December 18, 2023
By Nadia Denton
For more than five decades, Fespaco has been the preferred setting to reaffirm and celebrate Africa and its global diaspora on the big screen. Widely regarded as a place of pilgrimage between filmmakers and industry figures from the African diaspora, the cultural significance of Burkina Faso festival lies in its prestige as a de facto pan-African space to discuss, debate and analyze the issues facing fashionable African cinema. ” Nowhere are so many African films screened at the same time; nowhere do so many African filmmakers come together,” said influential Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, one of the founding fathers of the festival which, at its peak in the pre-Covid years, attracted more than 500,000 local and foreign spectators.
Organized by the government since its inception, Fespaco has faced difficult situations over the past decade: issues with curation, event management, marketing and promotion risked alienating festival-goers, threatening Fespaco’s reputation as the largest film festival on the African continent. However, many remain true to the pan-African ideals on which the festival was founded and continue to try to restore it to its former glory. Among them is Black Film Bulletin founder and film archivist Dr. June Givanni.
In the summer of 2023, the June Givanni Pan African Film Archive engaged the reminiscence and legacy of Fespaco in an exhibition entitled “PerAnkh”, a showcase of the treasures of the archives, held at the Raven Row gallery in London. sometimes took place in parallel with the exhibition; Of particular note was a panel discussion entitled “Fespaco and the African Film Archive”, which brought together African industry luminaries such as filmmakers Mohamed Challouf and Jihan El-Tahri and curators Aboubakar Sanogo and Keith Shiri. Chaired by Givanni, the talks dramatically recounted the ups and downs of Fespaco, giving both private and professional context to the history of the festival, which has recently generated growing complaints from the film network it has become its project to serve. The spirit of Fespaco omnipresent, with lively and provocative outbursts from the panelists and the audience: “fespacoesque”, as El-Tahri called it.
El-Tahri, who is Egyptian, highlighted what made the 50-year-old festival so exclusive to African filmmakers, passionately describing it as “the only place where other people from the South have their own space: we are not visitors there. “, we can communicate together, there is a sense of security: we are not judged. We can be who we are in our other articulations, languages, and aesthetics. Regardless of its flaws, Fespaco still rivals many Western festivals praised in the minds of Southern filmmakers.
Reflecting on Fespaco’s intentions towards African filmmakers and the extent of its decolonial ambitions, El-Tahri notes: “In the French-speaking African colonies, ‘the image’ was forbidden to the ‘natives’. [These restrictive methods also existed in the English colonies. “English-speaking territories and were known as “specialized techniques. “] It wasn’t until the early 1960s [though decades earlier in Egypt] that the concept of who we were as Africans was transmitted through our own eyes. . . in dramatic films. . . We can just imagine and film ourselves. External powers can limit themselves to this area by preventing investment and distribution, and that is what Fespaco tried to break. “
In the 1990s, the festival began to welcome a younger generation of filmmakers, overcoming the dominance of the old guard. “These founding fathers [like Ousmane Sembène] were there, but there was little engagement with the younger generation,” El-Tahri recalls. “Then, in 1995, there was a motion for the second generation to be more vocal and the African Diaspora Filmmakers Guild was created. Most of us rarely saw our films screened in our own countries, so many of the African filmmakers who were part of the Guild were the ones who made films that would be internationally competitive. To ensure the maintenance of its core platform on the continent, Fespaco had to adapt to the conversion of demand.
Shiri, a UK-based curator originally from Zimbabwe, spoke of the importance of the grammar of African cinema and the fact that it arose from a revolutionary politics rooted and present in other forms of African artistic expression, such as the paintings of the Oshogbo school in south-west Nigeria and the music of Fela Kuti. Shiri insisted that such evolution occurs via cultural immersion in an African festival like Fespaco; knowledge of this underpins the loyalty many in the wider African film community have felt in standing by the event even during its more difficult phases.
The idea of Fespaco as a site of cultural exchange was expanded on by Sanogo, associate professor in film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, who argued that the festival has long been “a liberated zone for African filmmakers to show themselves”. Sanogo described Fespaco as “an emancipatory project; something that pertained to and exceeded cinema. It was born in conversation with a large group of theorists and thinkers who were trying to address a number of questions: can we have an African culture if we are colonised? When we get rid of colonisation, what kind of culture and politics of culture could we have?”
Clearly, over the years, the festival has created fertile ground for the formation of a new kind of Afrocentric cinematic consciousness, influencing generations of filmmakers on the continent and beyond. Reiterating the multidimensional strength of the festival, Sanogo stated that Fespaco functioned as an incubation space, “the intellectual and cultural framework in which the pioneers of African cinema emerged. “But he also noted that “within this pan-African movement, filmmakers and artists had a set of responsibilities explained. We had the feeling that the filmmaker knew less than “the people,” but that he is guilty before “the people. “
The late Burkinabe leader Thomas Sankara featured prominently in the panel’s examination of Fespaco’s history and legacy. Sankara, a committed Marxist revolutionary, was forced to come to power through a military coup in 1983. Known as a “man of the people,” Sankara tackled corruption and promoted an anti-colonial vision for a Burkina molded from its own needs, prioritizing self-determination, children’s health, and women’s rights. He saw the prospects of Fespaco’s pan-African ambitions and embraced them wholeheartedly.
