otherwise thorough studies of the festival. 12. Translations from Latil from French to English are my own throughout the chapter. 13. The jury was headed by the French actress Jeanne Moreau, and was comprised of: Anthony Burgess (an American writer); André Delvaux (a Belgian editor); Gérard Ducaux-Rupp (a French producer); Léa Massari (an Italian actress); Pierre Mazars (a French journalist); Fernando Rey (a Spanish actor); Georges Roy Hill (an American editor); Pierre Salinger (an American writer); and Youlia Solntzeva (a Soviet director and actress) (Latil 2005: 193). 14. It is important to point out that this pavilion is not just a meeting and networking place for “world filmmakers,” but also a production space. In 2013, of the nine young filmmakers selected for the Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde (a professional program that supports young directors and their producers to “develop and finance their projects”), four were from Africa. These projects have a reasonably high chance of getting made into films, given that 15 percent of the projects workshopped in the past have gone on to be produced. This track record also seems to be improving over time, with 80 percent of the projects in 2012 finding coproduction partners within half a year. See Diao (2011) for further discussion of the pavilion and its work with African filmmakers. It is also vital to contextualize “Les Cinémas du Monde” pavilion within the history of changing French administrations and attitudes to the “support” of filmmakers from Africa. As Andrade-Watkins points out, “The rise of the Socialist government of François Mitterand in 1981 resulted in a shift of emphasis of the French state from technical and financial assistance to individual countries, to a broader focus which would work through the regional grouping of francophone African states as represented by OCAM (Organisation Commune Africaine et Mauricienne). . . . The Film Bureau [that had operated from 1963] came under closer scrutiny by the French government and was increasingly perceived as a political liability, particularly because it provided technical and financial assistance to individual filmmakers, which at times created political problems between France and disgruntled African governments angered by the content of some of the films” (1993: 35). Such political problems continue today, most recently in the case of the banning of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s film Le President (2013) not only by the Cameroonian government, but also through the refusal of the French Ambassador in Cameroon to screen it. The Ambassador’s letter can be found on Bekolo’s blog: http://bekolopress.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/lettre-de-censure-du-film-le-presidentde-lambassadeur-de-france-au-cameroun/. 15. For example, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo says that he was “born” as a filmmaker at Cannes (pers. comm.); the Kenyan filmmaker Bob Nyanja says that the Angers Film Festival is one of his favorites to attend (survey response); and the South African filmmaker Ramadan Suleman speaks highly of the work of the Festival International du Films d’Amiens (survey response). 16. Some of these funds include: the World Cinema Fund at the Berlin Film Festival (https://www.berlinale.de/en/branche/world_cinema_fund/wcf_profil/index.html/); the Hubert Bals Fund at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (http://www.film festivalrotterdam.com/professionals/hubert_bals_fund/); the Göteborg International Film Festival Fund, which ran from 1998–2011 (http://www.giff.se/en/film-fund/); the Bertha Fund (formerly the Jan Vrijman Fund) at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) (http://www.idfa.nl/industry/idfa-bertha-fund.aspx/); Final Cut at the Venice Film Festival, which was open to filmmakers from Africa in 2013 and 2014 (http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/archive/70th-festival/final-cut/); Open Doors at the Locarno Film Festival (http://www.pardolive.ch/en/Open-Doors/

218 Notes Presentation;jsessionid=B10E11112EDA60C5F80291D1B43061B3#.U2jKgscSGMc/); the Blue Ice program at the Hot Docs Film Festival (http://www.hotdocs.ca/funds/ hot_docs_blue_ice_group_documentary_fund/); and the Jeonju Digital Project at the Jeonju International Film Festival (http://eng.jiff.or.kr/c00_news/c10_notice_detail.asp ?idx=68&nowpage=9&objpage=0&search_genre=&search_str=/). Other funds specifically for African filmmakers also exist outside of film festivals, such as US-based production company Focus Features’ “Africa First” project (http://www.focusfeatures.com/ africafirst/). See also Domarkaite (2013), a Masters thesis that explores the European Union’s programs of support for African filmmakers.

Chapter 3 1. The only major showcase devoted to African film prior to the 2010 IFFR’s program occurred in 1986 at the Havana Film Festival (founded 1979), when it held the “Largest Retrospective on African Films in the World” (Wong 2011: 12). 2. See https://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/cinemart/ for an explanation of the work of the CineMart. 3. See http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/professionals/hubert_bals_fund/ for an explanation of the work of the Hubert Bals Fund, and see Ross (2011) for an analysis of the relationship between the fund and the production of Latin American cinema. 4. See Qing (1993); Farahmand (2002, 2010); Wong (2011: 17, 118–19, 121–22, 147, 156–58). 5. Founded in Kampala in 2004, the Amakula Kampala International Film Festival is today experiencing difficulties (see Chapter 6). 6. As Wong points out, the IFFR “pioneered European interest in Asian cinema and films of the global South, and it was also the first festival to promote global coproduction” (2011: 12). Zuilhof was one of the programmers who pioneered this interest; it is thus interesting in terms of our broader understandings of film festivals to see that his initial motivation was not to “discover” films per se, but rather people. 7. One of these 22 films, African Tales (2008), consisted of several short films, produced by Tanzanian filmmaker Imruh Bakari, which were screened together. 8. See Slavin (2001), Dovey (2009: 27–29, 34–45), Higgins (2012), and Eltringham (2013). 9. See http://www.worldconnectors.nl/en/over/. 10. Manthia Diawara describes a similar moment at a screening of Clouds Over Conakry (dir. Cheick Fantamady Camara, 2006) on a Midwestern university campus in the United States (2010: 74–75). 11. There is currently no published version of this interview. The author can be contacted with requests for an audio copy of this interview from Neal MacInnes. 12. Smits and Ellickson also attempted to show Song of Khartoum (1955), an 18-minute color film by Sudanese filmmaker Gadalla Gubara (1920–2008), but there were problems with the arrival of the print. It is worth noting here that this curatorial approach of (re)writing film history is one of three in a typology suggested by Jeffrey Ruoff; the other two approaches involve storytelling and montage (2012a: 7–10). 13. One African filmmaker, who wishes to remain anonymous, reports that at the Tokyo African Film Festival she found herself physically locked in the cinema in which her film was screening (most filmmakers, having watched their films hundreds of times during editing, do not want to watch them again at festivals). When she complained about it later, she was told by the festival organizers that it was “a precaution since Africans are always late!” (survey response)

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14. The previous night, Momar Thiam had spoken for long periods in French. At one point, the translator remarked to the audience in English: “He’s just given you his whole life story.” 15. This award was initiated in 2002 within the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs—the Directors’ Fortnight—and the winner is selected by the filmmakers themselves. 16. Afolayan has 26,400 Twitter followers, most of them Nigerian. 17. Many “A-list” festivals make a distinction between “public screenings” (to which all festival attendees have access) and “industry screenings” (which are reserved for film professionals such as film distributors and sales agents). 18. See http://www.bamart.be/persons/detail/en/730/. 19. See http://www.bamart.be/persons/detail/en/730/. 20. See also http://dubaifilmfest.com/en/industry/submissions/awards/muhr-emirati/. 21. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonju_International_Film_Festival#Jeonju_Digital_ Project/. 22. See http://www.idfa.nl/industry/idfa-bertha-fund/cinema-mondial-tour-2012-2013 .aspx/. 23. Druids are magicians or fortune-tellers of an ancient Celtic religion. 24. See http://gathr.us/. 25. See also Balzer (2014) for an exploration of the various uses of the word “curate.” 26. See http://www.ariselive.com/articles/arise-100-women-kerryn-greenberg/132148/. 27. João Ribas, for example, points out that “Empirical histories of modern art exhibitions—as cultural forms central to the public presentation of art since the 18th century, including critical assessments of how such forms directly affected modes of artistic production—only began to be written in the early 1980s” (2013: 96). 28. See http://www.filmfestivalresearch.org/index.php/ffrn-bibliography/7-programming/. 29. See Issue 18 of ONCURATING.org: http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-18. html#.U2ql2McSGMc/. 30. See http://www.manifestajournal.org/.

Chapter 4 1. See the relatively short list of publications on film festival audiences at http://www .filmfestivalresearch.org/index.php/ffrn-bibliography/8-reception-audiences-commu nities-and-cinephiles/. 2. See, however, the groundbreaking work of Matthias Krings on veejay performances and audience reception at video halls in East Africa (2010, 2013). See also the documentary film Veejays in Daressalaam (2010). 3. This research has included surveys of audiences at four festivals in Africa: Amakula Kampala in Uganda (2010); the Kenya International Film Festival (2010); the Durban International Film Festival (2013); and the Rwanda Film Festival (2013). It has also involved conducting many one-on-one interviews with individual spectators at festivals across the continent. 4. A total of 352 audience surveys were completed, across four of the festival’s five main venues: the Suncoast cinemas (the main festival screening venue), the Elizabeth Sneddon theatre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (the original home of the festival), the Blue Waters Hotel (the festival headquarters), and the Ekhaya Multi-Arts Centre in the township of KwaMashu (the festival’s main “outreach” venue). The fifth main venue of the festival (not covered by my survey) is the Musgrave shopping center’s cinemas. At

220 Notes each screening at the four venues, across seven of the festival’s 11 days, 10 spectators were randomly selected to complete surveys. 5. The question asked was “Why did you come to the screening today?,” followed by a blank space rather than a list of possible answers for respondents to choose from. 6. The question asked was “What do you hope to get out of the festival?,” followed by a blank space rather than a list of possible answers for respondents to choose from. 7. Two French distribution and exhibition companies, COMACICO (created in the early 1920s) and SECMA (created in 1939) largely controlled distribution and exhibition in the West African territory well into the postcolonial period. 8. See the documentary films Afrique Cannes (2013) and Sacred Places (2009). 9. My translation from the French. 10. “Tricontinentalism” is the term generally used to describe the rise of a connected antiimperialist movement among the continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While many attribute its formal origins to the 1966 First Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, some suggest that the idea of Tricontinentalism began in the 1920s (Pitman and Stafford 2009). See Adesokan (2011) for the importance of understanding cultural production in Africa through the lens of Tricontinentalism. 11. Ethnographic French filmmaker Jean Rouch even said that “video is the AIDS of the film industry” (quoted in Barrot 2008: 3). 12. Scholarly work on film festivals that adopts a postcolonial focus includes Falicov (2010), Iordanova and Cheung (2010, 2011), Ross (2011), Wong (2011), Iordanova and Torchin (2012), Ahn (2012), and Nornes (2013). 13. As Patricia Caillé (2014) notes, the Festival International du Film Amateur de Kelibia (FIFAK) is, in fact, the “oldest film festival in Tunisia” and thus the oldest film festival in Africa that has paid attention to African films. Created by the Fédération Tunisienne des Cinéastes Amateurs (FTCA), it has held 28 editions between 1964 and 2013, so is not as regularly held or as well known as JCC. 14. I have found a reference to a film festival that existed for several years during this early independence period in Mogadishu, Somalia, but no further information about it (Tomaselli 1984: 7). 15. I do not have the space in this book, focused as it is on film festivals, to analyze the 1966 Dakar and the 1969 Algiers festivals. Further analysis of these festivals—and, in particular, their respective relationships to their audiences—is forthcoming in future work. 16. Translation from French to English from Dupré is my own throughout this chapter. 17. As many have noted, the festivals should be further spaced apart. FESPACO takes place in February/March, just a few months after JCC in October/November, making it difficult for filmmakers to attend both. 18. It is worth noting here that more recently founded African film festivals on the continent, such as the Luxor African Film Festival (founded 2012), make a similar distinction between North and sub-Saharan Africa. For example, in a press release during its 2014 edition, the Luxor African Film Festival refers to a film workshop in which “20 Egyptians and 20 Africans” will participate. Several scholars have done important work on the relationship between “African” and “Arab” identities in relation to festivals (see Barka and Barka 2013, Apter 2014). 19. The African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) were founded in 2005 by Nigerian filmmaker Peace Anyiam-Osigwe, and are held annually in Yenagoa, Nigeria. The Awards aim to be the “Oscars” of Africa, and have accrued significant influence in film taste-making both within and beyond Africa. See http://www.ama-awards. com/.

