2

Afri-Cannes? African Film and

Filmmakers at the World’s Most
Prestigious Film Festival

F ilm festivals’ whirlwind curatorial tours of the globe in the second half of the
twentieth century and the early twenty-first century beg an important ques-
tion: where are the great sub-Saharan African filmmakers who began their work
in the early 1960s? Several films, made with some African participation, were fea-
tured in 1950s film festivals. For example, The Boy Kumasenu (1952), produced
through the Colonial Film Unit of Ghana and shown at the Berlin Film Festival,
won a diplomat at the Venice Film Festival (Garritano 2013: 33). The 1961 Berlin
Film Festival screened and awarded two Senegalese films: Grand Magal à Touba
(dir. Blaise Senghor, 1960), which received the Silver Bear for the best short film,
and Une Nation est née (dir. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr, 1961),
which received a special mention (Bangré 1994). Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sar-
ret (1963) won first prize at the Tours Film Festival in France. The only African
director truly and consistently venerated on the international film festival circuit
from the 1950s to the 1990s, however, was the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Cha-
hine (1926–2008). Chahine began his career at Cannes in the 1950s (De Valck
2007: 94); was featured in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in the 1970s (Wong
2011: 24); was the subject of major retrospectives by the Locarno Film Festival
(in 1996) and the New York Film Festival (in 1998); and won the first Lifetime
Achievement Award at Cannes in 1997 (Wong 2011: 47).1 For African filmmak-
ers other than Chahine—even the Senegalese writer and filmmaker Sembene, the
so-called “Father of African Cinema”—international festival recognition was far
more sporadic.
The task of analyzing the representation of African film and filmmakers at the
major international festivals outside of the continent needs to begin squarely with
Cannes. This is less due to Cannes’ specific relationships with African filmmakers,
however, and more because the French government has been among the main
funders of African filmmaking from its earliest days of independence. In 1961,
the Ministry of Cooperation was created to facilitate relations between France
and its ex-colonies, and in 1963 a Bureau of African Cinema was created within
46 CURATING AFRICA IN THE AGE OF FILM FESTIVALS

the ministry, providing the funding for no fewer than 125 of the 185 African
short and feature films made by 1975, most of them by “francophone” directors
(Andrade-Watkins 1996: 112). Confronted with this aid, which was often framed
altruistically by French authorities, African filmmakers frequently found them-
selves in an impossible situation. With very few other funding sources available in
the early years of independence, and with filmmaking still an expensive endeavor
(before the advent of digital), they felt compelled to take the money, but at the
same time they wondered whether accepting it compromised their values and
independence. More recently, as Diawara argues, the French government—in con-
cert with Cannes—has instead cultivated a genre of “world cinema,” into which
certain African films have been subsumed with little attention to their unique
traits (2010: 86–7). Diawara thus censures the entire French film establishment for
their ongoing “colonialist and technological paternalism when it comes to African
cinema,” arguing that “[t]hey only have eyes for an African cinema that partici-
pates in the deconstruction of Hollywood film language and asserts the logic of
a European humanitarian agenda” (2010: 87). Before I can address these claims,
or Cannes’ contemporary relationship with African filmmaking, it is necessary to
set the scene in terms of the kinds of African films historically shown and prized
at Cannes.
Journalist Claire Diao’s research on African films included in the Cannes
Competition reveals that, from 1946 to 2010, 44 African films were screened: 15
South African films; 13 Egyptian films; four Algerian films; three Malian films;
three Tunisian films; two Senegalese films; and one film each from Burkina Faso,
Chad, Morocco and Guinea Bissau (Diao 2011). If we update these figures to
include the period 2011 to 2014, we add one Egyptian film, one Chadian film, and
one Mauritanian film. It must be acknowledged that the countries featured are
representative of those African countries—South Africa, Egypt, the Maghrebian
countries, and the “francophone” West African countries—where the strongest
celluloid filmmaking cultures existed in the twentieth century. However, what is
striking about these figures is not only that a mere 3 percent of the films in the
Competition from 1946 to 2014 have been African, but that, contrary to what
one might expect, only a third of the ones screened in the Competition have
been “francophone” African films. What the statistics reveal is that while French
authorities may have been funding the production of “francophone” African films
since the early 1960s, they have not been screening many of them within the
Competition section of their most prestigious film festival. In fact, having funded
hundreds of “francophone” African films, they have featured only 18 of them in
their Competition across 67 years.
As Diao’s research reveals (2011), there has been far more visibility and sup-
port for African filmmakers beyond the official Competition at Cannes. The two
most important programs within the Official Selection are the Competition and
Un Certain Regard. According to Cannes, the criteria for Competition films is
“auteur cinema with a wide audience appeal” whereas “Un Certain Regard focuses
on works that have an original aim and aesthetic.”2 Diao’s analysis, reported above,
focuses only on the main Competition; Un Certain Regard was inaugurated
 AFRI-CANNES? AFRICAN FILM AND FILMMAKERS 47

