Abderrahmane Sissako’s « Bamako », officially selected out-of-competition at the 2006 Cannes Festival, was such a success with the festival-goers that for the second screening, after more than an hour’s wait, many people didn’t make it into the fully-packed Salle Buñuel. On the same day, interview of the film director by two enthusiastic critics.

« This film is based on real events and shot on the same spot where they happened ». This warning at the beginning of the film finds an echo before the final credits where pictures of the laughing faces of the film’s Rwandan colleagues scrolled down, who themselves have lost most of their family in the genocide, sometimes even in the same conditions that are described here. We are then in a reality legitimated by the actors themselves, that of the historical reconstruction on the spot, with those who have lived through it. And yet… Using the ingredients of actions films and…

Paul Rusesabagina is Hutu and is in charge of one of Kigali’s biggest hotels. Letting about a thousand Tutsis take refuge there during the 1994 Genocide, he succeeds in stopping the Hutu militia from coming to slaughter them. This is Terry George’s fiction choice to make this tragedy of African history accessible to a wide audience who, in its majority, still believes it was an ethnic conflict and doesn’t know its origin or the way things unfolded. The intention is honest and the result is fair: the film moves us in its sincerity, its reserve as regards to the representation…

In this film, there is tension that Hitchcock would have appreciated. Yet, Daratt is a film in which there is practically no music or dialogue and in which time is drawn out. But the heat of the dry season stimulates sensations and creates static in the air. Young Atim wants to avenge for his father by killing his murderer. Inside of him, he carries a rage that knows no bounds but is fuelled from afar: because the’Justice and Truth’ commission grants a general amnesty to the terrible acts of violence committed in Chad, his grandfather gives him a gun to…

100 Days, a fiction that deals with the massacres perpetrated in a church in Rwanda, exposes horror by showing it crudely. The images and editing are efficient; the suspense is maintained before the massacre, which is shown in all its cruelty. It stops at nothing in order to force emotion: zooms, filters, lighting, close-ups, slow-motion and hemoglobin. The blue helmets are ordered to leave the Tutsis behind in a church, French soldiers are accused of being racists and supporting extremists, children picked out from a classroom are burned alive in a gas station, a priest rapes a young woman…Even if…

A well-known documentary maker who has never set foot in Africa decides to go there to understand what is happening and what happened in Rwanda. He goes there ten years after the Genocide, ready to listen. His first stop is in Germany where he meets Esther, a survivor. Shot from the train, images of a flooded countryside set the tone: reality goes beyond fiction. First difficulty: the silence. We saw the catastrophe coming but we did not talk about it. Everyone sang a popular song, as if it were nothing: « Let’s exterminate them ». In the little Rwandan bus, Gheerbrant notes…

The following notes represent my summaries and reactions to a series of short films and feature films presented at the Vues d’Afrique film festival this year. The presentations were divided into the following sections: International long métrage fiction, international court métrage fiction; an homage to Henri Duparc (1941-2006), with showings of seven of his films. An international section of long and short métrage documentary films, and of international documentary films. What are called « films » are celluloid, which are distinguished from the next set of categories, « numérique » films. These include long métrage, court métrage, and then séries and feuilletons télé.

Un dimanche à Kigali, an adaptation of a novel by Gil Courtemanche, is more a film about a Quebecker journalist’s love for Africa than about the Rwandan Genocide. However, the will to evoke the genocide is obvious from the start, with images that recall its sparking off by the presidential guard and the army as soon as the President’s plane was brought down on April the 6th, 1994. The film is punctuated with historical elements that aim to show the key events: the lists asserting that it had been planned for a long time, the Western Powers’ negligence, the refusal…

You like calling African cinema the « cinema of schizophrenia ». Why is that? I’m referring to an article I wrote, entitled From militant cinema to schizophrenic cinema: it’s a cinema which, without saying it, leaves the scope of reality for entertainment under the cover of art house films. I’m not trying to be harsh but what is important is that they assume it: there is no bad cinema, all of us do what we can, but this kind of cinema is trying to get itself a public by referring to Hollywood cinema, without holding it up as an example. Besides that,…

Sometimes in April is not about « dealing with a big subject », unlike in many other political films. Is it more about a necessity? No, it was more complex than that. I wasn’t looking to make a film about the Rwandan genocide: someone approached me with the idea. I was asked if I’d be interested in making a film about Paul Rusesabagina who, at the time, was the manager of the Mille collines Hotel. The American cable channel HBO had purchased the rights to several chapters of Philip Gourevitch’s book. I had refused: politically-speaking, I couldn’t imagine working on a character…

Sometimes in April clearly differs from the other fictions made on the Rwandan Genocide (100 days, Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs) by its will to be complex. The other films had based their stories on heroes trying to overcome the horror by reconstructions based on « real facts », pulling the spectator only into sentimental terror and desperation and eventually closing with a comforting happy end, affirming the necessity of humanity. On the contrary, Peck draws his inspiration from reality in order to transpose it to the different strata of an entirely constructed script. There are no good victims or bad genocide perpetrators…

Les documentaires de Laurent Chevallier sont toujours bâtis sur sa relation émotionnelle et forte avec une personne remarquable. Dès Djembefola (1992), il suivait les pas de Mamady Keïta dans son village natal, et après avoir contribué à l’émergence du premier cirque aérien d’Afrique noire (Circus Baobab, 2001), il construisait La Vie sans Brahim (2004) sur son amitié avec un épicier marocain et Hadja Moï (2005) sur sa complicité avec la grand-mère de sa femme guinéenne. Si ces personnages fascinent, c’est qu’en prenant la mesure du cinéma, ils prennent goût à se mettre en scène, et se révèlent de véritables acteurs,…

La quatrième édition du festival international de films et de télévision « Lagunimages » qui se tient à Cotonou du 9 au 15 avril 2007 donne une idée de l’effervescence de la production audiovisuelle au Bénin.

Adapté d’un roman de Gil Courtemanche, Un dimanche à Kigali n’est pas tant un film sur le génocide rwandais que sur la relation (amoureuse) d’un journaliste québécois avec l’Afrique. Pourtant, la volonté d’évoquer le génocide est patente dès les premières images qui en rappellent le déclenchement par la garde présidentielle et les milices dès que l’avion présidentiel a été abattu le 6 avril 1994. Le film est émaillé d’éléments historiques cherchant à en cerner les faits marquants : les listes attestant qu’il était planifié de longue date, l’incurie des puissances occidentales, le refus d’évacuer des Rwandais, le silence devant la…