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Cine-Agora Africana: Meditating on The Fiftieth Anniversary of FESPACO

2020; Indiana University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/blackcamera.12.1.14

1947-4237

Sanogo,

African history and culture studies

Cine-Agora Africana:Meditating on The Fiftieth Anniversary Of FESPACO Aboubakar Sanogo (bio) It is good [for African films] to go to Cannes, but Africa must create her own.We have FESPACO. We begot FESPACO, now it is FESPACO that carries us forward.… Let us be the ones to first recognize the quality and the value of our artists and their works.… It is up to us to create our own values, to celebrate them, to carry them throughout the world. We are not alone in the world, but we are our own sun. In the deepest of all darkness, if the Other does not see me, I see myself. And I shine. —Ousmane Sembène1 The week of February 23–March 2, 2019 witnessed one of the most important events on the cultural calendar: the fiftieth anniversary of the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), launched in 1969 and a biennial event since 1979. It is rare in world cinema that a festival becomes the embodiment of both the aspirations and frustrations of a continental and indeed global film community around the idea of the image of Africa, the world's oldest and youngest continent. Indeed, the festival is an institution around which all kinds of projections, imaginaries, demands, ambitions, and expectations are articulated regarding the place of Africa in cinema—and through it, in the world. How FESPACO Came Into Being and What It Sought to Achieve Although African-led experiments with the moving image date back to the medium's beginnings in the late 1890s, it was really in the late 1950s and early 1960s that a movement toward a continent-wide cinematic project began to take shape through the emergence of African filmmakers recently trained in European film schools. Influenced by the general decolonization movement and inspired by the politico-theoretic-artistic work of a generation of artists and intellectuals, they began to create small collectives and [End Page 171] to attend gatherings and meetings at international congresses (such as those organized by the Présence Africaine movement in Paris in 1956 and Rome in 1959), art and cultural events (the World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 and the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969), and film festivals (Cannes and others).And they mulled over the need, in the context of a historic external dominance over the continent's screens, to create film festivals in Africa. After the creation of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (JCC) in Tunisia in 1966, due in no small part to the collaboration of Tahar Cheriaa and Ousmane Sembène, there was an even stronger desire to create another festival that would be located, for lack of a better term, "south of the Sahara." According to Sembène, he was assigned by his pioneering colleagues to travel across Africa in search of a country that would agree to host such a film festival.2 After several rejections, he found very receptive ears in Burkina Faso (what was then Upper Volta), where President Aboubakar Sangoulé Lamizana welcomed the idea in spite of the country's very limited resources. This origin narrative is complemented by another domestic one, according to which Upper Volta's Ciné Club Federation, which used to meet at the French Cultural Center, was also involved in advocating for a festival that would screen African films in Africa.3 It is thus through the combination of the desires and efforts of African filmmakers and of the Burkinabe ciné-club movement, together with the benevolent support of enlightened military leaders, and of the French Cultural Center, that the Premier Festival de Cinéma Africain de Ouagadougou (First African Film Festival of Ouagadougou) was held in Burkina Faso from February 1 to February 15, 1969. The first edition screened thirty-four films and was attended by directors Timité Bassori, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Moustapha Alassane, Oumarou Ganda, and Ousmane Sembène, along with Jean Rouch and Joris Ivens, among other original participants, and even included a questionnaire to the public about their favorite festival films.4 FESPACO 2019 With its consolidation in the 1970s—from its institutionalization and start of an official...