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20. Loist notes that “[e]very city that wants to compete in the global creative/cultural market and in the tourist arena . . . now runs an IFF or city festival” (2011: 269). There is, accordingly, a large body of scholarship about the relationships between festivals and cities (see, for example, Stringer 2001). The decision to make Ouagadougou the unlikely capital of “African Cinema” was a strategic one on the part of those who founded FESPACO. In the late 1960s, the sub-Saharan African countries most engaged in film production were Senegal, Niger, and Ivory Coast. This was largely due to aid provided by the French Bureau of African Cinema, created in 1963 (see Chapter 2). Ouagadougou seems to have been chosen for its neutrality, as a way of sidestepping French control, and also avoiding rivalry amongst powerful African nations, such as Nigeria and Senegal. The Burkinabé government was delighted to be elected the host of FESPACO by vote and, in this way, to find what would become the main source of existence for this resource-poor nation in the eyes of the world. After the first festival, Sembene wrote to FESPACO treasurer Hamidou Ouédraogo with the resonant commitment: “mon Coeur est voltaïque” (“my heart is Voltaïque”) (a copy of the full letter can be found in Ouédraogo 1995: 111). 21. Burkina Faso gained its full independence from France (still under the name “ Upper Volta”) on August 5, 1960, with its first president being Maurice Yaméogo, who established a one-party state under his Voltaic Democratic Union (UDV) party. A military-led coup d’état in 1966 brought Lt. Col. Sangoulé Lamizana to the presidency, and he remained in power until 1980, when Col. Saye Zerbo seized control in another coup d’état. The Council of Popular Salvation (CSP) overthrew Zerbo’s government in 1982, under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Ouédraogo, but was hampered by internal conflicts between moderates (such as Ouédraogo) and leftist radicals (such as Captain Thomas Sankara). This conflict led to another coup d’état in 1982, after which Sankara became president. Blaise Compaoré orchestrated a coup d’état in 1987 that involved the murder of Sankara; Compaoré was in power from this time until October 2014, when he was forced to resign after a popular uprising (see Kaboré 2002). 22. Many filmmakers boycotted several editions of FESPACO after the assassination of Sankara (Dupré 2012: 166); certain filmmakers, such as Haile Gerima (from Ethiopia), have refused to attend the festival ever since. The Senegalese filmmaker Amadou Saalum Seck also notes that he encountered problems screening his film Saaraba, which was among several dedicated to Sankara, at FESPACO 1989; he was refused the typical press conference for the film the day following the screening, and he says that “no commentary was made about [the] film by journalists” (survey response). More recently, some African filmmakers have begun boycotting the festival on account of what they see as a drastic fall in the quality of its organization since the arrival of Michel Ouédraogo as Secretary General in 2008, succeeding Baba Hama. For example, Cannes-awardwinning Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun made an explicit decision not to return to the festival after the 2011 edition (see film Afrique Cannes). My 2013 survey of African filmmakers reveals divergent opinions on the historical and contemporary value of FESPACO. Cameroonian filmmaker Victor Viyuoh responded: “FESPACO 2013. A disaster! Two screenings [of my film] and a total audience of less than 15 people!!!” Another filmmaker, who wished to remain anonymous, described FESPACO 2013 as follows: “Incredible level of amateurism from the very beginning. . . . Everything is wrong: incoherent and poor programming, technical issues, exceptionally incompetent staff.” Other filmmakers have had very positive experiences at FESPACO, however. For example, the Burkinabé filmmaker Elénore Yaméogo says that FESPACO has been most useful to her career of all film festivals and attributes the international success of her film Paris mon paradis to its selection in the official documentary section

222 Notes at FESPACO 2011. Despite all its challenges, strong loyalty to FESPACO remains. As festival organizer and curator Katarina Hedrén puts it, “There are still problems to be solved [at FESPACO], like the need to bridge existing language gaps and the appallingly bad organization. However, as is the case in families held together by love or just shared interest, none of these problems seems serious enough to discourage the members to attend the next reunion” (2013a). 23. One recalls here Sembene’s much-quoted reference to cinema as a “night school” for his people. 24. Translation from French to English is my own. 25. It is important to note here, however, that this Africanized perspective had, and continues to have, its own blind spots, particularly in terms of gender. African filmmaking has been dominated by men, and very few African women have had the opportunity to direct films, especially feature fiction films. Women have mostly taken on roles in the industry as actresses, the makers of low-budget documentary films, and film festival organizers and curators (of which Salembéré is an example). The paradoxical combination of the “feminization” of, and the sexism displayed within, the sphere of film festivals (one of the few industry realms to which women have had access, but within which they are often treated as sex objects by men) requires a great deal of further research and exploration. Unfortunately, a complete gender analysis is beyond the scope of this project. However, in Chapter 6, my analysis of the curatorial approaches of festival directors in South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Algeria includes a gendered angle. See also Dovey (2012), in which I discuss some of the relationships between film festivals and women filmmakers from Africa, and Caillé (2012). 26. This film school operated from 1977 to 1987 and was largely funded by the government of Burkina Faso, with assistance from the Mitterand administration in France (Andrade-Watkins 1993: 35); Burkinabé director Fanta Régina Nacro received her primary training there. 27. One of the most fascinating examples of this is how FESPACO used quotes from children saying how much they liked African films in their marketing and publicity materials (Dupré 2012: 189). 28. As De Valck points out, “Festivals have organized official markets since the 1950s, of which Le Marché International du Cinéma, founded in Cannes in 1959, is undoubtedly the most famous and influential” (2014: 45). There have been several attempts within Africa to establish serious film markets. The creation of SITHENGI (the Southern African International Film and Television Market) in Cape Town in 1996, which initiated a parallel festival called the Cape Town World Cinema Festival in 2002, was perhaps the most promising of these, but it collapsed after CEO Michael Auret was forced to step down after the 2005 edition. Today, the Durban FilmMart, founded in 2010 at the Durban International Film Festival, and a new film market inaugurated at the 2014 Luxor African Film Festival in Egypt, carry the hopes of those who seek to professionalize the sector more. 29. The festival brochures started to be translated into English from 1985, and in 1987 French and English were made the official languages of business for FESPACO (Dupré 2012: 175). 30. CODESRIA is the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa and is based in Dakar, Senegal. See http://www.codesria.org/. 31. During a panel discussion at the 2013 Cordoba African Film Festival in Spain, Russell Southwood pointed to a recent market research survey conducted in Nigeria that recorded that: 17 percent of people surveyed would like improvement to the quality of the acting in Nollywood films, 19 percent would like production quality improvement, and 48 percent would like improvement in the storylines.

Notes 223

Chapter 5 1. This program was curated by Silvia Voser, the producer of several of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety’s films. 2. Some scholars argue that these festival “partnerships” have not necessarily been beneficial to FESPACO, in that they have deprived the latter of the world premieres of films and the attendant prestige that accompanies such premieres (see, for example, Diawara 1993; Bikales 1997: 273–4). One cannot ignore the fact, however, that it is ultimately a filmmaker’s choice where he or she will premiere the film, as when Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé chose not to present his film Yeelen in competition at FESPACO 1987. His official reason was that he wanted to give space to other African filmmakers, having already won the top prize at FESPACO twice, for Baara (1979) and Finyé (1983). Some suggest, however, that he wanted to be able to screen the film in competition at Cannes (something he would not have been able to do had it screened in competition at FESPACO) (Dupré 2012: 186). Yeelen went on to share the 1987 Jury Prize at Cannes (see Chapter 2). 3. See http://www.3continents.com/en/le-festival/histoire/. 4. Comments made at the 2011 African Film Distribution Forum at Film Africa. 5. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6228236.stm/. 6. My thanks to Fadhili Maghiya, founder and director of Watch Africa, the Wales African film festival, for undertaking this research. The International Organization for Migration has a fascinating app that allows one to see the number of immigrants from different countries to each country in the world: see http://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/ home/about-migration/world-migration.html/. 7. Until the end of its 1999 edition, the festival focused only on African film; from 2000 onwards, it broadened its geographical remit to screen films from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This can be interpreted as expedient (having a greater pool of films from which to program) and also part of the general global movement towards the institutionalization of “world cinema” (see Chapters 1 and 2). The festival is one of the founders and supporters of a Wikipedia project to make knowledge about African film freely available: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Cinema/. 8. Thirteen surveys were completed, and were used as the basis of my analysis of African film festivals outside of Africa in Dovey (2010). A copy of the survey is available upon request. 9. See http://www.3continents.com/en/le-festival/histoire/. 10. The 2012 Film Africa audience also grew to 3,600 from 2,000 people in 2011. At Film Africa 2011, 553 audience feedback forms were completed, whereas at Film Africa 2012, 941 audience feedback forms were returned. 11. The term “Third World” went out of vogue in the 1980s, overtaken by terms such as “Global South” and “developing countries.” See Tomlinson (2003) for a history and critique of the term. 12. There has also been a significant increase in African film festivals in Brazil in recent years (Bamba 2014). 13. Some of the research presented here was co-conducted with Federico Olivieri, to whom I want to extend my gratitude for a mutually enriching collaboration. Without the contributions of Olivieri, who partly grew up in Tarifa and who has been involved in FCAT since its origins, the research presented here would not have been able to access, to the same extent, the details of the historical and material context in which FCAT takes place. This signals the necessity of collaboration in film festival research, as I have argued elsewhere (see Dovey, McNamara, and Olivieri 2013; and Dovey and Olivieri 2015).

224 Notes 14. My translation from French. 15. For example, in her written welcome in the catalogue for FCAT 2011, Mane Cisneros Manrique clearly states that the “true protagonists” of the festival are African filmmakers (p. 16–17). 16. Prizes awarded in this fourth edition included 20,000 euros for the best fiction feature film (in addition to an acquisition deal offered by TVE, the main public television broadcaster in Spain); 10,000 euros for the best director of a fiction feature film; and 10,000 euros for the best documentary. While there were several roundtables at this edition, it was only in 2009 that FCAT inaugurated the Jornadas profesionales (Professional meetings), which included the first coproduction forum between African filmmakers and Spanish film producers. 17. See http://www.filmfestamiens.org/?Entry-form-and-the-regulations&lang=en/. 18. My translation from French. 19. For further background on the Festival International du Films d’Amiens, which has quite distinct origins from the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes, see Tomaselli (1984). For a critical analysis of its 13th edition, see Kaboré (1993). 20. Translation from Spanish was done by Federico Olivieri. 21. Most of this funding came from the Cordoba City Hall. 22. See http://www.enar-eu.org. 23. See http://africasacountry.com/africa-and-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/. 24. The film was an official selection at Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, and Busan. 25. See the AFRICALA Festival de Cine Africano page on Facebook for more information. 26. Africa’s relationships with countries beyond Europe and North America are nothing new, of course, and at Film Africa 2012 we devised a program strand called “Continental Crossings” to trace out the rich and complicated relationships that have long existed between African nations and countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, Burma, the former Soviet Union, Ukraine, and India. 27. One non-profit organization that is specifically aiming to redress this problem is Art Moves Africa (AMA), founded in 2005, which provides funding for artists to travel to meet one another in Africa (see http://www.artmovesafrica.org/). 28. See http://www.ama-awards.com/news/amaa-roundtable-toronto-film-festival-challen ges-african-leaders/. 29. In Sweden, Hedrén was a co-organizer of the CinemAfrica Film Festival in Stockholm. Now living in South Africa, she co-organizes the monthly First Wednesday Film Club at Atlas Studios in Johannesburg (http://www.atlasstudios.co.za/filmclub.php/), and is also involved with the organization and curating of the Encounters Documentary Film Festival and the Tri Continental Film Festival.

Chapter 6 1. ARTerial Network is a “dynamic network of individuals, organizations, donors, companies and institutions engaged in the African creative and cultural sector” (http://www. arterialnetwork.org/). It is currently helmed by Peter Rorvik, formerly director of the Durban International Film Festival. 2. See http://www.afrifestnet.org/en/node/10/. 3. See http://www.afrifestnet.org/en/liste-festival/. 4. See the Africa Vision Exchange page on Facebook. 5. My translation from French.

