What authorizes you to refer the mevungu ritual of Beti women in film? I’m always torn between seriousness and levity. I go looking for a content, a meaning, which shapes « African » film, not in the modern meaning but mythological one too. I discovered the mevungu in the novel Le Tombeau du Soleil by Philippe Laburthe Tolra (Le Seuil / Point Odile Jacob) who teaches at the Sorbonne. We had even started to adapt the novel to the screen but the production went out of business and the project aborted. Though I’m myself a Beti, I didn’t know this rite. This…

As his film Moolade was presented at the Ecrans Noirs festival closing ceremony in his absence due to a flight delay; Ousmane Sembène agreed to meet the press and the audience the following morning at the festival’s village. Bassek ba Kobhio personally handed him a prize offered by PMU Cameroon, the festival’s sponsor, as well as a check representing the Ecrans noirs award of the year.

An informal meeting at the Apt festival provided the opportunity to explore the ongoing trends and stakes of African film. When referring to African film you like to talk about « a cinema of schizophrenia ». Why? It is a reference to an article I wrote entitled « From Militant to Schizophrenic cinema »: which refers to a cinema that is leaving the realm of reality to entertain, but disguised as auteur films. I am not blaming anybody, but it is important to take responsibility for that. There are no bad films, everybody is trying to do what they can, but this type of…

Benjelloun’s films are films that say more than they suggest, that point an accusing finger more than they cast an eye, would have said critic Serge Daney. Not that all is said in the dialogue, but because the whole film is built around a will for commitment. As in Jugement d’une Femme, that illustrated the movement that tried to give women their rights back, and in La Chambre Noire that dealt with repression during the dark years to show how they pushed the youth in the Islamists’ arms, he tries to shake up his country, not without taking the corresponding…

The love of films plays a large part in the film; the references are both ironic and indirect. What is your relationship to films? It’s true that when looking at my biography drama occupies a large place, but for a very long time I have had an all-consuming passion for cinema. It is what pushed me to go into theater. I was a film buff in my hometown, without the slightest distance, stricken body and soul: it was a disease! I only worked in theater whilst waiting to make films! Many reviewers have indeed stressed the references to film techniques…

published on 15/08/2007 A mysterious outspoken critic pirates the waves of the national radio: Liberty. His words are incantatory, a poetic harangue encouraging rebellion, a window of hope against the « tyrants who die in their beds. » He properly thwarts the police’s traps who ridicule themselves and decide to adopt tougher methods. But how to capture a phenomenon that escapes time, an intangible voice that nonetheless exists in everybody, this rebellious energy that wakes up when the people become one. Liberty is the one who makes dreams possible again. He is the uncatchable avenger of the oppressed, Robin Hood and L’Archer…

published on 15/08/2007 Wooden Camera started as a great screenplay idea: Madiba, a poor kid in a township, finds a video camera on a corpse and hides it in a wooden camera to film his surrounding without being bothered. Gradually discovering all the possibilities of the tool, he develops a new gaze, a cinematic one. His personal relationship to his daily life (family, friends, neighbors, events – a burning house or a party) and with Estelle, a revolted white young woman whom he falls in love with take on an artistic dimension. Some scenes convey a true poetry, especially when…

As South Africa is seeking a still uncertain future, it is not a coincidence if a black director has chosen to concentrate on Sophiatown of the 50s. It is in this suburb of Johannesburg that after World War Two South Africa sought a new being, among an extraordinary artistic proliferation where not only genres were intermingling, combining the traditional and the modern to define new possibilities, but also men, black and white side by side as the country was sinking in the shadows of apartheid. In February 1955, 80 trucks and 2000 armed policemen started to evict the inhabitants, up…

Summer of ’62 is a story of torn loyalties. It is set in that type of very special moment when History senses it is time to turn a page, during this spring of 1962 before Algeria’s independence. Ali is 11, and it is through his silent eyes that we will live this moment where tensions intensify and from where are leaving those who are defeated or who have made the wrong choice. To shoot this film through a child’s eyes, Charef went to film in his hometown, Maghniya and in Tlemcen, in western Algeria. Because Ali is Mehdi Charef as…

Everybody who is attracted to Africa should absolutely see this film. It is a beautiful lesson on a relationship finally devoid of the eternal ambiguities inherited from imaginative representations of our colonial history. Julie, nicknamed Lili, photographer at the town hall of a small town near La Hague in Normandy, is sent to photo the works carried out thanks to the town’s twinning with the Senegalese village of Agnam Lidoubé. She is thus transplanted in an unknown world and the first image of the film shows her leaning her head out of a taxi window, which is driving her to…

The local productions that are multiplying thanks to the digital revolution free expression that has been curbed for too long or the object of an external gaze. A society discovers itself in shattering taboos, thereby opening itself to bracing evolutions. It is the case of this film in which Senegalese women freely open their hearts concerning male-female relations. Director Moussa Touré is behind the camera, becoming increasingly involved in documentary productions of quality after directing international feature films, and the film is produced by Cheick Tidiane Ndiaye, at the forefront of a documentary production capable of finding its place on…

From film to film, Moknèche repeats his vision of a contradictory Algeria, both culturally ingrained and penetrated by the outside, but which cannot be reduced to a tradition / modernity opposition. Claiming individual conscience born from the European Renaissance as an inescapable perspective, he builds unconventional and vivid characters, and yet torn by contingencies, who throw themselves unconditionally toward a still unattainable libertarian future and end up with scars. This existential melody imposes its themes and rhythm on films that often start with a bang but quickly calm to wed the intimate breath of these self-willed yet necessarily lucid women.…

Revealed in 2005 by a very good short documentary, My Beautiful Smile about her gum tattoo, Angèle Diabang-Brener pursues her same approach in listening to Senegalese women in their relationship with Islam. A background in editing, it is definitively how she gives her films the energy they convey. A rhythm takes hold in sync with the topic, which respects expression and sharpens perception at the same time. Moving among five Muslim women whose experience of Islam is very different, from respectful detachment to systematic headscarf, Senegalese and Islam does not only provide a range of stories or a medley of…

Desert wind, a dusty expanse, wide screen, everywhere, men pop out of the ground like aliens. A gold mine in Burkina Faso. Mocktar (Makena Diop) has driven from Niger to work there. His reserve but also his dignity hide a pain that the film will gradually reveal. He blends in with these gold washers, as these kind of legionnaires come from some other place, ready to risk their lives in these weak-ceilinged bottlenecks with no possibility of rescuing those that they bury. For many of them, the dream of wealth is an enduring one and their struggle as immigrants is…

The Colonial Misunderstanding is tremendously topical in the context of the suburb riots: the medias’ reaction, the incredible lack of thought on the continuing influences of the colonial fact, the lack of films on these questions, etc. It is really clear how necessary this film is today.