in 1978, usually screening about 18 films, and has selected the work of several
African filmmakers over the years, for example Mauritanian-Malian filmmaker
Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness (2002) and South African director
Oliver Schmitz’s Life, Above All (2010). Other sections within the Official Cannes
program include the Short Film Competition (introduced in 1988); Cannes Clas-
sics (which includes restored films, retrospectives, and “Cinéma de la Plage”);
the Out of Competition, Midnight, and Special Screenings (which usually feature
about 12 films); and the Cinéfondation Selection (which curates 15 to 20 short
or medium-length films from film schools around the world). The Cinéfonda-
tion (founded in 1998) also runs “Atelier” and “Residence” programs to support
young filmmakers; in 2013, three of the 15 projects selected for the “Atelier” at
Cannes came from Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Africa). And from 2000
to 2010, five African filmmakers have been beneficiaries of the “Residence” pro-
gram (Diao 2011). The Directors’ Fortnight, inaugurated in 1969, the origins of
which I described in Chapter 1, operates as a parallel, noncompetitive “mini-
festival,” aiming to recognize “independent” and “eclectic” cinema; it strives to be
more accessible to “non-professional Cannes audiences” than the Cannes Film
Festival itself.3 Another event running parallel to the festival is La Semaine de la
Critique (Critics’ Week), which began in 1961, on the initiative of Robert Favre
le Bret (then Artistic Director of Cannes), as a way of empowering the Associa-
tion Française de la Critique (French Film Critics Association) with the chance
to “explore and reveal filmmakers from all around the world.” Algerian director
Merzak Allouache is one of the African filmmakers whose work has been featured
in this parallel program.4 As I discuss later, African filmmakers have also, more
recently, been the focus of a Pavilion (boasting a budget of half a million euros),
created at Cannes by institutions such as the Organisation Internationale de la
Francophonie (OIF).
Nevertheless, the disjunct between French support of African film production
and the general absence of African films at Cannes is disconcerting, particularly
given the self-congratulatory rhetoric that often surrounds new announcements of
“aid” for African filmmaking at the festival. What is the point of producing some-
thing that you do not screen? The continued absence of African films at Cannes
also fails to recognize the growing audience for them within France more gener-
ally. A 2010 report by the Centre Nationale du Cinéma (CNC) in France reveals
that, whereas in 1992, only 17 African films had a theatrical release in France,
in 2010, the figure had more than doubled to 38. The most interesting statistic
in the report, however, concerns audience numbers in France for African films:
they grew from 30,000 in 1992 to an overwhelming 570,000 in 2010; or from 0.03
percent of total cinema admissions in 1992 to 0.27 percent in 2010 (where the
majority of admissions—48 percent—in 2010 were for US films and the next larg-
est group of admissions—at 36 percent—were for French films). This means that
African films collectively performed better at the French box office in 2010 than—
for example—Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, and Chinese films combined.
The paucity of African films featured at the world’s most prestigious film festi-
val confirms Cindy Wong’s point that, at Cannes, Africa has been “a blatant area
48 CURATING AFRICA IN THE AGE OF FILM FESTIVALS

of neglect” (2011: 61). Furthermore, those African films that have been featured
“have rarely won major festival prizes” (2011: 17).5 Sambolgo Bangré writes:

There can be no doubt whatsoever that it was the prestigious Cannes Festival, by
awarding prizes to Sembene’s La Noire de . . . and Le Vent des Aurès by the Alge-
rian [Mohammed] Lakhdar Hamina, in 1966 and 1969 respectively, that definitively
marked the recognition of African cinema. (1994: 51)6