Notes 225

6. See http://www.nadirbouhmouch.com/1/post/2013/12/scorsese-more-at-home-inmorocco-than-a-moroccan.html/ for a critique of the Marrakech International Film Festival by Moroccan filmmaker Nadir Bouhmouch. 7. These were not the only festivals founded in the region around this time. Others include: the Johannesburg and Cape Town film festivals (founded 1976); and several student and ethnographic film festivals in South Africa, such as the First National Student Film and Video Festival, at Rhodes University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies, July 15–18, 1981, and the first Ethnographic Film Festival, held at the School of Dramatic Art at the University of Witwatersrand, July 21–26, 1980 (see Hayman 1981, Tomaselli 1981, and Grove 1981 for analysis of some of these festivals). 8. Late-night debates at film festivals I have attended often feature conversations about the relative value of FESPACO and DIFF. Most tend to agree that while FESPACO remains important because of its unusual heritage (based as it is in one of the poorest countries in Africa) and the historic support it has given African filmmakers, DIFF is today a superior festival in terms of the provision of professional and practical opportunities, and its position within the mainstream international film festival circuit. 9. eThekwini is a metropolitan municipality created in 2000 that includes the city of Durban and surrounding towns. 10. I was not able to interview Ros Sarkin in my research because she is very ill. Much of my analysis of the early editions of the festival thus relies on archival research of newspapers, conducted at the Killie Campbell Archives in Durban, as well as some contemporary interviews, reports, and debates about the festival recommended by Professor Keyan Tomaselli. 11. Television channels at the time were also segregated, with specified “black” television channels offering a diet of particularly inane programming, from documentaries about the manufacturing of furniture to etiquette shows for teenage girls. International boycotts against South Africa, which meant that foreign television channels refused to sell content to the country, were part of the reason for this myopic programming. 12. It is interesting to note that this film includes a sequence in which Brocka focuses on then-president Ferdinand Marcos’s exploitation of construction workers in the building of a site for his own film festival (Malcolm 2001). 13. Lynne Kelly, “Three Films Highlight Same Theme,” in Natal Mercury, Tuesday, June 10. 14. The release was not successful, however, and distributor Ster-Kinekor noted that the film did not even recoup its publicity costs (Tomaselli 1988: 173). 15. Lynne Kelly, “Society through another set of eyes,” Natal Mercury, Monday, June 9, 1980, p. 6. 16. No author, “Film gamble paid off,” Natal Mercury, Wednesday, June 18, 1980, p. 13. 17. Lynne Kelly, “Glimpse of an alien lifestyle,” Natal Mercury, Monday, May 10, 1982, p. 8. 18. Ibid. 19. Lynne Kelly, “German film gets green light for Durban festival,” Natal Mercury, Friday, May 14, 1982, p. 5. 20. No author, “Film gamble paid off,” Natal Mercury, Wednesday, June 18, 1980, p. 13. 21. No author, “Festive fare,” Natal Mercury, Town & Around Supplement, Friday, June 13, 1980, p. 8. 22. No author, “Film gamble paid off,” Natal Mercury, Wednesday, June 18, 1980, p. 13. 23. Derek Malcolm, “What’s the Point of Film Festivals?,” Natal Mercury, Town & Around Supplement, Friday, May 14, 1982, p. 7. 24. Lynne Kelly, “Film festival for blacks urges visiting British critic,” The Natal Mercury, Monday, May 24, 1982, p. 6.

226 Notes 25. See http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=6869&t=Boycotts/. 26. Sara Blecher, today one of South Africa’s leading filmmakers, says that the festival played a hugely formative role in her personal and professional life as she grew up in Durban (pers. comm.). 27. See http://www.cca.ukzn.ac.za/. 28. South Africa today has myriad film festivals, which include: the Encounters documentary film festival; the Tri Continental Film Festival; the significant film festival that takes place within the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, curated by Trevor Steele Taylor; the Jozi Film Festival; the Cape Town and Winelands International Film Festival; and Out in Africa, the only film festival in Africa dedicated to LGBT rights and identities. 29. DIFF’s diverse range of local and global funders and partners can be seen here: http:// www.durbanfilmfest.co.za/2013/funders-partners/. 30. The Berlin Film Festival has pioneered similar programs at festivals in Guadalajara, Buenos Aires, Beirut, Sarajevo, and Tokyo (see http://www.berlinale-talents.de/channel/109.html/). 31. See http://www.durbanfilmmart.com/About-DFM/What-is-DFM/. 32. See http://www.afford-uk.org/. 33. See http://africasacountry.com/africa-and-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/. 34. This story—of the closure of formal cinemas, and their conversion into supermarkets as well as mosques and churches—is a common one across the African continent (Barlet 2000, McClune 2010). There are only a few places on the continent where a vibrant, formal cinema-going culture survives: to some extent in Nigeria, where the Silverbird cinema chain is reviving this culture (there are 14 multiplex cinemas in Nigeria, and approximately 70 screens, according to a 2014 press release from distribution company Talking Drum Entertainment; see also Haynes 2014); in Egypt, where there has long been a strong film culture (Shafik 2007); and in South Africa, but mostly among the white, Afrikaans community. At the same time, there are many examples across Africa of what Ramon Lobato (2012) calls the “shadow economies of cinema,” of people viewing films collectively outside of their homes in small video halls or parlors. As Fuglesang recounts (1994), there are also many instances of people gathering in the homes or courtyards of others to watch a film, in what becomes a mixture of a domestic and public screening. Notably, Nigerian entrepreneur Dayo Ogunyemi is attempting to make public cinema-going more affordable through his Cinemart project, which aims to construct 10,000 cinema screens across Africa in the period 2013-2023. The cinemas will be set up inside tents, with digital projection facilities and tickets that cost the local equivalent of 20 cents. The project is to be initiated in Kenya, where Ogunyemi says that electricity infrastructure is better than in Nigeria, and where the government has created an environment conducive to ICT business. Part of the plan is to dub films into Swahili for the 150 million Swahili speakers across East Africa, thereby reaching a potentially vast audience (see also Overbergh 2014). 35. For further historical and contemporary background on filmmaking and film-viewing cultures in Tanzania, see Smyth (1989), Bryce (2010), Fair (2009, 2010a, 2010b), Böhme (2013), and Krings (2013). 36. Skeens still runs a hotel and restaurant in Zanzibar (Emerson Spice), although he is no longer involved with ZIFF. 37. As noted above, much of the funding for this advocacy work comes from European and North American embassies, development aid organizations, and other groups. For example, the Danish Film Institute has been instrumental to ZIFF’s film programs for children, called “Children’s Panorama.”

Notes 227

38. Zanzibar is made up of two large islands—Unguja Island (where Stone Town is located) and Pemba—as well as several smaller islands. 39. Scholarship on the relationship between film festivals and tourism can be found at: http://www.filmfestivalresearch.org/index.php/ffrn-bibliography/3-festival-spacecities-tourism-and-publics/. 40. The anger that has arisen on account of this tourism, and the lack of respect for local customs, is perhaps one way to interpret the August 7, 2013 “acid” attack on two young British volunteer teachers in Zanzibar (see Karim, Albagir, and Smith-Spark 2013). 41. For further analysis on how locals negotiate tourism in Tanzania, see Salazar (2006). 42. Mhando has had a fascinating life. His filmmaking career began in his second year of university, when the first Japanese crew came to Africa to make a film called Asante Sana (1972) and hired Mhando as assistant director. This led to Mhando’s apprenticeship in Japan under the filmmaker Senkichi Taniguchi. Later, from 1976 to 1979, Mhando studied filmmaking in Romania on a scholarship granted to him because of Tanzania’s socialist status (pers. comm.). 43. I attended some of the Children Panorama screenings in 2013 and they were very well run, unlike many “outreach” programs at film festivals on the continent. 44. My translation from French. 45. Ellickson and Smits were also the curators of the “Where is Africa?” program at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam, discussed in Chapter 3. 46. The festival nevertheless continues today, run by the AECID centers, as the SouthSouth Itinerant Film Festival, a traveling film event in which African and South American films are taken to different parts of Equatorial Guinea over 10 days. Thanks to Federico Olivieri for providing this information. 47. Audience research that I conducted at AKIFF 2010 revealed that 80 percent of the surveyed audience was aged 19–34 with 64 percent working in the film industry or studying filmmaking (66 surveys were completed). The results from an identical audience survey I conducted at the 2010 edition of the Kenya International Film Festival revealed very similar results, with 82 percent of the surveyed audience aged 19–34 and 59 percent working in the film industry or studying filmmaking (168 surveys were completed). 48. The festival had five main sections: The African Panorama; The Regional Focus on the East (including Ugandan films) and Regional Visions (including international films about Uganda); Contemporary World Cinema; Landmarks (Western cinema classics); and Highlights and Tributes (retrospectives). Each year it also held a three-day Congress on East African Cinema, and many training workshops and master-classes for filmmakers. 49. See http://kampala1ne.wordpress.com/tag/amakula-kampala-international-film-festival/. 50. It is still rare for film festivals, anywhere in the world, to use extensive audience feedback forms. Most film festivals invite the audience’s feedback solely through presenting an Audience Award for the film that gains the most public votes. 51. For more about the RFF, see Cieplak (2010) and the documentary Finding Hillywood (2013). 52. For further background, see Journal of African Cinemas 3.2 (2012), a special issue on Lusophone filmmaking and industries in Africa. 53. Diao maintains an interesting and important blog on African film: http://weloveafricanfilms.blogs.courrierinternational.com/. 54. Balancing Act is a consultancy and research organization that provides regular updates and reports on the broadcast and telecommunications industries in Africa (see http:// www.balancingact-africa.com/).

228 Notes

Chapter 7 1. For a history of DIFF, see Chapter 6. 2. The Suncoast cinemas, although an unabashedly commercial enterprise, have had an interesting and complex history that has led to their support for DIFF. AB Moosa, the Managing Director of Avalon Group—the owner of the cinemas and South Africa’s largest and oldest independent cinema exhibition company—explains as follows: “South Africa’s history was very inextricably linked, from a business and economic point of view, to the political scenario that we contended with. . . . My late grandfather, AB senior after whom I’m named, as a young boy used to firstly sell newspapers to earn pocket money, and . . . he used to use that pocket money to go and watch movies because that was his passion and his love and he had a dream that one day he’d own his own cinema so he could go in for free and that is how the dream started. So in 1939 he co-founded the first Avalon theatre. At the time there were not really any sufficient or appropriate facilities for the majority of South Africans so it became the first decent non bug-house cinema that catered for all peoples. . . . And then he built a chain of cinemas, the largest independent at that time. And that spanned the length and breadth of South Africa from Cape Town to Paarl, Worcester, Kimberley, Johannesburg. . . . Flowing from the unfortunate dynamic that unfolded a decade later when apartheid came into effect in 1948 . . . unfortunately most of the cinemas were directly or indirectly expropriated to the legislation of the apartheid system” (pers. comm.). By the 1990s, Avalon had only one cinema screen, and it has taken two decades for AB Moosa and his father, Moosa Moosa, to rebuild the company. 3. See http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CI/WPFD2009/pdf/ Films%20and%20Publications%20Act%202009.pdf/ for the latest version of the Film and Publications Act, with the 2009 amendments underlined. This clearly shows the government’s increased focus on what it calls “child pornography.” 4. While the literary reference to “Lolita” is clear, it is also important to note that Nolitha is a popular Xhosa name in South Africa, from the Eastern Cape region where Qubeka was raised. 5. The meeting was organized by the IPO (Independent Producers Organization), SASFED (South African Screen Federation), Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions), and other groups, and was held on July 21, 2013 at the Blue Waters Hotel, the festival’s then-headquarters. 6. This meeting was held on July 24, 2013 at the Blue Waters Hotel; notably, it had been scheduled into the festival program as a panel discussion with the FPB before any of the controversy around Of Good Report occurred. A full account of the meeting can be found in Blignaut (2013). 7. Festival press release; see http://versfeld.co.za/versfeld-associates/2013/6/7/the-34thdurban-international-film-festival-announces-its-opening-night-film/. 8. Festival press release; see http://versfeld.co.za/versfeld-associates/2013/6/7/the-34thdurban-international-film-festival-announces-its-opening-night-film/. 9. Interview in the documentary Afrique Cannes. 10. See page 20 of the Act. 11. De Valck notes that controversies have long been used by film festivals to market films, and points to the example of Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 which “shows that political interests and managerial restrictions for distribution can, in fact, go hand in hand creating a controversy that enabled Moore to win the Golden Palm of the world’s most prestigious festival and subsequently proceed to score a box office hit in commercial theatres and the DVD market” (2007: 87). Modisane (2012) also

