The 28th edition of the Durban International Film Festival was held from the 20th June to the 1st July 2007. With nearly 200 films and 300 screenings, it is South Africa’s most important film festival. The Best Film prize was awarded to Newton Aduaka’s Ezra (Nigeria), already winner of the Golden Stallion at the Fespaco. While its rich program allows the discovery of fictions from all over the world, often exploring intercultural issues, workshops covering all film practices, shorts and documentaries, were given pride of place. This year, furthermore, it presented a program dedicated to the Indian Ocean (cf. the…

Le festival qui s’est déroulé à Durban, Afrique du Sud, du 20 juin au 1er juillet 2007 a proposé un panorama des cinématographies des îles de l’Océan Indien, en collaboration avec l’ambassade de France. En complément de notre article sur le festival (n°6760). De Madagascar à la Réunion, quelques découvertes et beaucoup de potentiel.

After Wesh wesh, ça me regarde! (2002) in which he, as an insider, offers a different viewpoint on the deprived estates, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche goes to the bled, his native village in the far east of Africa, and there finds a way to broaden and remarkably elevate his vision of cinema. Neither sociological nor pure fiction, its apparent roughness may be disconcerting but it is eminently worth seeing because it in fact leads to a new understanding, beyond clichés and projections. Like in his previous film, Ameur-Zaïmeche films on video and plays Kamel, deported from France when he comes out of…

In a South Africa still marked by the violence of the apartheid and affected to the core by AIDS, death roams everywhere. When young Max leaves his village for Johannesburg, he is given a goat which, by mistake, happens to be the sacred goat of the village. It brings him luck: he has the power to trigger tears in funerals when people no longer know how to cry, in a country where it is believed that if one does not cry, the dead won’t be able to enter the world of ancestors. This lines his opportunist uncle’s pockets, who makes…

Le 22 mai 2007, au festival de Cannes, une table ronde sur le thème « Création et mémoire cinématographiques »a été organisée au Pavillon des cinémas du Sud, sur le Pavillon Cinémas du Sud autour d’une présentation du Centre de Ressources Audiovisuelles au Cambodge, Bophana, par son fondateur, le cinéaste Rithy Panh, en présence des partenaires du projet. Projet pilote du Plan Images Archives financé par le ministère français des Affaires étrangères, Bophana a pour objectif la mise à la disposition des Cambodgiens de leur mémoire audiovisuelle. L’expérience du Centre Bophana est-elle transposable à d’autres pays, notamment en Afrique ? Dialogue entre…

Hosted by Jean-Pierre Garcia, director of the Amiens Film Festival.

Dans le cadre des rencontres proposées par le Pavillon des cinémas du Sud au festival de Cannes, Newton Aduaka, jeune cinéaste du Nigeria ayant obtenu l’Étalon d’Or au Fespaco 2007 avec son film Ezra, a été invité à tenir une leçon de cinéma qui fut animée par Jean-Pierre Garcia, directeur du festival d’Amiens. Une masterclass est l’occasion pour un réalisateur de parler de sa démarche de cinéma, laquelle ne peut être détachée de sa démarche de vie. On en trouvera ici l’exacte transcription.

Keeping to the narrative style of The Wanderers and The Dove’s Lost Necklace, Nacer Khemir makes a staggeringly beautiful film, as fascinating as it is disorienting. We are easily lost in this maze as narratives intertwine and the story takes on the meaning we want it to have, but we accept so readily because it takes us to a world where poetry transcends realism. It would be a shame to only see in it a drug made to satisfy the latent orientalists within us all: this appeal to dreams restores the relevance of imagination in thoughts, that of opening the…

« In the past, children were married so they would leave home; now we marry them to bring them home », says Ahmed’s mother: the day after his wedding, he leaves to try his luck abroad. His wife Zeinab, strained as she waits for him to come back, lulls to sleep the child she is carrying to postpone the date of birth. But time goes past, and loneliness increases… One might think that L’enfant endormi is the fictional counterpart to Yasmine Kassari’s beautiful documentary Quand les hommes pleurent, in which she captures the painful stories of clandestine Moroccan immigrants in Spain. Indeed,…

Gilli Apter : J’ai étudié la réalisation à l’AFDA, une école de cinéma de Johannesburg. J’habite à Sandton qui est une banlieue au Nord de la province du Gauteng et je travaille dans divers secteurs de l’industrie du film en tant que réalisatrice free lance. « SA/X » c’est pour « South Africa » (Afrique du Sud) et le chiffre romain X (10), c’est pour les dix ans après la fin de l’apartheid. SL : Quel regard portez-vous sur ces deux programmes sud-africains du Festival de Clermont-Ferrand ainsi que sur les autres programmes ? GA : Je pense que c’était un mélange intéressant de…

L’édition 2007 du Festival du Court Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand a été l’occasion d’assister à deux programmes sud-africains – Panorama Afrique du Sud. (1) Ces programmes offraient un aperçu d’une production de plus en plus importante et qui constitue un laboratoire pour la créativité d’un cinéma sud-africain en plein essor.

Never in Arab cinema has a filmmaker so directly suggested that the spectator cease to be one in order to share the questionings of his approach to creation. Interrupting his narrative thrice, Bouzid films his leading actor’s revolt against the role he makes him play. It is so strong and unexpected that we believe it, Lotfi Abdelli’s performance (who was awarded « Best Actor » at the 2006 Carthage Film Festival for this film) largely contributing to the success of this making of graft in the film. When he asks the filmmaker what he’s letting himself in for, he becomes the mirror…

A historical reconstruction film with an almost fifteen-million-euro production budget, a year-and-a-half long shoot and a year of postproduction, soaring violins and great actors: Days of Glory clearly makes the choice of addressing a large audience. There is no reason to look down on it for all that: for one, this film says what it has to say in a profoundly just way and secondly, it has nothing of a smooth-running production and only exists thanks to the commitment from both sides of the Mediterranean. Hollywoodian in ambition, unquestionably, in the style of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, but here, there…