However, from 1946 to 2013, a total of only 14 African or Africa-related films have
won prizes. The first of these cannot even be considered an African film—Othello
by Orson Welles, which won the Grand Prix in 1952 (Latil 2005: 277); it brought
acclaim to Morocco, the country of production but still a French protectorate at
the time (until its independence in 1956). The next prize, which came in 1966, was
not one of the main festival prizes but rather an ancillary prize: the Prix Jean-Vigo,
which was awarded to Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de. . . . This prize is dedicated
annually to a young French filmmaker of “independent spirit.” The fact that Sem-
bene, a Senegalese filmmaker, won the award is symbolic of a consistent French
practice of attempting to appropriate certain African filmmakers as their own, a
remnant of their policies of assimilation and francophonie from colonial times.
Steven Malčić (2013) refers to this contradictory behavior as a “vicious circle,”
which the first “francophone” African filmmakers had to negotiate. While certain
African filmmakers succumbed to this appropriation, Sembene remained fiercely
Afrocentric until the last. As Maya Jaggi has noted (2005), Sembene judged “his
worth as a filmmaker by his ability to touch audiences in Africa,” and he was
known for his adage: “Europe is not my reference.”
It is, furthermore, ironic (or perhaps cynical) that La Noire de . . . was awarded
the Prix Jean-Vigo for French filmmakers when what the film attempts to do
is carve out an independent space for black African expression, distinct from
French control. Interestingly, the film was funded not by the Bureau of African
Cinema, established in Paris in 1963 to sponsor African filmmaking, but by Les
Actualités Françaises (a French newsreel service, based in Dakar, and headed by
the rebellious Frenchman André Zwobada) and Filmi Doomirev (Sembene’s pro-
duction company). Because of the coproduction with Les Actualités Françaises,
Sembene was nevertheless required to seek authorization from the CNC by sub-
mitting the screenplay to the Bureau of African Cinema. The film is based on a
true story of a young Senegalese maid, Diouana, taken to France by her white
bosses; in a critical metafictional gesture, Sembene makes this white couple work
for the Ministry of Cooperation, charged with running the Bureau of African
Cinema (Malčić 2013: 169). In France, the young maid is so badly treated by her
bosses that she ends up committing suicide. The Bureau was furious about the
film, saying that it was “directed against France” (Andrade-Watkins 1993: 34).
Zwobada retorted: “No, it’s not directed against France, it expresses the feelings of
people who had France imposed on them” (quoted in ibid.). The Bureau rejected
the film, giving it the distinction of being the only African film the Bureau ever
dismissed because of its content (Diawara 1992: 26). Sembene and Zwobada went
ahead, nevertheless, and made the film.
 AFRI-CANNES? AFRICAN FILM AND FILMMAKERS 49

In the moving story of the beautiful young Diouana, Africans and diaspo-
ran Africans found common ground. The film expresses the aesthetic of mel-
ancholy that Simon Gikandi sees as a constant feature of responses by slaves to
their imprisonment (2011). Sadly, expression of her melancholy is not sufficient
to sustain Diouana’s will to live, and her death is a reminder and regrounding of
the aesthetic in its human source, showing that the two are indivisible. This is no
doubt why important African and diasporan filmmakers and thinkers, such as
John Akomfrah, have continued to remind us of the indispensability of La Noire
de . . . to the origin and canon of African filmmaking.7 Even Sembene’s contempo-
rary, the Senegalese filmmaker Momar Thiam, told me at the 2010 IFFR—at which
the festival curators were attempting to elevate him to the same status as Sembene
within African film history—that Sembene deserved his title of “Father of African
Cinema” (pers. comm.). The film was recognized on African territory by winning
the grand prize for cinema at the 1966 Dakar First World Festival of Negro Arts,
and the Tanit d’Or (first prize) at the 1966 Journées Cinématographiques de Car-
thage (JCC) in Tunisia. It is perhaps worth noting here, too, that Sembene “did not
want his films to be viewed in solitary fashion—he wanted audiences to view his
films as social events, provoking shared reactions, to be followed by discussions”
(Dembrow nd).
One might wonder why La Noire de . . . was awarded such a prestigious French
prize at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival if the film had angered the French govern-
ment to such an extent. When one looks at the larger picture of how the French
authorities decided to deal with this scathingly critical film, one answer becomes
clear: this was a form of appropriation designed to quell dissent, to give the appear-
ance of tolerance of critique just as it restrained that critique. It was a form of what
Herman and Chomsky would call the “manufacturing of consent,” of allowing vis-
ibility of critique in order to neutralize it (1994). For, after the making of La Noire
de . . ., the Bureau of African Cinema in fact bought the (noncommercial) distribu-
tion rights for the film, as it did with many African films at the time (Malčić 2013:
170). As Malčić notes:

This is interesting insofar as it shows that such foreign organizations invest their
resources in acquiring control of African cinematic output in lieu of supporting the
production of that output. . . . Armes (1996: 13) writes, “Indeed, distributors and
exhibitors may well consider the very existence of locally-produced films (even if
unsupported by them) as a threat to the profitability of their own operations, since—
if successful—locally-produced films might change audience tastes.” . . . It is for this
reason, perhaps, that upon the purchase of the film’s distribution rights by French
companies, La Noire de . . . premiered in Paris and was prevented from being com-
mercially screened in Africa (Diawara 1992: 108). (2013: 170–171)