Notes 229

provides ample and fascinating evidence of how the banning of films during apartheid aided interest in them abroad. 12. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8957996/Spain-demandsEU-payments-to-cover-loss-of-Moroccan-fishing-rights.html/. 13. Morocco’s aggressive behavior towards Western Sahara was punished by its exclusion from the African Union as far back as 1984. The UN has also recognized Western Sahara’s right to independence, although France’s veto on the UN Security Council has continuously prevented a much-needed referendum on Sahrawi sovereignty going ahead since it was first mandated in 1991. In October 2013 at the UN General Assembly, current South African president Jacob Zuma put the cause of the Palestinian and Sahrawi people on the same level of urgency in calling for their self-determination. Strong support for the Sahrawi cause from South Africa was fully in evidence at FiSahara 2013, with ANC representatives announcing, at the festival, a R1 million (roughly £60,000) donation to the Sahrawi people. Young South African filmmaker Milly Moabi also won first prize at FiSahara 2013 for her documentary Mayibuye i-Western Sahara! (Come Back, Western Sahara!), named after the first anti-apartheid film ever made, Come Back, Africa (1959). 14. Useful information and eyewitness accounts can be found in the documentary films El Problema, Sons of the Clouds, and The Runner. 15. Of the eight human rights-oriented film festivals “related to (involuntary) migration” listed by Beatriz Tadeo Fuica in Iordanova and Torchin (2012: 297), FiSahara is the only festival that takes place within the space of that involuntary migration. The table provided by Fuica also calls FiSahara a “mobile” film festival, but it should be noted that since 2006, the festival no longer travels to a different wilaya each year, but is always held only in Dakhla. According to FiSahara cofounder Javier Corcuera this is because “Dakhla is the furthest of the camps” from Tindouf, and so most in need of solidarity (pers. comm.; my translation from Spanish to English here and throughout chapter). The Sahrawi refugees based in other wilayas do not resent that FiSahara is now held annually in Dakhla because they see it as one of a number of Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) celebrations held across the year in different wilayas (Lehbib pers. comm.). 16. While one might assume that this “Hispanophone” connection is the result of postcolonial ties between Western Sahara and its former colonizer Spain, Pablo San Martín points out that “the process of Hispanisation [of the Western Sahara] is a new and ongoing process that has to do, more than with the poor Spanish colonial legacy, with postcolonial connections with Latin America. A significant part of the emerging Saharawi elites have been educated in Cuba. As a result, the Cubarawis are a new ‘tribe’ that is contributing to the definition of the new Saharawi society—and also generating tensions” (2009: 249). There were not to my knowledge, however, any Cubans present at FiSahara 2013. 17. See the tables of human rights and activist film festivals in Iordanova and Torchin (2012: 281–301); the majority of these festivals are not located in the places where people are suffering from the human rights abuses shown in the films screened. 18. Thank you to Christine Singer for bringing this proverb to my attention. 19. Noam Chomsky has suggested that the Gdeim Izik protest was the beginning of the “Arab Spring” in North Africa (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTjOt0Pz0BQ/). 20. My translation from Spanish.

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248 Bibliography Stringer, Julian (2010). “Review of Marijke De Valck, Film Festivals: from European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007, 276pp.” Screen 51.1 (Spring): 82–84. Stringer, Julian (2001). “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy.” In Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds, Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Oxford: Blackwell, 134–44. Tang, Jeannine (2011). “Biennalization and its Discontents.” In Moeran and Pederson (2011): 73–93. Tarrow, Sidney (2005). The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tcheuyap, Alexie (2011). Postnationalist African Cinemas. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tcheuyap, Alexie (2010). “Comedy of power, power of comedy: strategic transformations in African cinemas.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 22.1: 25–40. Teno, Jean-Marie (1992). Afrique, je te Plumerai. Cameroon: California Newsreel, 88 minutes. Terán, Shus. 2009. “El PP de Tarifa insiste en que el Festival de Cine Africano ‘no es un atractivo turístico.’” (“The PP of Tarifa insists that the Festival of African Cinema ‘is not a tourist attraction.’”) EuropaSur, February 3. http://www.europasur.es/article/comarca/340923/ pp/tarifa/insiste/festival/cine/africano/quotno/es/atractivo/turisticoquot.html/. Accessed June 1, 2014. Thackway, Melissa (2014). “Exile and the ‘Burden of Representation’: Trends in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Francophone African Filmmaking.” Black Camera 5.2 (Spring): 5–20. Thackway, Melissa (2003). Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film. Oxford: James Currey. Thornton, Sarah (2009). Seven Days in the Art World. London: Granta. Thorpe, Vanessa (2014). “Cannes 2014 struggle with strikes, showers and unhappy critics.” The Observer, May 18. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/18/cannes2014-film-festival-strikes-showers-unhappy-critics/. Accessed June 1, 2014. Tomaselli, Keyan (2013). “Child pornography and the law: The Case of Of Good Report (2013). Reopening debates on secrecy, information and censorship.” Position paper circulated at 2013 Durban International Film Festival. Eight pages. Tomaselli, Keyan (1988). The Cinema of Apartheid: Race and Class in South African Film. New York and Chicago: Smyrna/Lake View Press. Tomaselli, Keyan (1984). “Cultural Interventions: Beyond the Boycott.” An interview with Peter Chappell and Jean-Pierre Garcia of the Amiens Film Festival. The South African Film and Television Technicians Association (SAFTTA) Journal 4.1–2: 6–12. Tomaselli, Keyan (1981). “Film Festivals—which audience: punk rockers, European immigrants or the ‘mass’ audience?” The South African Film and Television Technicians Association (SAFTTA) Journal 2.1 (November): 11–14. Tomlinson, B. R. (2003). “What Was the Third World?” Journal of Contemporary History 38.2 (April): 307–21. Torchin, Leshu (2012). “Networked for Advocacy: Film Festivals and Activism.” In Iordanova and Torchin (2012): 1–12. Turan, Kenneth (2002). Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank, ed. (2014). Critical Approaches to African cinema discourse. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank (2014a). “Introduction: Proliferating African Film Discourse.” In Ukadike (2014): ix–xvi.

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250 Bibliography Zeleza, Paul, ed. (2003). Leisure in Urban Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press. Zielinski, Ger (2008). “Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence and Cultural Politics of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals.” PhD thesis. McGill University, Montreal.

List of Interviews (cited in book) Absa, Moussa Sene (2010). Personal communication (audio interview). Tarifa African Film Festival. May 25. Afolayan, Kunle (2010). Personal communication (audio interview). Tarifa African Film Festival, May 23. Bailey, Cameron (2011). Personal communication (audio interview). Toronto International Film Festival. September 17. Baron, Jérôme (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Cannes film festival. May 20. Bekolo, Jean-Pierre (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Durban International Film Festival. July 26. Blecher, Sara (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Johannesburg. December 23. Brouwer, Wim (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FiSahara film festival. October 13. Carels, Edwin (2010). Personal communication (filmed interview). International Film Festival of Rotterdam. February 5. Corcuera, Javier (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Cordoba African Film Festival. October 19. Davidi, Guy (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FiSahara film festival. October 13. Diao, Claire (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Cordoba African Film Festival. October 18. Ebdadi, Galia (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). FiSahara film festival. October 10. el-Tahri, Jihan (2011). Personal communication (audio interview). FESPACO. March 2. Essuman, Hawa (2010). Personal communication (audio interview). Tarifa African Film Festival. May 27. García, Jean-Pierre (2009). Personal communication (filmed interview). Cannes film festival. May 20. García Benito, Nieves (2010). Personal communication (audio interview). Co-conducted with Federico Olivieri. Tarifa African Film Festival. May 24. Hedrén, Katarina (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Johannesburg. December 4. Jones, Sarah Ping Nie and Jean Meeran (2013). Personal communication (unrecorded discussion). Cape Town. December 17. Kanyinda, Balufu-Bakupa (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Cannes film festival. May 19. Lehbib, Safia Abderahman (2013). Personal communication (unrecorded discussion). FiSahara film festival. October 10. Luali, Takiyo (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). FiSahara film festival. October 10. Manrique, Mane Cisneros (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FESPACO. March 2.

Bibliography 251

Mhando, Martin (2014). Personal communication (audio interview by Skype). London/ Perth. February 28. Moodley, Nashen (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Sydney. September 25. Pimenta, Pedro (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FESPACO. March 1. Radshaw, Elizabeth (2013). Personal communication (audio interview by Skype). London/ Toronto. August 20. Rorvik, Peter (2013). Personal communication (filmed interview). Cape Town. December 18. Salembéré, Alimata (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FESPACO. February 26. Salti, Rasha (2011). Personal communication (audio interview). Toronto International Film Festival. September 16. Sissoko, Cheick Oumar (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). Cannes film festival. May 22. Smits, Alice (2010). Personal communication (filmed interview). International Film Festival of Rotterdam. February 4. Teno, Jean-Marie (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FESPACO. March 1. Thiam, Momar (2010). Personal communication (filmed interview). International Film Festival of Rotterdam. February 3. Umulisa, Romeo (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). FESPACO. March 3. Wenner, Dorothee (2013). Personal communication (audio interview). Durban International Film Festival. July 20. Zuilhof, Gertjan (2010). Personal communication (filmed interview). International Film Festival of Rotterdam. January 28.

Filmography 12 Years a Slave (2013). Dir. Steve McQueen. US/UK. 134min. Available from Amazon. Abouna (2002). Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. France/Chad/Netherlands. 84min. Available from Amazon. African Rhythms (1966). Dir. I. Venzher and L. Mahnach. USSR (Second Creative Union of Moscow). 69min. Held in the reserves of the Russian state cinematic and photographic archive. Afrique Cannes (2013). Dir. Dave Calhoun and Don Boyd. UK. 82min. Distributed by The Festival Agency. Alhambrista! (1977). Dir. Robert M. Young. US. 110min. Available from The Criterion Collection. All That Jazz (1979). Dir. Bob Fosse. US. 123min. Available from Amazon. Anchor Baby (2010). Dir. Lonzo Nzekwe. Nigeria. 95min. Available on iROKOtv and http:// www.anchorbabymovie.com/ Aristotle’s Plot (1997). Dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo. France/UK/Zimbabwe. 70min. Distributed by JBA Production. Asante Sana (Waga Itoshino Tanzania) (1972). Dir. Senkichi Taniguchi. Japan/Tanzania. No further information available. L’Avventura (1960). Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Italy/France. 143min. Available from Amazon. Awake from Mourning (1981). Dir. Chris Austin. UK. 50min. Rights held by Channel 4. Baara (Work) (1978). Dir. Souleymane Cissé. Mali. 90min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris.

252 Bibliography Bad Timing (1980). Dir. Nicholas Roeg. UK. 122min. Available from Amazon and The Criterion Collection. The Battle of Algiers (1966). Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Italy/Algeria. 121min. Available from Amazon and The Criterion Collection. Beauty (2011). Dir. Oliver Hermanus. South Africa. 98min. Distributed by Peccadillo Pictures. Bengasi (1942). Dir. Augusto Genina. Italy. 90min. Available on YouTube (without English subtitles): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnZUMMxfJQ4/. Black Wax (1982). Dir. Robert Mugge. UK. 79min. Available from Amazon. Bona (1980). Dir. Lino Brocka. Philippines. 85min. Print available through MoMA Collection. Bon Voyage Sim (1966). Dir. Moustapha Alassane. Niger. 5min. Distributed by POM Films. Borom Sarret (1963). Dir. Ousmane Sembene. Senegal. 22min. Print available from New Yorker Films and BFI. DVD available from Amazon and (in French) from Médiathèque des Trois Mondes. The Boy Kumasenu (1952). Dir. Sean Graham. Gold Coast (Ghana). 63min. Available to view free online at: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/332/. Bronco Billy (1980). Dir. Clint Eastwood. US. 116min. Available from Amazon. Bye Bye Africa (1999). Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Chad/France. 86min. Available from filmmaker. Bye Bye Brasil (1978). Dir. Carlos Diegues. Brazil. 100min. Available from Amazon. Call Me Kuchu (2012). Dir. Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright. Uganda/ US. 87min. Available from Amazon. Camp de Thiaroye (1989). Dir. Ousmane Sembene. Senegal. 157min. Will be available on MNet African Film Library. Cane/Cain (2011). Dir. Jordache Ellapen. South Africa. 15min. Available from filmmaker. The Chess Players (1978). Dir. Satyajit Ray. India. 125min. Available from Amazon. The Children of Troumaron (2012). Dir. Harrikrisna Anenden and Sharvan Anenden. Mauritius. 90min. Available from filmmaker. Chroniques des années de braise (1975). Dir. Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina. Algeria. 177min. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZeoLKJtHbU/. Cinema in Sudan: Conversations with Gadalla Gubara (2008). Dir. Frederique Cifuentes. Sudan/UK. 52min. Available from filmmaker. Clouds Over Conakry (2006). Dir. Cheick Fantamady Camara. Guinea/France. 97min. Available from filmmaker. Come Back, Africa (1959). Dir. Lionel Rogosin. US/South Africa. 95min. Distributed by Villon Films and the Cineteca di Bologna. The Couple in the Cage (1993). Dir. Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia. 34min. Available on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/79363320/. Daratt (2006). Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Chad/France. 96min. Available from Amazon. Dear Mandela (2012). Dir. Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza. South Africa/US. 93min. Available on iTunes. Debbie (1965). Dir. Elmo de Witt. South Africa. 85min. Not currently available. Difficult Love (2010). Dir. Zanele Muholi. South Africa. 48min. Distributed by SABC. Drama Consult (2012). Dir. Dorothee Wenner. Germany/Nigeria. 80min. Available from filmmaker. Drum (2005). Dir. Zola Maseko. South Africa. 97min. Available from filmmaker. Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010). Dir. Manthia Diawara. US. 50min. Available from Third World Newsreel.

