Short films and documentaries: the emergence of the intimate
What tendencies, what meteors emerge in this profusion of fictions? On the Edge, by the Nigerian Nweton Aduaka, most certainly. Indeed, this homage to Fela has an air of Afrobeat…
Sucre amer
The historic fiction Sucre amer is a dense and fascinating film whose aim leaps right out of the screen: i.e. to restitute West Indian memory in the light of its…
Femmes… et femmes
Zakia is beautiful, active, passionate. She presents a women’s television programme. She meets up with her lost friends, Leila, Keltoum and Ghita. The four women promise to keep in touch,…
La Jumelle
Awa and Adama (Adam and Eve) are very close twins. In order to help her scholastically less able brother, Awa (Nacky Sy Savané) sells her soul to the soothsayer Mousso…
Letting Go
When she returns to South Africa after having lived in exile in the States, Nolutando, who has qualified as a doctor, wants to offer her father, whom she thinks has…
Chickin Biznis
This lively comedy creates its own classification: « mandelazation ». No reference is made to apartheid, and Whites are absent. It is is entirely on his own free will that Sipho (Fats…
Dakan
Manga and Sorry love one another, and defy the taboos surrounding homosexuality. Their families manage to force them apart. Manga attempts a relation with a white woman, but ends up…
Mektoub
A young, rich couple travel to Tangier for a medical congress. The woman is abducted and raped by some important men. In the effort to rescue her, the man kills…
Demain je brûle
A Tunisian immigrant ruined by exile, physically weakened and mentally diminished by his stay in France, returns to the fold to die at the end of a long journey in…
TGV
Eight years after the release of Toubab bi which stared Makena Diop in the role of an immigrant, Moussa Touré renews his confidence in the actor. Diop plays Rambo in…
Distribution: a superhuman effort?
African film production and distribution have to go hand in hand, affirmed the participants at the « Cinema and distribution circuits in Africa » seminar, at the Fespaco 99.
On the shoot of La Genèse
In what way is this film relevant today? In the Bible, there is a fraternity which does not stop conflict: we love one another and we fight. This is more…
La Genèse
« Why did you create brothers if only for this dry wind and thirst to return with each generation? » Images of the genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, of all the countries…
Pièces d’identité
The second feature film by the Congolese filmmaker Mweze Dieudonné Ngangura won the Etalon de Yennenga at the sixteenth Fespaco. Set in Congo and Belgium, the film tells the incredible…
The master’s last testament
Emotions were running high, and the minute of silence too short at the Fespaco’s homage to Djibril Diop Mambéty and David Achkar, two filmmakers who passed away in 1998, and…
The Fespaco through the eyes of the South Africans
He is still wondering whether the prize he won for Fools was a politically motivated or not… Refusing to bite his tongue over the Zongo affair, the Burkinabè journalist murdered…
FESPACO 99 : New directions?
Whether we like it or not, the way in which the prizes are attributed conveys a message. It reflects the compromises reached by a jury comprising differing sensibilities, but which,…
Comments made at the Masa
Tu Nokwe and his manager Janneke Strijdonk, South Africa J.S. : « You spend your whole time waiting. Waiting for the bus, for your pass, luncheon vouchers, for the programme, for…
From one festival to the next
The notes and choices of a festival organizer from Marseilles, out and about at the Masa and the Fespaco.
African music
Music is omnipresent at the MASA, and unsurprisingly so… At the « world market of African performing arts », where theatre is unprofitable, and dance yields minimal returns, only African music is…