Despite Africans’ veneration of Sembene at the 1966 Dakar Festival, despite La

Noire de . . . winning the Prix Jean-Vigo in 1966, despite Sembene winning awards
at other European film festivals,8 it took Cannes until 2005, when Sembene was 82
years old, to invite him to become the first African filmmaker to give the director’s
lesson at the festival (Jaggi 2005). He passed away two years later, in 2007.
50 CURATING AFRICA IN THE AGE OF FILM FESTIVALS

Algerian Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina was the first filmmaker from Africa to

win any of the major awards at Cannes: in 1967, he won the Prix de la Première
Oeuvre (the prize for a debut film) with Le Vent des Aurès; and in 1975, he won
the Palme d’Or (the prize for the best film at the festival, introduced for the first
time that year in lieu of the Grand Prix) for Chroniques des années de braise (Latil
2005: 284, 287). It then took until 1987 for an African film to win recognition
again—this time it was the Prix du Jury, which Malian filmmaker Souleymane
Cissé shared with Japanese director Rentaro Mikuni, for his film Yeelen (Light).9
In 1990, Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouedraogo shared the Grand Prix (the sec-
ond most prestigious award at the festival, after the Palme d’Or) with Japanese
filmmaker Kohei Oguri, for his film Tilaï (The Law) (Latil 2005: 295). African
films won two further prizes in the 1990s: South African filmmaker Elaine Proctor
became the first female and the first white African filmmaker to receive recogni-
tion at Cannes, with a “Special Mention” going to her film Friends in 1993; and
Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine won the newly inaugurated “Prix du 50eme
anniversaire,” or the lifetime achievement award, for Le Destin in 1997 (Latil 2005:
296–297). Since 2000, Africans or African-related films collectively have won six
awards. In 2005, Burkinabé filmmaker S. Pierre Yaméogo won the Un Certain
Regard “Prize of Hope” for Delwende; the same award went to Johnny Mad Dog
(directed by the French filmmaker Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, but set in Liberia) in
2008. The whole cast of French-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes
(about the contributions of North African soldiers to WWII) won the Best Actor
award in 2006. Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun won the Prix du Jury in
2010 for A Screaming Man, while in 2013 French-Tunisian filmmaker Abdellatif
Kechiche won the Palme d’Or for Blue is the Warmest Colour (La Vie d’Adèle—
Chapitres 1 et 2) and Haroun’s Grisgris was awarded the Vulcain Prize for technical
achievement.
It is clear, then, that African films have neither been frequently screened in
competition nor fêted at Cannes. It is not only the festival itself that needs to
be critiqued on this basis, however, particularly when we consider that Cannes
makes a distinction between its in-house programming and the independence of
its juries.10 This narrative of exclusion touches on the broader, international per-
ception of Africa, African films, and African filmmakers, as well as the specific
relationships among a whole swathe of French institutions and former French
colonies in Africa. In order to understand these dynamics better, it is necessary
to look beyond the statistics regarding African films screened and awarded to the
controversies and debates—the (dis)sensus communis—surrounding some of the
films. I want to look at two themes in particular: the political controversy that
arose around the screening and awarding of Chroniques des années de braise in
1975; and the debates around the thematics and aesthetics of African films occur-
ring when Yeelen and Tilaï won their awards in 1987 and 1990, and continuing at
Cannes 2013 around the screening of Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s
film Grisgris.
It seems a significant oversight in much film festival scholarship that the dis-
ruptions at Cannes 1975 have not been given equal attention to those of Cannes
1968.11 While Cannes 1975 was not cancelled, as was the case with the earlier
 AFRI-CANNES? AFRICAN FILM AND FILMMAKERS 51