Bibliography 253

The Education of Auma Obama (2011). Dir. Branwen Okpako. Germany/Kenya. 79min. Distributed by Filmkantine. Eldridge Cleaver Black Panther (1969). Dir. William Klein. Algeria. 70min. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oveOiKSj7Jo/. El Problema (2010). Dir. Jordi Ferrer Cortijo and Pablo Vidal Santos. Western Sahara/Spain. 82min. Available from filmmakers. Emitaï (1971). Dir. Ousmane Sembene. Senegal. 106min. Will be available on MNet African Film Library. La Espalda del Mundo (The Back of the World) (2000). Dir. Javier Corcuera. Spain. 105min. Available from Amazon. Ezra (2007). Dir. Newton Aduaka. France/Nigeria/US/UK/Austria. 103min. Available from Amazon. Faso Furie (2012). Dir. Michael Kamuanga. Burkina Faso. 100min. Available from TV5Monde+Afrique (in France only). La femme au couteau (1969). Dir. Timité Bassori. Ivory Coast. 90min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. The Figurine (2009). Dir. Kunle Afolayan. Nigeria. 120min. Available from IbakaTV: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DpXrwUAsUQ/. Finding Hillywood (2013). Dir. Chris Towey and Leah Warshawski. US/Rwanda. 58min. Available from The Cinema Guild. Finyé (The Wind) (1983). Dir. Souleymane Cissé. Mali. 100min. Available from Trigon Film. First World Festival of Negro Arts (1966). Dir. William Greaves. US/Senegal. 40min. Distributed by William Greaves Productions. Five Broken Cameras (2012). Dir. Guy Davidi and Emad Burnat. Palestine/Israel. 94min. Available from Amazon. From Carthage to Carthage (2009). Dir. Khaled Barsaoui. Tunisia. 27min. Available from the Mediateca de Casa Árabe in Spain. Fuelling Poverty (2012). Dir. Ishaya Bako. Nigeria. 28min. Available on YouTube: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVq10BwzQoI/. Grand Magal à Touba (1960). Dir. Blaise Senghor. Senegal. 25min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Grey Matter (2011). Dir. Kivu Ruhorahoza. Rwanda. 110min. Distributed by Camera Club. Grisgris (2013). Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Chad/France. 101min. Distributed by Les Films du Losange. Guerilla Grannies (2013). Dir. Ike Bertels. Mozambique. 80min. Available from Icarus Films. Handsworth Songs (1986). Dir. John Akomfrah. UK. 61min. Distributed by Smoking Dogs Films. Heritage Africa (1989). Dir. Kwaw Ansah. Ghana. 126min. Will be available on MNet African Film Library. La Hora de Los Hornos (1968). Dir. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. Argentina. 260min. Available on YouTube (in Spanish): http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jQOXKoMHOE0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqaHNU03aag/. The Hunters (1957). Dir. John Marshall. US. 72min. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. Indochine: Traces of a Mother (2010). Dir. Idrissou Mora Kpai. Benin/Vietnam/France. 71min. Distributed by MKJ films. Irapada (2007). Dir. Kunle Afolayan. Nigeria. 110min. Available from IbakaTV: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSRzvDSn36c/. Julie et Romeo (2011). Dir. Boubacar Diallo. Burkina Faso. 92min. Available from Films du Dromadaire.

254 Bibliography Just Tell Me What you Want (1980). Dir. Sidney Lumet. US. 112min. Available from Amazon. Kaka yo (1966). Dir. Sebastien Kamba. Congo-Brazzaville. 28min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Karim (1970). Dir. Momar Thiam. Senegal. 69min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Kibera Kid (2006). Dir. Nathan Collett. Kenya. 12min. Available on vimeo: http://vimeo. com/75762619/. King Naki and the Thundering Hooves (2011). Dir. Tim Wege. South Africa. 80min. Available from Plexus Films and Miki Redelinghuys. Kuxa Kanema: The Birth of Cinema (Kuxa Kanema: O Nascimento do Cinema) (2003). Dir. Margarida Cardoso. Available on YouTube (in Portuguese): http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0H400osWpm0/. Last Flight to Abuja (2012). Dir. Obi Emelonye. Nigeria/UK. 81min. Available from IbakaTV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y6SxDkJgH8&feature=kp/. Last Grave at Dimbaza (1973). Dir. Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane. South Africa/UK. 55min. Distributed by Icarus Films. Laurence Anyways (2012). Dir. Xavier Dolan. Canada/France. 168min. Available from Amazon. Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). Dir. Bertrand Tavernier. France. 114min. Available from Amazon. Lezare (For Today) (2009). Dir. Zelalem Woldemariam. Ethiopia. 14min. Available on Ethiotube: http://www.ethiotube.net/video/18231/Lezare--Short-Ethiopian-Film/. Life, Above All (2010). Dir. Oliver Schmitz. South Africa/Germany. 105min. Available from Amazon. Luciano Serra Pilota (1938). Dir. Goffredo Alessandrini. Italy. 100min. Available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd8Rt3rHvks/. Mah Saah-Sah (2007). Dir. Daniel Kamwa. Cameroon. 92min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Manila: in the Claws of Darkness (1975). Dir. Lino Brocka. Philippines. 124min. Print available from the Cineteca di Bologna. Marigolds in August (1980). Dir. Ross Devenish. South Africa. 87min. Will be available on MNet African Film Library. Mayibuye i-Western Sahara! (Come Back, Western Sahara!) (2013). Dir. Milly Moabi. South Africa/Western Sahara. 75min. Available from filmmakers. The Messenger (Onye Ozi) (2013). Dir. Obi Emelonye. UK. 89min. Available on iROKOtv. Microphone (2010). Dir. Ahmad Abdalla. Egypt. 120min. Distributed by Pacha Pictures. Miners Shot Down (2014). Dir. Rehad Desai. South Africa. 85min. Available from filmmakers. The Mirror Boy (2011). Dir. Obi Emelonye. UK. 120min. Available on iROKOtv and YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okv7vqIja64/. Moi et Mon Blanc (2003). Dir. Pierre Yaméogo. Burkina Faso/France. 97min. Available from filmmaker. Moi Zaphira (2013). Dir. Appoline Traoré. Burkina Faso. 102min. Available from filmmaker. Montenegro (1981). Dir. Dušan Makavejev. Sweden/UK. 96min. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=976dTUmgiRs/. Munyurangabo (2007). Dir. Lee Isaac Chung. South Korea/Rwanda/US. 97min. Available from Amazon. Mwansa the Great (2011). Dir. Rungano Nyoni. Zambia/UK. 23min. Available on Hulu (only in US).

Bibliography 255

My Makhzen and Me (2012). Dir. Nadir Bouhmouch. Morocco. 42min. Available on vimeo: http://vimeo.com/36997532/. Nairobi Half Life (2012). Dir. David Tosh Gitonga. Kenya/Germany/UK. 96min. Distributed by The Festival Agency. Naked Weapon (2002). Dir. Siu-Tung Ching. Hong Kong. 92min. Available from Amazon. Ndoto za Elibidi (Dreams of Elibidi) (2010). Dir. Kamau wa Ndungu and Nick Reding. Kenya. 90min. Distributed by The Festival Agency. La Noire de . . . (1966). Dir. Ousmane Sembene. Senegal. 60min. Print available from New Yorker Films and BFI. DVD available from Amazon and (in French) from Médiathèque des Trois Mondes. Nollywood Lady (2008). Dir. Dorothee Wenner. Germany/Nigeria. 52min. Available from Women Make Movies. No Mercy, No Future (1981). Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms. Germany. 110min. Available from Amazon. Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light) (2010). Dir. Patricio Guzmán. Chile/France/ Germany/Spain/US. 90min. Available from Amazon. Of Good Report (2013). Dir. Jahmil X.T. Qubeka. South Africa. 109min. Distributed by Spier Films. Otelo Burning (2012). Dir. Sara Blecher. South Africa. 105min. Available on iTunes. Othello (1952). Dir. Orson Welles. US/Italy/Morocco/France. 90min. Available from Amazon. Out of Africa (1985). Dir. Sydney Pollack. US. 161min. Available from Amazon. The Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers (1969). Dir. William Klein. Algeria. 120min. Distributed by ARTE. Paris mon paradis (Paris my paradise) (2011). Dir. Elénore Yaméogo. Burkina Faso/ France. 70min. Available (in French) on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5BDj0ow5hnA/. Le Petit Soldat (1960). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France. 88min. Available from Amazon. Phone Swap (2012). Dir. Kunle Afolayan. Nigeria. 111min. Will be available on IbakaTV. La Pirogue (2012). Dir. Moussa Touré. Senegal/France/Germany. 87min. Distributed by Rezo Films. Le President (2013). Dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Cameroon/Germany. 64min. Available at http://president.weltfilm.com/. Quartier Mozart (1992). Dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Cameroon/France. 79min. Distributed by AK Video. Rebelle (War Witch) (2012). Dir. Kim Nguyen. Canada. 90min. Available from Amazon. Le retour d’un aventurier (Return of an Adventurer) (1967). Dir. Moustapha Alassane. Niger/ France. 34min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. The Runner (2012). Dir. Saeed T. Farouky. UK/Ireland/France. 94min. Available from filmmaker. Saaraba (1989). Dir. Amadou Saalum Seck. Senegal. 86min. Available from filmmaker. Sacred Places (Lieux Saints) (2009). Dir. Jean-Marie Teno. Cameroon/France. 70min. Available at http://shop.jmteno.us/main.sc/. Les Saignantes (2005). Dir. Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Cameroon. 92min. Will be available on MNet African film library. Sambizanga (1972). Dir. Sarah Maldoror. Angola/France. 103min. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVXWIBmjkSg&feature=youtu.be/. Sarzan (1963). Dir. Momar Thiam. Senegal/France. 29min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Adapted from a Birago Diop story.

256 Bibliography Scipione L’Africano (1937). Dir. Carmine Gallone. Italy. 108min. Available on YouTube (with no English subtitles): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jjZ9U-4nN4/. A Screaming Man (2010). Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Chad/France. 92min. Print distributed by Soda Pictures and DVD available on Amazon. Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (2008). Dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Chad/France. 81min. Distributed by Doc and Film International. Something Necessary (2013). Dir. Judy Kibinge. Kenya/Germany. 85min. Distributed by One Fine Day Films. Song of Khartoum (1955). Dir. Gadalla Gubara. Sudan. 18min. Not currently available. Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony (2012). Dir. Álvaro Longoria. Spain. 78min. Distributed by Wild Bunch. Soul Boy (2010). Dir. Hawa Essuman. Kenya/Germany. 60min. Distributed by One Fine Day Films. The Stuart Hall Project (2013). Dir. John Akomfrah. UK. 103min. Available from Amazon. Submission (2004). Dir. Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Netherlands. 12min. Available on YouTube (in Arabic with Dutch subtitles): http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aGtQvGGY4S4&feature=kp/. Surfing Soweto (2010). Dir. Sara Blecher. South Africa. 84min. Available from filmmaker. Sur la dune de la solitude (1966) Dir. Timité Bassori. Ivory Coast. 32min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Tango With Me (2010). Dir. Mahmood Ali-Balogun. Nigeria. 104min. Available on iROKOtv. Tey (Today) (2013). Dir. Alain Gomis. Senegal/France. 86min. Distributed by Wide Management. There’s Something in the Air—Cannes 1968, Part 1 (nd). Written and edited by Scout Tafoya. 7min. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU3ej6LxhtE/. There’s Something in the Air—Cannes 1968, Part 2 (nd). Written and edited by Scout Tafoya. 6min. Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96XqVJ8tk8k/. Tilaï (The Law) (1990). Dir. Idrissa Ouédraogo. Burkina Faso/Switzerland/UK/France/ Germany. 81min. Available on Amazon. Tinye So (The House of Truth) (2011). Dir. Daouda Coulibaly. Mali/France. 25min. Available from filmmaker. Togetherness Supreme (2010). Dir. Nathan Collett. Kenya/Venezuela. 94min. Available from filmmaker. Le Troisième Jour (1967). Dir. Edouard Sailly. Chad. 15min. Available from the Cinémathèque Afrique in Paris. Tsotsi (2005). Dir. Gavin Hood. South Africa/UK. 94min. Available on Amazon. Uhlanga: The Mark (2012). Dir. Ndaba Ka Ngwane. South Africa. 88min. Available from filmmakers. Une Nation est née (1961). Dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr. Senegal/ France/Tunisia. 20min. Available from the French Ministry of Cooperation. Veejays in Daressalaam (2010). Dir. Andres Carvajal and Sandra Gross. Tanzania. 53 min. Available from filmmakers. Le Vent des Aurès (1967). Dir. Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina. Algeria. 95min. VHS available from FNAC. The Video Crusades: Tugenda Mumaso! (2010). Dir. Alice Smits. Uganda. 90min. Available from filmmaker. Virgin Margarida (2012). Dir. Licinio Azevedo. Mozambique/France/Portugal. 90min. Available from filmmaker. Vita Nova (2009). Dir. Vincent Meessen. Belgium. 26min. Available from filmmaker.