Sankara’s reputation as something of an African Che Guevara made attendance at the festival even more attractive to filmmakers and artists who saw themselves as part of a pan-African film movement. But in 1987, at the age of 37, Sankara was killed in another coup led by his former friend and co-revolutionary Blaise Compaoré. During Compaoré’s rule, which lasted until 2014, Challouf’s 2000 documentary about Fespaco, Ouaga: Capital City of Cinema, was banned – though it was eventually shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato on the 50th anniversary of Fespaco in 2019, and was also screened at ‘PerAnkh’, along with the films FESPACO ’87 (Carolyn Sides, 1987) and Ouaga: African Cinema Now! (Nii Kwate Owoo & Kwesi Owusu, 1988).
According to Challouf, the goal of Fespaco and the Carthage Festival in Tunis, founded in 1966, was not just to screen films, but to create an entire ecology of film distribution and exhibition and to challenge the dominance of other nations’ films on African screens. . Tunisian film critic Tahar Cheriaa, founder of the Carthage Film Festival, was briefly imprisoned in 1969 for his efforts to nationalize distribution and exhibition in countries on the continent in order to create a market area for African films. Challouf highlighted three key films that have been stifled by a lack of investment from partners in the northern hemisphere, concerned about the stories being told: Amok (Souheil Ben-Barka, 1983), Sarraounia (Med Hondo, 1986) and Camp de Thiaroye (Sembène, 1988). Sankara provided key support for the production of Sarraounia, allowing the film to be shot in Burkina Faso when the Niger government withdrew its support, most likely due to publicity pressure from France.
Evaluating Sankara’s influence on Fespaco, Sanogo stated that the leader’s support for the event was “one of few instances on the African continent where the vision of filmmakers and the vision of the state merged. It was magical.” He continued, “There is a ‘dream deferred’ dimension which is still haunting African cinema… [During Sankara’s time] there was a clear vision… an ideological spectrum of possibility that was counter to capitalism… many of the pioneers were comrades.”
Challouf also praises the radical figure: “Thomas Sankara has done the most for African cinema. ” Many veterans of the broader African film network have refused to return to Fespaco since Sankara’s assassination, viewing his presence as a betrayal of the progressive vision he espoused. During the circular table, the prominent British-Ghanaian filmmaker and visual artist John Akomfrah, present in the audience, commented: “For many of us it is difficult to talk about Fespaco due to the threat of Thomas Sankara. The festival was the scene of the greatest promise and also the greatest tragedy. There was a Promethean ethic assigned to Sankara, and that ethic assumed that as a national leader, one can simply control the national culture; that you had enough control over the means of cultural transmission to do anything and make a genuine effort. The neoliberal mandate put an end to this. There is no African leader on the continent who has the ghost or arrogance to assume that he has any control over his national culture. Sankara’s preference for doing anything for national culture echoed ours [as African filmmakers].
In another impassioned encounter with the audience, filmmaker Kwesi Owusu presented a counterpoint to the romanticism expressed about the revolutionary: “It’s very exciting to be there at that moment with Sankara. . . But we idealize this era too much. I think after so many years, we want to take a step back and look beyond what it stands for. We want to take a more critical look at the army’s intervention. Sankara had a hard human face, which softened the harshness of this reality, which was very brutal in many ways.
The panel ended with reflections on how to fertilize the memory of Fespaco for future generations. A new future will have to be written for the occasion, if it lasts another 50 years. Sanogo highlighted the conceptual importance of exhibitions such as “PerAnkh” with a clarion call: “We will all have to make a contribution to the work of transmission and be actors/curators of the memory of the future, because we are in an era where this memory is being lost, or perhaps it is being lost, for a new cinematic interpretation. Regarding the preservation of Pan-African conceptualism at the Fespaco center, El-Tahri said: “This is one of the last spaces where the concept of Pan-Africanism has interacted on the ground; It’s concrete. You’re sitting with other people you’d never meet anywhere else. You have interaction with them at a cultural point and many projects start in this space.
The second book in the three-volume series African Cinema: Manifesto and Practice for Cultural Decolonization, published in August by Indiana University Press, is dedicated to Fespaco. Edited by Burkinabe filmmaker Gaston Kaboré and Professor Michael T. Martin, and containing contributions from a significant organization of filmmakers, critics, scholars, curators, and industry leaders from around the world, it is a critical and timely resource for a mirror image of African cinema and its history. Therefore, it seems that the task of continuing the festival is promising. . Or, as Michel Ouédraogo, former CEO of Fespaco, put it in a 2009 interview: “The founders of Fespaco turned it into a pan-African and continental tool. The challenge today is to turn it into a foreign tool. The ultimate goal is that Fespaco is the most important institution in African cinema: if it manages to combine its institutional political task with that of creating an event that resonates around the world, Fespaco will have achieved its goal.
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