festival, it took place in a climate of frenzied security and anxiety. As Latil says,
“this edition of the festival . . . remains until today the one that unrolled within the
worst atmosphere, the lives of festival participants at times even in danger” (2005:
191).12 The controversy started well before the festival’s opening day, however. It
was due to the festival committee’s decision to select for the official Competition
the Algerian film Chroniques des années de braise, a film that tells the story of two
generations of Algerians, one that fights alongside the French in WWII, and the
next that fights for its independence against the French, in the war that lasted from
1954–1962. The mayor of Cannes at the time, Bernard Cornut-Gentille, was one of
the first to protest the film’s selection, arguing that it would stir up too many emo-
tions in the city, which—along with other cities in the region of Provençe—was
now home to thousands of French people who had been repatriated from Algeria,
many still believing that Algeria belonged to France. Cornut-Gentille warned the
committee that screening the film would inevitably result in “incidents.” But the
festival has a rule that says that city officials are not to attempt to interfere with its
operations, and the committee remained resolute in its selection of the film (Latil
2005: 192).
Cornut-Gentille’s augury was correct, however. The day before the festival’s
opening, two bombs exploded near significant venues: one alongside the Palais,
and another along the Croisette. The bombs caused destruction to buildings but
no one was harmed. On the first day of the festival, anonymous phone threats were
received, warning of further attacks, and the organization committee had to take
extreme measures to ensure festival participants’ safety by delaying screenings
and bringing in a significant police presence. The anonymous threats continued
throughout the festival, sometimes through phone calls, sometimes through mes-
sages written on doors, although no further bombs were detonated. Various groups
claimed responsibility for the explosions on the day before the festival’s opening,
but the police were never able to ascertain who was accountable. The anonymous
fury grew to fever pitch on the closing night of the festival, when Chroniques des
années de braise became the first, and (to date) only, film by an African and set in
Africa to be awarded the Palme d’Or. The police had to deal with a deluge of bomb
threats, and the jury13 required police protection as they left the Palais that night.
The Algerian delegation to the festival also received anonymous death threats.
Still, no further bombs were detonated, and the festival managed to come
to a close without a single participant being harmed. The festival, the jury, and
Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina were, ultimately, the victors, securing a major
symbolic victory for the global recognition of Algerian independence (and of the
country’s sufferings under French rule) and for Algerian, African, and so-called
“Third World” artists more generally since, as Latil points out, Lakhdar-Hamina
was “the first director from a Third World country to win this validation” (2005:
196). The Algerian filmmaker acknowledged this in his speech at the awards cer-
emony, saying: “This time, the Festival has really become international. This prize
is a recognition of the existence of the Third World: I dedicate it to the Algerian
people, who allowed me to become a filmmaker” (quoted in Latil 2005: 196).
To understand just how significant a moment this was, one has only to delve a
little deeper into the history of the fraught relations between France and Algeria,
52 CURATING AFRICA IN THE AGE OF FILM FESTIVALS

relations that were so traumatized during the Algerian War of Independence

from 1954 to 1962 that all films that even touched on the theme of the war were
systematically censored at Cannes until 1962, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Le
Petit Soldat (1960) (Latil 2005: 184–5). For the duration of the war, the festival
remained on high alert, anxious about suffering attacks. Even four years after
Algerian independence had been won, in 1966, Cannes’ rejection of Gillo Pon-
tecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers led to a major diplomatic spat with Italy, on account
of the film’s screening at the Venice Film Festival, and its being awarded that
Festival’s highest award, the Golden Lion (Latil 2005: 186–8). The concomitant
French embarrassment, perhaps, led to Cannes’ 1967 decision to accept Lakhdar-
Hamina’s Le Vent des Aurès for the official competition, even though the film is
an intense tribute to Algerian nationalism and the agony suffered by ordinary
Algerians during the French occupation. The film went on to win the Prix de la
Première Oeuvre, thereby paving the way for Lakhdar-Hamina’s grand success at
Cannes in 1975.
The next controversy surrounding African films at Cannes was related to the
thematic and aesthetic representation of African contexts on film, and not, as
before, directly to the material and political aftermath of European colonialism in
Africa. It was prompted by the fact that African films such as Yeelen and Tilaï were
awarded prizes at Cannes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Based on a Bambara
legend and on the workings of the secret Komo society of blacksmiths in Mali,
Yeelen tells the story of Nianancoro Diarra, who has to escape his father Soma’s
control in order to restore goodness to the land. The battle between father and son
results in the destruction of both, but also ushers in a period of new hope for the
people. Set in a village in Burkina Faso, Tilaï is a tale of two young lovers, Saga and
Nogma, who are torn apart when Saga’s father marries Nogma while Saga is on a
journey outside of the village. When Saga returns, he and Nogma have to express
their love illicitly. The film ends in tragedy when Saga’s brother Kougri shoots him
to restore the honor of the family.
In his 1992 book, African Cinema: Aesthetics and Politics, Diawara categorized
works such as Yeelen and Tilaï as part of an African film movement he called
“return to the source,” referring to the way they spun mythical dimensions of the
African past and oral storytelling forms into new cinematic tales. Some resented
the attention the films garnered at Cannes, arguing they represented a regression,
from urgent (mostly urban) political issues, to a less confrontational aestheticizing
and exoticizing rural Africa for “Western” consumption. These concerns echoed
broader global anxieties about the consecration of non-Euro-American films at
festivals and the possible “Orientalism” and exoticism in which these films were
compelled to participate to gain such recognition (see Wong 2011: 17, Qing 1993).
The term that started to circulate describing such African films was “calabash cin-
ema,” and it has remained remarkably durable, called upon the moment Africans
feel an African film is in any way “pandering” to an “external” and “exotic” view of
Africa. More recent scholarship (MacRae 1995, Austen 2007, Bolgar Smith 2010)
has reassessed the value of these films, arguing that, in many cases, they use the
past to disguise political critique of the present, thereby avoiding the possibility of
censorship in their countries of origin.
 AFRI-CANNES? AFRICAN FILM AND FILMMAKERS 53