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Viva Riva! (2010). Dir. Djo Tunda Wa Munga. DRC/France/Belgium. 98min. Available from Amazon. Waiting for Happiness (Heremakono). Dir. Abderrahmane Sissako. France/Mauritania. 90min. Distributed by Artificial Eye. Where are you taking me? (2010). Dir. Kimi Takesue. US/Uganda. 71min. Available at http:// www.kimitakesue.com/. Yaaba (1989). Dir. Idrissa Ouedraogo. Burkina Faso/Switzerland/France. 90min. Available from Amazon. Yeelen (Brightness) (1987). Dir. Souleymane Cissé. Mali/Burkina Faso/France/West Germany/Japan. 105min. Available from Amazon.

Index

NOTE: Page references in italics refer to photos.

A

Abdalla, Ahmad, 21 Abdelaziz, Mohammed, 175 Abouna (Haroun), 54 Absa, Moussa Sene, 3, 98, 122 Abt, Jeffrey, 29, 30 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 11 Achebe, Chinua, 16 activism antiracist activism and film, 127–28 “citizen journalism” and film, 21 “festive excitement” and film festival activism, 159, 161, 166–67, 168, 174, 176 (see also “festive excitement”) Film Festivals and Activism (Iordanova, Torchin), 171 see also sensus communis actor network theory (ANT), 39 Adejunmobi, Moradewun, 26, 74 Adesokan, Akin, 213n3 AFFORD (African Foundation for Development), 144 Afolayan, Adeyemi “Ade Love,” 72, 105 Afolayan, Kunle, 7–8, 72–75 Africa at the Pictures, 111 Africa Explores (Vogel), 97 AfricaFilms.tv, 178 Africa International Film Festival, 166 Africa in the Picture, 111, 114, 118–19, 126–27 Africa is a Country (blog), 144 Africa (journal), 10 African Cinema (Diawara), 52 African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) (African Union), 121–22

African Movie Academy Awards (AMAAs), 72, 130, 220n19 “Africanness,” 113, 125 African Pictures Program, 79, 206 African Theatre Festivals (Gibbs), 104, 124 African Union, 121–22 African Video Movies and Global Desires (Garritano), 11 “Africapitalism,” 144 Africa Remix (Njami), 97 AfricAvenir, 166 Africa Vision Exchange (AVE), 131 Africultures (journal), 131–32 AFRIFESTNET (ARTerial Network), 131 “age of directors,” 103 “age of the programmer,” 39, 42, 98 Ahmed, Sara, 22, 67–68, 77 Ahn, SooJeong, 33 Akomfrah, John, 49, 118 Alassane, Moustapha, 69–70 Alessandrini, Goffredo, 34 Alhambrista, 134 “A-list” film festivals African film festivals outside of Africa and, 111–13 Bailey as first black director of, 67 Berlin Film Festival, 1, 37, 42, 56, 166 Edinburgh Film Festival, 1, 37, 39, 57 historical perspective, 37–44, 41 new attitude of, 79–85 “public screenings” and “industry screenings” of, 219n17 see also Cannes film festival; International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) Allix, André, 142

260 index Allouache, Merzak, 47 All That Jazz (Fosse), 134 Almesberger, Christian, 66 Amakula Kampala International Film Festival, 99, 151–53, 177 Ameidan, Saleh, 174 Amnesty International, 173 Anderson, Annalisa, 145–46 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 4 Anyiam-Osigwe, Peace, 130 Appadurai, Arjun, 3 Apter, Andrew, 74 Arendt, Hannah, 78 Aristotle, 29 Armah, Ayi Kwei, 104, 148 art “art cinema,” 4–5, 53 auratic objects compared to, 30 creating African audiences for African films, 97–104 (see also audience) “international” film festivals in Africa and, 141–45 terminology for, 90 ARTerial Network, 129–30, 131 Art Moves Africa (AMA), 224n27 AsiaAfrica program (Dubai International Film Festival), 79, 129, 202 Asterix and Obelix, 174 audience, 87–109 arts festivals in era of decolonization, 94–95 FESPACO and filmmaking technology, 104–6, 108 FESPACO and Nollywood, 106–9 FESPACO inception and goals, 97–104, 98 festivals dedicated to films by Africans, 95–96 film festivals defined by, 159 (see also “festive excitement”) financial issues of cinemagoing and, 9 generally, 87–92 “international” film festivals in Africa and curating practices, 153–58 liberating and politicizing of African audiences, 92–94 as “publics,” 22 study of, 11–12, 177–80 “aura,” of films, 12, 214–15n1 Auslander, Philip, 15, 178

Austen, Ralph, 104 Avventura, L’ (Antonioni), 4 Awake from Mourning, 135 AZAPO (Azanian Peoples Organization), 138 Azevedo, Licinio, 105 Azonto (dance form), 14

B

Babatope, Moses, 73 Bachmann, Gideon, 96 Bad Timing (Roeg), 135 Bailey, Cameron, 67, 79–80, 85 Baker, Léandre-Alain, 73 Bakker, Mariët, 112, 118 Bako, Ishaya, 21 Bakupa-Kanyinda, Balufu, 55 Bals, Hubert, 43, 44, 157, 161 Bangré, Sambolgo, 9, 48, 123 Barber, Karin, 10, 16, 88 Bardón, Xavier García, 75 Barlet, Olivier, 53–54 Baron, Jérôme, 40, 80, 81, 82, 83 Barthes, Roland, 76 Bassolet, François, 97 Bassori, Timité, 69–70 Battle of Algiers, The (Pontecorvo), 52 Bayart, Jean-François, 132 Bekolo, Jean-Pierre, 5, 21, 82, 165 Belghazi, Taieb, 158 Benga, Ota, 32 Bengasi (Genina), 34, 35 Bergman, Ingmar, 57 Berlin Film Festival, 1, 37, 42, 56, 166, 202, 217n16 Bertha Fund, 204, 217n16 Betz, Mark, 53 Bhabha, Homi, 123 Bikales, Thomas, 95, 103, 178 Biko, Steve, 137 Binger, Louis Gustave, 76–77 Bird, Elizabeth, 106 “black” film festivals, 119, 207–11 Black Girl (La Noire de . . .) (Sembene), 48–49, 95 Blecher, Sara, 5–6, 21, 113, 129 Blue Ice Group, 69, 204, 217–18n16 Blue is the Warmest Colour (Kechiche), 50 “Bollywood,” popularity of, 11 Bona, 134

index 261

Bonetti, Mahen, 56, 84, 112, 115 Bongowood, 148 Bonsu, Henry, 118 Bon Voyage Sim (Alassane), 69 Bordwell, David, 4, 53 Borom Sarret (Sembene), 45, 70, 95 Bottai, Giuseppe, 34 Bouchareb, Rachid, 50 Bouhmouch, Nadir, 21 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3–4, 5 Bouzid, Nouri, 96 Boy Kumasenu, The, 45 Braidotti, Rosi, 80, 83, 123 Brecht, Bertolt, 93 British Educational Kinema Experiment (BEKE), 88–89, 91, 92 Bronco Billy (Eastwood), 134 Broomfield, Nick, 148 Brouwer, Wim, 173, 175 Buck-Morss, Susan, 77 Bulbulia, Firdoze, 167 BuniTV, 13, 82 Bureau of African Cinema (Ministry of Cooperation, France), 45–46, 49 Burkina Faso Ciné Burkina, 98, 99 FESPACO inception and, 98 filmmaking in, 101 Mossi nation of, 96 name of, 99 see also Festival Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) Burnat, Emad, 170, 175 Burton, Julianne, 10 Bye Bye Africa (Haroun), 54 Bye Bye Brasil (Diegues), 112

C

Cairo International Film Festival, 1, 140 “calabash cinema,” 54 Cameroon, Mbororo people of, 122 Campion, Jane, 71 Cannes film festival, 45–57 African films recognized by, 48–50, 51 audience of, 87 Les Cinémas du Monde, 56, 202 controversies surrounding African films, 50–53 filmmaking technology and, 105

French funding for African film production, 45–48, 57 historical perspective, 1, 33, 35–36, 40–41, 41 main awards of, 216n5 programs of, 46–47 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and, 36 “Village International,” 55, 56 “world cinema” perceived as genre, 52–57 Cape Town World Cinema Film Festival, 139 Carels, Edwin, 63, 75 Carrión, María, 172, 173 Casa África, 124 Centre for Creative Arts (University of KwaZulu-Natal), 139 Centro Orientamento Educativo (COE), 114 Chahine,Youssef, 45, 50 Chama Cha Mapinduzi party (Tanzania), 146 Cheriaa, Tahar, 92, 96 Chess Players, The (Ray), 112 Chomsky, Noam, 49 Chroniques des années de braise (LakhdarHamina), 50, 51–52, 57 Chung, Lee Isaac, 129 Ciment, Michel, 71 Cine Afrique (Stone Town, Zanzibar), 150 Cinéfondation (Cannes film festival), 47 cinemagoing. see audience Cinema Mondial Tour, 79 Cinéma Numérique Ambulant (CNA), 99 Cinémas du Monde, Les, 56, 202 Cinémathèque Française, 40, 42 Cinematograph Act, 36 Cissé, Souleymane, 53–54 “citizen journalism,” films as, 21 Cocteau, Jean, 23 colonialism audience and arts festivals in era of decolonization, 94–95 filmmaking goals and, 90–92 French funding for African film production and, 45–48, 57 historical perspective of film festivals, 33–37 “international” film festivals in Africa and, 142 international perspective of African films and, 50

262 index Colours of the Nile Film Festival, 129 Coming Soon to a Festival Near You, 84 Committee on African Advance (Kenya), 91 Compaoré, Blaise, 103, 221n21 Congo Love (Bardón), 75 Conklin, Alice, 35 Consortium Interafricain de Distribution Cinématographique (CIDC), 106–7 “Continental Crossings” program, 224n26 Corcuera, Javier, 171, 172 Cornut-Gentille, Bernard, 51 Couldry, Nick, 15 Couple in the Cage, The (Fusco and Heredia), 32 Cousins, Mark, 17, 57 Criticism and Ideology (Eagleton), 93 curating audience and “international” film festivals in Africa, 153–58 as career, 79–85 historical perspective, 29–32 of “indigeneity” at “international” film festivals in Africa, 151–53 “liveness” of festivals and, 17 Curzon Cinemas, 13–14

D

Daney, Serge, 53–54, 63 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 6, 149 Daratt (Haroun), 54, 105 Davidi, Guy, 170, 172, 173, 175–76 Debbie, 162 De Groot, Rindert, 65–67, 68 Delwende (Yaméogo), 50 Demos, T. J., 76–77 Derrida, Jacques, 77 Desai, Rehad, 6 Destin, Le (Chahine), 50 De Valck, Marijke film festivals as media events, 15 film festivals as “trade fairs,” 141 financial issues of film festivals, 3, 5, 57 historical perspective of film festivals, 36–37, 38–39, 41, 42, 43 “phases” of film festivals, 39, 42, 98, 103 Devenish, Ross, 134 Diallo, Boubacar, 101, 105 Diana (Princess of Wales), 15 Diao, Claire, 7, 46, 156

Diawara, Manthia, 46, 53, 55, 56, 62, 97, 103, 123 Dicks, Bella, 158 Diegues, Carlos, 112 Dingley Bill, 36 Diop, Birago, 71 Diouana (film character), 48–49 distribution, of films, 9–12, 92, 97, 136 see also audience Dockanema Film Festival, 153–58 Dozo, Marie-Hélene, 55 Drama Consult (Wenner), 73 Dubai International Film Festival, 79, 129 Duggan, Mark, 118 Dupré, Colin, 95, 178 Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) audience and, 89 Of Good Report (Qubeka), 159–67 historical perspective of film festivals, 1, 24 “international” film festivals in Africa and, 132, 133–41, 150 “Window to the World,” 214n8

E

Eagleton, Terry, 19, 93, 175 Ebdadi, Galia, 174 Ebelle, Eitel Basile Ngangue, 69 Écrans d’Abondance (Cheriaa), 92 Edinburgh Film Festival, 1, 37, 39, 57 Education of Auma Obama, The (Okpako), 112 Edwards, Zena, 118 Elizabeth Sneddon theatre (University of KwaZulu-Natal), 135 Ellickson, Lee, 60, 63–64, 69, 70–71, 151, 153, 177 Elumelu, Tony, 144 Enwezor, Okwui, 84, 97, 127, 213n6 Espalda del Mundo, La (The Back of the World) (Corcuera), 169 Essuman, Hawa, 64–69, 105 European Network Against Racism, 127–28

F

Fair, Laura, 11, 148 Falicov, Tamara, 4 Farrell, Laurie Ann, 84 Femme au couteau, La (Bassori), 70

index 263

FEPACI (Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers), 20, 102 FESPACO. see Festival Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) Festival Cinema Africano Milano, 111, 114 Festival de Cinema Africano, Asia, and America Latina, 112 Festival des 3 Continents, 1, 63, 111, 112, 116–17 Festival International du Film Amateur de Kelibia (FIFAK), 1, 220n13 Festival International du Film Panafricain, 69 Festival International du Films d’Amiens, 111–12, 124 “festivalization,” 13 Festival Pan-Africain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) “African films for Africans” motto of, 130 Bailey and, 67 boycott of, 221–22n22 filmmaking technology and, 104–6, 108 historical perspective, 1, 39 inception and goals of, 92–95, 97–109, 98 influence of, 111–12 JCC compared to, 95–96 location of, 221n20 Nollywood and, 106–9 study of, 179 ZIFF compared to, 147 “festive excitement,” 159–76 defined, 17, 19 film festivals defined by audiences and, 159 FiSahara Film Festival and, 167–76 Of Good Report (Qubeka) and DIFF, 159–67 FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations), 140, 202, 215n9 Figurine, The (Afolayan), 8, 72–75, 105 Film Africa, 113, 114, 117–18, 118, 166 Film Africain et Le Film du Sud, Le (journal), 124 Film and Publications Act of 1996 (South Africa), 160, 161–62 Film and Publications Act of 2009 (South Africa), 167

Film and Publications Board (FPB) (South Africa), 159–67 film festivals, 1–27 “A-list” film festival history, 37–44, 41 book structure and, 22–27 early film festival history, 33–37 as heuristic device, 20–21 historical perspective of curating and, 29–32 “liveness” of, 12–19 rise of, 1–2 study of, 2–12, 142, 177–80 see also audience; curating; film festivals (held outside of Africa); film production; financial issues; individual names of festivals Film Festivals and Activism (Iordanova, Torchin), 171 film festivals (held outside of Africa), 111–30 rise of, 111–20 Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival and, 120–26, 121 transnational trajectories for African film and filmmakers, 126–30 film production audience role and, 177 (see also audience) FESPACO and filmmaking technology, 104–6, 108 (see also audience) FESPACO goals and, 99–100 major international film festivals that support African filmmaking, 202–6 transnational trajectories for African film and filmmakers, 126–30 Final Cut program, 206, 217n16 financial issues box office income and film festivals, 150–51 encouraging African filmmaking and, 60, 64–69, 71, 79 festival ticket affordability and, 99 of film festivals outside of Africa, 124 filmmaking budgets, 8–9 French funding for African film production, 45–48, 57 “international” film festivals in Africa and, 142–45 major international film festivals that support African filmmaking, 202–6

264 index financial issues (Continued) media access to films and, 107 “non-commercial” cinema/films, 3, 5 First Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers, 71 First World Festival of Negro Arts, 49, 94 FiSahara Film Festival, 167–76, 170, 172, 174, 175 Five Broken Cameras (Davidi, Burnat), 170, 174, 175 Florencio, Flavio, 129 Fonds de Dévélopment du Scénario, Les, 125, 203 “Forget Africa” (International Film Festival of Rotterdam), 60–64, 72–75, 129 Foucault, Michel, 22, 23–24, 41, 62 France African film production funded by, 45–48, 57 colonial censorship of film screenings (post-World War II), 91–92 historical perspective of film festivals, 30–31, 33, 40–41, 41 see also Cannes film festival Franco, Francisco, 120 Friends (Proctor), 50 From Carthage to Carthage, 96 Fuelling Poverty (Bako), 21 Fugard, Athol, 134 Fuglesang, Minou, 11 Fujiwara, Chris, 23, 39 Fusco, Coco, 32

G

Gabriel, Teshome, 21, 92–93, 173 Gallone, Carmine, 34 Galt, Rosalind, 5 García, Jean-Pierre, 111, 124 Gardner, Anthony, 82 Garritano, Carmela, 10, 11, 38, 106, 107, 108, 148 Geldof, Bob, 144 Genina, Augusto, 34 genre, of films, 11 Ghana filmmaking revolution and, 2 music production in, 14 videomaking in, 108 Gibbs, James, 104, 172

Giddens, Anthony, 26 Gikandi, Simon, 49, 77 Givanni, June, 67, 84, 115–17, 118, 129 Glissant, Edouard, 22 Global Art Cinema (Galt, Schoonhover), 5 Godard, Jean-Luc, 52, 93, 99 Goerg, Odile, 15, 87, 108, 151 Gomis, Alain, 105–6, 112 Göteborg International Film Festival Fund, 204, 217n16 Gould, Gaylene, 67 Grahamstown National Arts Festival, 16 Grand Magal à Touba (Senghor), 45 Great Britain African film festivals in, 115–18 filmmaking goals and, 91–92 historical perspective of film festivals, 36 Greenberg, Kerryn, 83 Green-Simms, Lindsey, 11 Grey Matter (Ruhorahoza), 21 Grisgris (Haroun), 50, 54–55 Gubara, Gadalla, 218n12 Guerilla Grannies, 155 Guevara, Che, 102 Guzman, Patricio, 155–56 “Guzmán El Bueno,” 122

H

Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 19, 22 Hall, Stuart, 123 Hamdi, Khadija, 170 Handsworth Songs (Akomfrah), 118 Harbord, Janet, 14–15 Harney, Elizabeth, 101 Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh, 50, 54–55, 61, 70, 105 Harrow, Ken, 106 Harvey, David, 158 Haslam, Mark, 85 Hassan II (King of Morocco), 168 Havana Film Festival, 102 Hayek, Salma, 173 Haynes, Jonathan, 7–8 Hebron, Sandra, 216n13 Hedrén, Katarina, 130 Hegel, Georg, 77 Heredia, Paula, 32 Herman, Edward S., 49 heterotopia concept, 22, 23–24, 41, 112 Hicks, John, 18–19

index 265

Hodeir, Catherine, 32 Hoffman, Jens, 83 Hollywood, historical perspective of film festivals, 5, 36, 38–41 Hong Kong International Film Festival, 94–95 Horak, Jan-Christopher, 84 HotDocs Film Festival, 68–69, 204, 217–18n16 Hubert Bals Fund, 60, 64, 68, 79, 205, 217n16

I

Ideology of the Aesthetic, The (Eagleton), 19 Ilboudo, Patrick, 100 Indigènes (Bouchareb), 50 Indochine: Traces of a Mother, 112 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), 114 International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), 79, 204, 217n16 Internationales Forum des Jungen Film, Das, 42 International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF), 140, 202, 215n9 International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR) “A-list” attitudes and curation, 79–85 The Figurine (Afolayan) and, 72–75 “Forget Africa” program, 60–64, 72–75, 129 historical perspective, 39, 43–44 Hubert Bals Fund, 60, 64, 68, 79, 217n16 Soul Boy (Essuman), 64–69, 65 translation issues and, 69–72 Vita Nova (Meessen) and, 75–79 Where are you taking me? (Takesue) and, 59–64 “Where is Africa?” program, 60–64, 67, 69, 72, 74, 77, 79, 179 “international” film festivals in Africa, 131–58 curating “indigeneity” at, 151–53 curating practices and audience, 153–58 Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) and, 133–41 festivalization and, 131–32 “internationalization,” defined, 133 proliferation of, since late 1990s, 141–45 Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), 145–51, 147, 149, 150

Iordanova, Dina, 13, 82, 171, 213n1 Irapada (Afolayan), 72

J

Jacob, Gilles, 40 Jaggi, Maya, 48 jaima, 171, 172 Jalladeau, Alain, 112, 117 Jalladeau, Philippe, 63, 112, 117 Jeonju Digital Project, 129, 205, 217–18n16 Jeonju International Film Festival, 79, 205, 217–18n16 Johnny Mad Dog (Sauvaire), 50 Jones, Sarah Ping Nie, 69 Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC), 12, 94–96, 112 Journey to the Sun, 93 Joutsio, Saila, 172 Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, 95 Julie et Romeo (Diallo), 105

K

Kabera, Eric, 6, 153 Kaboré, Gaston, 6, 100, 101, 102, 103 Kahora, Billy, 66 Kaka yo (Kamba), 70 Kamba, Sebastien, 70 Kant, Immanuel, 18–19, 78 Kanumba, Steven, 148 Karim (Thiam), 69 Karlovy Vary (film festival), 1 Kavanagh, Mshengu, 104 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 50 Keita, Mama, 122 Keïta, Salif, 99 Kelani, Tunde, 72, 104 Kelly, Lynne, 134 Kenya Committee on African Advance in, 91 Kenya International Film Festival, 156–57 Soul Boy (Essuman), 64–69, 65, 109 Kgositsile, Keorapetse, 170, 170 Kibinge, Judy, 20–21 Kishore, Shweta, 82, 88 Knatchbull, Phillip, 13–14 Kola, Mamadou Djim, 100–101 Kombo, Mahmoud T., 146 Kubrick, Stanley, 166 Kurosawa, Akira, 57 Kuxa Kanema project, 133, 155

266 index

L

Ladakh International Film Festival, 88 Lakew, Rasselas, 122 Lakhdar-Hamina, Mohammed, 48–52 Lamizana, Sangoulé, 101 Langlois, Henri, 42 language issues African film festivals outside of Africa and, 122 Anglophone filmmaking, 103 of “francophone” African films, 46 “Nollywood” and “African diaspora language,” 7–8 terminology for festivals, 89–90 Larkin, Brian, 11, 26, 89 Last grave at Dimbaza, 93 Latour, Bruno, 26, 39 Laval Decree, 36 Lehbib, Safia Abderahman, 174 Leopold II, 76 Let Joy Reign Supreme (Tavernier), 134 Life, Above All (Schmitz), 47 Life of Pi, 174 “liveness,” of film festivals mechanically reproduced art and, 12–19 as research methodology, 22, 57, 77, 178 see also audience Lobato, Heidi, 62, 112, 114, 118, 126–27 Lobato, Ramon, 9, 178 Locarno Film Festival, 1, 37, 205, 217n16 Lolita (Kubrick), 166 London Film Festival, 72 Lora-Mungai, Marie, 13, 82 Louvre, 30–31 Luali, Takiyo, 174 Luciano Serra Pilota (Alessandrini), 34–35 Luxor African Film Festival, 129, 220n18

M

Machel, Samora, 133, 155 Machen, Peter, 160, 162–63, 164 MacRae, Suzanne, 54 Maggie Magaba Trust, 135 Magiciens de la Terre (Martin), 97 Mahnke, Hans-Christian, 166 Mah Saah-Sah, 177 Majestic Cinema (Stone Town, Zanzibar), 148 Makavejev, Dušan, 135 Malčić, Steven, 48, 49 Malcolm, Derek, 136–37