In his more recent work (2010), Diawara attributes great importance not only
to these films, but to the awards they received at Cannes, inspiring what he sees as
the post-Sembenian new wave of African filmmaking. He writes:

[I]n retrospect one can see that films like Yaaba and Tilaï by Ouédraogo and Yeelen
by Cissé were important for the transition to the present. For one thing, they brought
mythical and heroic dimensions to African film that were missing in Sembene’s cin-
ema. Their careful attention to mise-en-scène, storytelling and the place of the indi-
vidual in it, to spirituality and magic, is a testimony to their investment in film as a
primarily fictional and relatively autonomous form. . . . The directors’ mastery of film
form and style becomes the sign of their intervention and determination to carve a new
space for Africa in world cinema. The fact that both Cissé and Ouédraogo received
top awards at Cannes is an indication of this new trend in African cinema. (2010: 96,
my emphasis)

It is somewhat contradictory that Diawara, just several pages after his critique of
Cannes for cultivating a genre of “world cinema” into which African film has been
subsumed (2010: 86–7), here implicitly gives Cannes and its juries credit for essen-
tially being the first to recognize this “new trend in African cinema.” If Diawara
wishes to rescue films such as Tilaï and Yeelen from the bland, flattening genre of
“world cinema,” he needs to find a different way of understanding their value. His
argument that “[t]he directors’ mastery of film form and style becomes the sign
of their intervention and determination to carve a new space for Africa in world
cinema” precisely echoes the very basis on which “world cinema” has been defined.
Mark Betz, for example, argues that the cinematic language of “world cinema” can
be characterized through the concept of “parametric narration, David Borwell’s
term to describe a mode of filmmaking that foregrounds style as an organizing prin-
ciple” (2010: 31, my emphasis). Initially used by Bordwell to describe the contours
and limits of “art cinema,” the term “parametric narration” is appropriated by Betz
to describe what many concur is art cinema’s offspring: world cinema. “World cin-
ema” thus consists of films that, while set in unique contexts around the globe,
frame their narratives within a standardized, highly stylized cinematic language
that will appeal to a certain kind of international audience self-consciously seek-
ing a “global” product (Betz 2010). We are not far here from Mitchell’s analysis of
the world fairs and exhibitions as not simply “representations of the world, but the
world itself being ordered up as an endless exhibition” (quoted in Rydell 2011: 141)—
an exhibition that continuously draws upon the same, uniform, worldly language.
In contrast, in a recent article for Black Camera, French critic of African cin-
ema and founder of Africultures Olivier Barlet implicitly positions himself against
such attempts to read an excess of style into African films celebrated at contempo-
rary international film festivals. Attempting to explain why, of all the 300 films he
watches each year from around the world, African films continue to move him the
most, Barlet returns to the example of Yeelen and offers an interesting, albeit subjec-
tive, reinterpretation of it, with the help of the late French film critic Serge Daney:

[African films’] originality indeed lies in how they respect the person and open up
the way to understanding his or her place in the universe. Souleymane Cissé manages
54 CURATING AFRICA IN THE AGE OF FILM FESTIVALS

this “very well,” as Serge Daney put it writing about Yeelen, “not by aestheticizing the
world but by immediately inscribing bodies in their environment [. . .]” For Cissé,
there is neither picturesque nor exotic! Exoticism requires picture postcard images,
settings for our desires and our fantasies of the barbarian, the savage, the primitive
man. On the contrary, the simplicity and clarity of the images, whose only aim is to
serve what is said, leave the characters the naturalness and grace of their presence in
the world [. . .] Cissé explains this himself [. . .]: “‘Damu’ is the Bambara term for the
positive impression that is left by the sight of a person or a thing and which stays in
the heart and mind a long time. ‘Damu’ is perhaps what grace is. When you see man
living, you observe all that he is, all that surrounds him. When you understand him,
you have to depict him with ‘damu’.” (2011: 139)