Maldoror, Sarah, 12–13 Malraux, André, 41–42 Mambety, Djibil Diop, 95 Mamdani, Mahmood, 37 Mandabi (Sembene), 95 Mandela, Nelson, 160 Manifesta (journal), 83, 84 Manila: In the Claws of Darkness, 134 “Man is Culture” (Sembene), 93–94 Man of Ashes (Bouzid), 96 Manrique, Mane Cisneros, 68, 120, 122, 123–25, 126 Manzi, Lwanzi, 163–65 Maraini, Antonio, 33 Marché du Cinéma, 40, 222n28 Marigolds in August (Devenish), 134 Marks, Laura, 84 Marrakech International Film Festival, 132 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 97 Mbembe, Achille, 60, 128, 144 Mbororo people (Cameroon), 122 Mboya, Hlubi, 160 “media events,” 15 Meeran, Jean, 69, 166 Meessen, Vincent, 75–79 Mensah, Ayoko, 132 Mhando, Martin, 6, 145–50, 157 Microphone (Abdalla), 21 Middle East and African film program, 206 Mikuni, Rentaro, 50 Miners Shot Down (Desai), 6 Ministry of Cooperation (France), 45–46 Moche, Lesedi, 178 Moeran, Brian, 108 Moi et Mon Blanc (Yaméogo), 101 Moi Zaphira (Traoré), 101 Montenegro (Makavejev), 135 Moodley, Nashen, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 129, 140, 150–51 Moore, Michael, 228–29n11 Moosa, Imrann, 138 Morgan, Jessica, 80 Morocco cultural festivals of, 158 Sahrawi people and, 167–76, 170, 172, 174, 175 Mosireen Collective, 21 Mossi nation, 96 Motion Picture Patent Company (MPPC), 36 Movies that Matter, 173 Moving Image, The (journal), 84

index 267

Moyo, Dambisa, 142 Mugge, Robert, 138 Muhr Awards, 79 “multiculturalism,” in Europe, 114 Munyurangabo (Chung), 129 museum curation, historical perspective, 29–32 Museum of Alexandria, 29 music, in films, 14, 148–49 Mussolini, Benito, 33, 34, 35, 102 Mwansa the Great (Nyoni), 113 Mwanza, Rachel, 7 My Makhzen and Me (Bouhmouch), 21, 174

N

Nacro, Fanta Régina, 101 Naidoo, Loganathan “Logie,” 133 Naked Weapon, 148 Natal Mercury, 136, 139 National Film Theatre (NFT), 116 National Institute of Cinema, 133 Nation est née, Une (Vieyra and Sarr), 45 Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries, 141 network theory, 26 Newell, Stephanie, 10 New York African Film Festival, 45, 56, 112 Nguyen, Kim, 7 Niang, Amy, 104 Nigeria cinemagoing in, 89 filmmaking revolution and, 2, 38, 72–75 Kunle Afolayan and, 7–8, 72–75 New Nollywood and, 7–8 (see also Nollywood) Njami, Simon, 97 NKA (journal), 84 Noire de . . . , La (Black Girl) (Sembene), 48–49, 95 Nollywood Afolayan on, 72 “African diaspora language” and, 7–8 Bongowood and, 148 defined, 2 FESPACO and, 105, 106–9 IFFR and, 72–75 Kunle Afolayan and, 72–75 Nollywood Lady (Wenner), 73 No Mercy, No Future (Sanders-Brahms), 135 Nornes, Abé Markus, 39

Nostalgia de la luz (Guzman), 155–56 Nouah, Ramsey, 8 Nuits de l’Armée, Les (television program), 76 Nyoni, Rungano, 113

O

Odeon iMax (Greenwich district, London), 73–74 Of Good Report (Qubeka), 159–67 “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault), 22 Ogunyemi, Dayo, 226n34 Oguri, Kohei, 50 O.K., 42 Okeke-Agulu, Chika, 84, 97 Okpako, Branwen, 112 Olivieri, Federico, 123, 223n13 One Fine Day Films, 64 Onjyeji, Chibo, 127–28 Online South African Film Festival, 178 On the Postcolony (Mbembe), 60 Open Doors, 205, 217n16 Otelo Burning (Blecher), 21, 113 Othello (Welles), 48 Ouédraogo, Idrissa, 50, 53, 101 Ouédraogo, Michel, 95 Overseas Ministry (France), 91–92 Oy Scorza Ltd., 172

P

Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers, 94–95 Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles, 72, 111, 166 “parametric narration,” 53 Paris Match (magazine), 76 Pederson, Jesper Strandgaard, 108 Pedretti, Don Francesco, 114–15 Pelican, Michaela, 121–22 Peña, Richard, 99 Perry, Grayson, 4 Pesaro Film Festival, 43 Petit Soldat, Le (Godard), 52 Phillips, Ray, 90 Phone Swap (Afolayan), 72 Pimenta, Pedro, 105–6, 153–57 Pines, Jim, 111 Plan África (Spain), 124 Planet Africa (Toronto International Film Festival), 67, 112 Planet in Focus Film Festival, 85

268 index Pontecorvo, Gillo, 52 Potgieter, Cheryl, 161, 167 President, Le (Bekolo), 21, 82 Problema, El, 168 Proctor, Elaine, 50 Produire au sud, 202 “publics,” 22 see also audience

Q

Qubeka, Jahmil X. T., 159–67 Quinzaine des Realisateurs, 42

R

race African immigrant minorities and film festivals outside Africa, 113–20 antiracist activism and, 127–28 audience and, 88–92, 102–3 Durban International Film Festival and, 133–41 historical perspective of film festivals, 32 “international” film festivals in Africa and curating “indigeneity,” 151–53 Radshaw, Elizabeth, 68–69 Radway, Janice, 89 Rattansi, Ali, 114, 119, 123 Ray, Satyajit, 57, 112 Rebelle (Nguyen), 7 Rencontres du Film Court Madagascar, 156 Retour d’un aventurier, Le (Alassane), 69 Return, The (Haroun), 54 Ribas, João, 219n27 Rio Bravo, 82 Rocky Road to Dublin (Lennon), 42 Roeg, Nicolas, 135 Rorvik, Peter, 80, 139–40 Roy, Arundhati, 56, 132 Ruhorahoza, Kivu, 21 Runner, The (Farouky), 174 Ruoff, Jeffrey, 14, 39, 96, 132, 218n12 Rwanda Film Festival, 153–54 Rydell, Robert, 31, 32

S

Sacred Places (Teno), 106 SAFTTA Journal (South African Film and Television Technicians Association), 138

Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), 169 Sahrawi people, FiSahara Film Festival and, 167–76, 170, 172, 174, 175 Sailly, Edouard, 70 Sakbollé, 123 Salembéré, Alimata, 100 Salti, Rasha, 80, 81, 84–85, 112–13, 206 Sambizanga (Maldoror), 12 Sancho IV (King of Castille), 122 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 135 Sankara, Thomas, 99, 101–4, 132 Sanogo, Aboubakar, 88–89, 91, 92 Sarkin, Ros, 133–34, 135–36, 137, 138 Sarkin, Teddy, 133, 139 Sarr, Mamadou, 45 Sarzan (Thiam), 69–70 Şaul, Mahir, 91, 104 Sauvaire, Jean-Stéphane, 50 Sawadogo, Filippe, 103 Schmitz, Oliver, 47 Schoonhover, Karl, 5 Scipione L’Africano (Gallone), 34 Scott-Heron, Gil, 138 Screaming Man, A (Haroun), 50, 54, 105 Seattle International Film Festival, 79 Sellers, William, 91 Sembene, Ousmane Black Girl (La Noire de . . .), 48–49, 95 Borom Sarret, 45, 70, 95 FESPACO and, 97 on historical perspective of Africa and film, 93–94 on language for “art,” 90 legacy of, 61, 69, 70, 71, 98, 100–101, 112 Mandabi, 95 “Man is Culture,” 93–94 Senghor, Blaise, 45, 101 sensus communis, 18–19, 78–79 “dis(sensus) communis,” 19 “festive excitement” and film festival activism, 159, 161, 166–67, 168, 174, 176 “international” film festivals in Africa and, 153 Serugo, Moses, 153 Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (Haroun), 54, 105 Sharp, Bill, 136

index 269

Shipley, Jesse Weaver, 14 Shiri, Keith, 111 Short Century (Enwezor), 97 Silverbird cinema chain, 226n34 Singer, Alan, 78–79 Sissako, Abderrahmane, 47, 61, 122 Skeens, Emerson, 145–46 Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Gikandi), 77 Smith, Kevin, 32 Smith, Michelle, 32 Smits, Alice, 60, 63–64, 69, 70, 151, 153, 177 Sobchack, Vivian, 175 Soetendorp, Rabbi Awraham, 64–65, 66–67, 68 Something Necessary (Kibinge), 20–21 Song of Khartoum (Gubara), 218n12 Soo-wan, Jung, 79 Soul Boy (Essuman), 64–69, 65, 105 South Africa Film and Publications Act of 1996, 160, 161–62 Film and Publications Act of 2009, 167 Of Good Report (Qubeka) and Film and Publications Board (FPB) of, 159–67 political change in, 16 see also Durban International Film Festival (DIFF) Southwood, Russell, 156 Stam, Robert, 37 Stone Town (Zanzibar), 148, 149 Strange Encounters (Ahmed), 22, 67 structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 107, 143–45 Submission (Van Gogh), 118–19 “substate national minorities,” 119 Suleman, Ramadan, 178 Suncoast cinemas, 228n2 Surfing Soweto (Blecher), 21 Sur la dune de la solitude (Bassori), 69 Sydney Film Festival, 150

T

Taboada, Pepe, 169 Tafoya, Scout, 42 Tahri, Jihan, el-, 5, 7, 160 Takesue, Kimi, 59–64 Tang, Jeannine, 3

Tarifa/Cordoba African Film Festival (FCAT), 72, 120–26, 121, 153, 156, 168 Tavernier, Bertrand, 134 technology, used in filmmaking, 104–6, 108 television African-oriented, 13 segregation and, 225n11 Teno, Jean-Marie, 106 Tevi, John, 32 Tey (Gomis), 105–6, 112 There’s Something in the Air (Tafoya), 42 Thiam, Momar, 49, 69–71 Third Cinema movement (Latin America), 21, 43, 92–93 Third Eye Festival of Third World Cinema, 111, 115–16 “Third World” films, connotation of, 111, 134–35 “Thirty Years of African Cinema,” 112 Tilaï (Ouédraogo), 50 Tokyo African Film Festival, 129, 218n13 Toledo, Willy, 169 Tomaselli, Keyan, 133–34, 135, 162 Torchin, Leshu, 165, 171 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), 2, 67, 112 Touré, Drissa, 101 Tours Film Festival, 45 “trade fair” concept, film festivals and, 141 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 36 translation issues, at film festivals, 69–72 Traoré, Appoline, 101 Triandis, Harry, 168 Tricontinentalism, 92 Troisième Jour, Le (Sailly), 70 Tshuma, Petronella, 161 Turan, Kenneth, 98 Tykwer, Tom, 64

U

Uhlanga (Ngwane), 6 Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank, 102 Umulisa, Romeo, 6, 153–54, 156, 157 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 121–22 United Bank for Africa, 144 University of KwaZulu-Natal, 133, 135, 139 Unluckiest, The, 60

270 index

V

Van Gogh, Theo, 118–19 Venice Film Festival, 1, 33–34, 52, 102, 217n16 Vent des Aurès, Le (Lakhdar-Hamina), 48, 50, 52 Verona African Film Festival, 111 Video Crusades: Tugenda Mumaso!, The (Smits), 153, 177 video-on-demand (VOD) platforms, 13, 17, 115, 178 Vieyra, Paulin Soumanou, 45 “Village International” (Cannes film festival), 55, 56 Vir, Parminder, 111 Virgin Margarida (Azevedo), 105 Vita Nova (Meessen), 75–79 Vogel, Susan, 97

W

Waiting for Happiness (Sissako), 47 Warner, Michael, 22 Welles, Orson, 48 Wenner, Dorothee, 63, 73 West Kine cinema complex (Durban), 134 Where are you taking me? (Takesue), 59–64 “Where is Africa?” (International Film Festival of Rotterdam), 60–64, 67, 69, 72, 74, 77, 79, 179

“Window to the World” (DIFF), 214n8 Witz, Leslie, 16–17, 19, 88, 168 Women of Color Arts and Film Festival, 72 Wong, Cindy, 4, 5, 12, 36, 44, 47–48, 94, 177 World Bank, 143 World Cinema Fund, 202, 217n16 “world cinema,” perception of, 53–57 WorldConnectors, 64–65 world fairs, curation and, 31–32

Y

Yaaba (Ouédraogo), 53 Yaméogo, Pierre S., 50, 101 Yeelen (Cissé), 50, 53 Yennenga (Princess, Mossi nation), 96 Yerima, Ahmed, 151 Yoruba (traveling theatre), 72 Young, Neil, 87 YouTube, 12–13

Z

Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), 2, 145–51, 147, 149, 150 Zapatero, José Luis, 124 Zondi, Khulekani, 6 Zuilhof, Gertjan, 60–64, 73 Zwobada, André, 48