I have quoted at length from Barlet’s article because, although it at times risks
homogenizing “African film” as a genre, it is exemplary in highlighting one of the
main strategies certain filmmakers from Africa use to reject accusations of exoti-
cism, and to reject integration into the bland category of “world cinema”—a turn
to the resolutely local and specific. Cissé’s answer to those who would classify
Yeelen as “calabash cinema” or “world cinema” is to look more closely, more deeply
at the film, its setting, the context of its production. MacRae argues, similarly, that
“Yeelen is so firmly rooted in West African Mande culture that the full significance
of the plot, characterization, artistic intent, and social/political significance cannot
be understood outside the cultural and historical context” (1995: 57). Those who
wish to smooth out the differences that reign not only across Africa, but also within
particular African countries and contexts, have only to turn to Cissé’s fascinating
claim that the film “was a discovery of a new thing that I knew existed but which
I had not experienced in real life [. . .] it was like an initiation for me” (quoted in
Austen 2007: 39). The film is not an “exotic” representation of Africa, but neither
can it naively be classified as a “nativist” perspective that reductively constructs
“‘insiders’ as having better knowledge and understanding than ‘outsiders’, no mat-
ter what theoretical approach they use” (Khiabany and Sreberny 2014: 478).
Still, the anxiety about films by Africans pandering to exotic, externalist views
of the continent was resurrected as recently as Cannes 2013. The film in question
this time was Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Grisgris, which tells the
story of how a young disabled male dancer, who gets caught up in petrol smug-
gling, escapes to a rural idyll with his beautiful yet equally troubled girlfriend.
Many African filmmakers with whom I spoke at the festival felt that it was yet
another example of “calabash cinema,” and could not understand why Haroun—
after making complex works such as Bye Bye Africa, Abouna, Daratt, Sex Okra
and Salted Butter, The Return, and A Screaming Man (the latter of which won the
2010 Special Jury Prize at Cannes)—had made such a film. A casual conversation
I had with two young women after a Cannes screening of the film perhaps best
encapsulates the issues. These American women, who were about to embark on a
film project of their own in Ghana, said something to the effect of: “We’ve learned
so much from this film about what we need to do with our own film in Africa.
African filmmaking is so slow and simple—the rhythms are so slow. Our film is too
fast-paced for Africa.” But what they did not realize—in their ignorance of African
films more generally—is that slowness is not indicative of African filmmaking on
 AFRI-CANNES? AFRICAN FILM AND FILMMAKERS 55

the whole. Once again, one film by one filmmaker from Africa is forced to substi-
tute for the entirety of “Africa.”
The reviewers and jury at Cannes 2013 seemed to agree with African filmmak-
ers’ general sensus communis around the film, and Grisgris, in spite of being in
Competition, did not win any main awards, only a technical artistry honor (the
Vulcain Prize). Of course, filmmaking involves the work of hundreds of people,
and Grisgris was the result of collaboration amongst no fewer than nine production
companies. This raises the question of whether certain problems lay in Haroun’s
script or whether he was, for example, compelled to relinquish his power over the
editing decisions to the Belgian editor Marie-Hélène Dozo. These are speculations
that would be difficult to verify, given the politics and confidentiality of filmmak-
ing; however, the example is representative of issues confronting many filmmakers
working with larger budgets today, where standard practice is coproduction with
a host of different companies with divergent, and possibly conflicting, agendas.
While teamwork might benefit a film in some cases, in others it can lead to a com-
promise of integrity and clear authorial vision.
One way of reading the problems many found in Grisgris is through Manthia
Diawara’s critique of the production of the genre of “world cinema”:

World cinema, by which festivals understand everything that is neither American

nor European, is a new invention of films from the non-Western world that com-
fort Europeans in their paternalistic supremacy vis-à-vis the Third World and in
their struggle against Hollywood. It is a cinema that [Congolese filmmaker] Balufu
Bakupa-Kanyinda calls “cinéma Haute-Couture,” a new genre created particularly by
Cannes to boost the French politics of “l’exception culturelle.” (2010: 86–87)

The most apparent, material example of the evolution of the “world cinema” genre
at Cannes is represented by the French government’s move away from supporting
only African filmmakers to a policy of offering support to filmmakers from many

Figure 2.1 “Village International” at the Cannes Film Festival

56 CURATING AFRICA IN THE AGE OF FILM FESTIVALS

different regions of the world. The place where filmmakers tend to gather for official
workshops and conferences at Cannes is the “Village International.” Stretching along
the beachfront beside the Palais des Festivals, and inaugurated in 2000, this “Village”
houses “pavilions” (white tents with space for displays and workshops) for countries
that are able to afford the cost. Of African nations, only South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria,
and the North African countries have their own pavilions. Furthermore, most of the
panels and networking events for African filmmakers are organized under the aegis
not of one of these pavilions, but of the French government’s pavilion for non-Euro-
American filmmakers. This particular pavilion began in 2003 as the Cinémas du Sud
(Cinemas of the South) pavilion, initiated by the Institut Français, in collaboration
with various partners, such as the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.
In 2009, the pavilion was renamed “Les Cinémas du Monde” (Cinemas of the
World), making explicit its commitment to the genre of “world cinema.”14
Much of the reason for the pigeonholing of African films within genres such as
“world cinema” stems from the sporadic and isolated programming of these films
within “A-list” festivals, which has prevented even film experts from expanding
their knowledge of African filmmaking beyond a few select films and filmmakers.
The general ignorance of African filmmakers’ entire oeuvres leads to uncritical
assessments of what constitutes filmmaking by Africans. For example, the Sierra
Leonean founder, director, and curator of the New York African Film Festival
(founded 1993), Mahen Bonetti, argues that:

Traditionally, American audiences simply have not had much exposure to films
made by Africans and, because of this, such audiences often are not accustomed to
the themes, subjects, aesthetics, and narrative styles that are a part of many of the
films coming out of Africa. This unfamiliarity has relegated African cinema to exis-
tence as an obscure, art-house-oriented cinema. (2012: 193)

Bonetti points out that “African cinema is not a genre to be easily defined—if it is
a genre at all” and sees the responsibility as resting with film curators to show that
filmmaking by Africans “spans a range of genres and appeals to a diverse audience
with different interests and tastes” (2012: 194, 198).
Instead, what has tended to happen is that a select few filmmakers from Africa
have been chosen to stand in for “African cinema” as a whole. Diawara critiques
this very pointedly:

It is also clear that, for ideological, personal and paternalistic reasons, the French
have been known to select one African filmmaker at a time, whom they isolate from
the continent’s other filmmakers. They then impose him on international audiences
as the best African filmmaker and make him the envy of everybody in the African
film world. Since the 1960s, this practice of “divide and conquer” has had a nega-
tive influence on the evolution and self-definition of African cinema. The different
French administrations have always attempted to co-opt and contain the definition
of African cinema, instead of encouraging the development of cinematic movements
conceived by African filmmakers and producers themselves. (2010: 85)

Besides the work of a small handful of African filmmakers—those whom Arund-

hati Roy would call the saved turkeys, the anointed ones (Roy 2006: 202; see also
 AFRI-CANNES? AFRICAN FILM AND FILMMAKERS 57

Adesokan 2011: 170–71)—films by Africans simply have not featured prominently

at “A-list” international film festivals. In response, former director of the Edin-
burgh Film Festival Mark Cousins has lamented the “conservative, blinkered pro-
gramming” that is at the “heart of the contemporary film festival problem” (2013:
169). He says that festivals rehash retrospectives of the usual suspects—such as
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa—yet
continue to ignore Indian filmmakers beyond Satyajit Ray, and, in particular, film-
makers from Africa (ibid.).
Filmmakers from Africa are tired of simply complaining about the situa-
tion. Rather, many people are actively working to do something about the prob-
lem, which I explore in the next chapter. The younger generation feels that it is
reductive to speak about “the French” collectively, and thereby risk falling into
the trap of adopting an essentialist approach themselves (see Khiabany and Sre-
berny 2014). Many have had very positive experiences at French film festivals,
including Cannes.15 Furthermore, as I hope to have shown through the example
of the controversy surrounding the Algerian film Chroniques des années de braise,
no film festival—even the most prestigious—can be considered in monolithic,
unchanging terms. Several African filmmakers have also expressed irritation with
an approach that immediately assumes any film by an African made with French
or other European funding will necessarily reflect the values of the funders. The
survey I conducted of African filmmakers in 2013 revealed that very few have even
availed themselves of such funding and that the majority feel they have been able
to “pursue their own vision” regardless of the sources of their funding. Neverthe-
less, De Valck argues that

there is now blossoming interest among film and film festival scholars for studying
the ways in which European (festival) funds influence film projects and their cin-
ematic language. One of the assumptions is that European tastes dominate the new
global economy that has emerged for art cinema, resulting in a situation in which
world cinema has to comply with cosmopolitan standards in order to be eligible for
funding. (2014: 42–3)

It is true that early French funding support for African film has now been com-
plemented by a whole range of funds managed through (mostly, but not exclu-
sively) European film festivals.16 However, one could argue that to focus on the
assumed influence of European film festivals over the thematics and aesthetics
of non-European films is—far from offering critique of such festivals—keeping
them centered, while rendering non-European or so-called “world” filmmakers
simple “victims” rather than agents with power to negotiate their individual posi-
tion and desires (see, for example, Halle 2010). What is needed more urgently than
ever is a shift from the more textual approaches dominating film and film festival
scholarship to an approach that incorporates ethnographic methods and draws on
the heuristic value of “liveness,” whether that be the “live” interactions occurring
between funders and their beneficiaries, curators and audiences, or filmmakers
and festival organizers. It is just such an approach that I attempt in the next chap-
ter, in order to assess the representation of “Africa,” “African film,” and “African
filmmakers” at the 2010 International Film Festival of Rotterdam.