Exploring African Women's Cinematic Practice As Womanist Work

Exploring African Women’s Cinematic Practice as Womanist
Work
Beti Ellerson
Black Camera, Volume 14, Number 2, Spring 2023, pp. 364-403 (Article)
Published by Indiana University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.20
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/883821
Dossier: African Women in Cinema
Exploring African Women’s Cinematic Practice
as Womanist Work*
Beti Ellerson
Abstract
The womanist work in African women’s cinematic practice empowers, supports, and
promotes women in tandem with upholding the fight for racial, ethnic, social, political,
and economic justice in their society and throughout the world. A selection of women’s
voices contextualizes the notion of a womanistic standpoint as a conceptual framework
that embodies their cinematic vision. Based on excerpts from interviews, critiques, cita-
tions, filmmakers’ statements, and intentions presented as leçons du cinéma, in their
own voice, women tell their stories about filmmaking, their cinematic vision, their deci-
sion-making, lessons learned.
Je ne suis pas du tout féministe. Je suis féminisante. Je defends

le cas des femmes . . .
(I am not at all feminist. I am “womanistic,” I defend the cause of women . . . )1
Fad signifies ‘arrive’ and Jal means ‘work,’ ‘work’ because when you arrive at
this farming village called Fad’jal, you must work. When you work, you’re
happy, and if you don’t work, people will mock you.2
Womanist Work: Defending the Cause of Women
I introduce Safi Faye’s words as a point of departure in the exploration of the

womanist work of African women’s cinematic practice. Her words invoke
the often vexed relationship that Afro-descendant women and women of the
South have with Western feminism, fraught with a contentious past, spurned
by those who reject its historical practices of exclusion, ethnocentrism and
elitism by white women. While the origins of the word “feminist” evolved
as a term for advocating women’s rights, womanist is embraced by Afro-
descendant women in order to re-conceptualize western feminism, which
Beti Ellerson, “Dossier: African Women in Cinema: Exploring African Women’s Cinematic
Practice as Womanist Work,” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 14, no. 2
(Spring 2023): 364–403, doi: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.20.
Beti Ellerson / African Women in Cinema Dossier 365
often prioritizes gender rather than integrating its intersectional relation-

ships, a positionality fundamental to Afro-descendant women’s lived expe-
riences, and the essence of Safi Faye’s work. Hence by rejecting the feminist
label but affirming “womanistic” as the practice of defending the cause of
women, she is exercising her agency by naming her own experience rather
than accepting one based on another reality. Afro-descendant and other
women of color at the same time have reformulated feminism—as a means
to visualize, critique, theorize, and explicate the specificities of their experi-
ences and the societies in which they live.
As a further matter, describing the actions of doing “womanist work”
renegotiates the terms of this feminism—outlining the tenets of a concep-
tual framework that I envision toward an intersectional, interdisciplinary,
and transnational methodology. In so doing, I use the second citation by
Safi Faye to place emphasis on the praxis-based approach to her cinematic
practice, as she states:
I investigate, inquire, and then I write, and I try to remain faithful to the rural
world that I come from, as well as to Africa and the villagers. I admire people
who live off the land. In Serer country, the coastal people to which I belong . . .
are renowned for the energy they put into their work. The people live within a
matriarchal society in which women have more importance than men. Men and
women are free thanks to the fruits of their labor. The rural world, the theme that
I chose and which corresponds to my cinematic vision, is timeless. It concerns all
rural farmers, whether they are Japanese, Senegalese or Singaporean, since we’ve
all been rural farmers at one time; the entire world comes from the country-
side. I glorify the hard work rural farmers do to achieve food self-sufficiency.3
Therefore, her womanistic act of defending the cause of women is con-

comitant with her desire to contribute to the knowledge production of Africa
and the safeguarding of its culture: “I do what I can for my Africa, to tell how
beautiful Africa is, and show that the people will not disappear, even if one
forgets us.”4
Elsewhere I have translated feminisante as “feministing”; and yes, many
Afro-descendant women embrace the term “feminism,” but there are just
as many who do not. By expressly employing “womanist” and “woman-
istic” in this present exploration, I put in relief these differentials, at the
same time highlighting the specificities of the womanistic experiences of
African women in cinema, where the practice of empowering, supporting,
and promoting women in tandem with upholding the fight for racial, ethnic,
social, political, and economic justice in their society is the sine qua non of
doing womanist work.
366 BLACK CAMERA 14:2
African Women Everywhere: Womanistic Voices behind the

Camera, in Front of the Screen
I begin with a selection of voices of African women of the screen that

frames what I describe as womanistic thought.
Sarah Maldoror asserts: “African women must be everywhere. They must
be in the images, behind the camera, at the editing table and involved in every
stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones who talk about their
problems.”5 The “everywhere” also includes women in front of the screen as
cultural readers; they must also be present in all areas of discourse as scholars,
critics, and theorists of African women in cinema studies. Moreover, in
defining her role as filmmaker in the context of cultural production, her
emphasis on African women telling their own stories becomes an imperative
“because our history has been written by others and not by us.” African
women must be the ones to take an interest in their own history, to do the
research and make films about Africa’s history: “I think it is up to us to defend
our own history . . . to make it known, with all our qualities and faults, our
hopes and despair—it is our role to do it!”6 As women film practitioners wear
multiple hats, in addition to filmmaker—as activist, organizer, producer,
critic, journalist, writer, academic—they must be the ones who talk about
the vital role that African women play in creating, shaping, and determining
the course of their history and the knowledge that it produces.
Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, veteran journalist, communications
specialist, media activist, critic and writer, and pioneer of Senegalese media
culture, is perhaps most exemplary of a cultural worker doing womanist
work. She was the founder and director of the Maison de la Femme Henriette
Bathily, the women’s house located on Gorée Island, Senegal. In addition,
for many years she was the director of Rencontres cinématographiques de
Dakar (RECIDAK), an annual Dakar-based film festival that she initiated.
Adding to the list of her accomplishments, she was a founding member of
the Association Sénégalaise des Critiques de Cinéma (ASSECCI), a Senegal-
based organization of film critics. Her goal as a cultural activist is “to allow
women to express themselves, to be witnesses to their era and to reflect a
realistic image of Africa in their own lives.”7 Employing her objective as a
methodological approach to this exploration of womanist work, women film
practitioners and advocates are positioned as direct witnesses to their lives,
of their society, of their history, hence drawing directly from women’s voices,
using their own words, and visualizing their experiences as they see it.
Assia Djebar, who came to filmmaking twenty-one years after writing
her first novel, used the camera to lift the veil that shrouds women’s vision,
allowing women’s experiences to be visualized and those on the outside to
see through women’s eyes by using her camera as a means to envision the
world of women: “I thought to myself that the woman has been deprived of an
image: She cannot be photographed, she does not even own her image. Since
she is shut away, her gaze is on the inside. She can only look at the outside if
she is veiled, and then, only with one eye. I decided then, that I would make
of my camera this eye of the veiled woman.”8 Hence, the camera becomes
the woman-eye, the lens becomes the vehicle for expressing woman/women’s
experiences to show her vision of the world, refocusing the gaze—a crucial
element of African women’s cinematic practice.
Alimata Salambéré, a founding member of FESPACO and president
of the organizing committee of the first festival in 1969, was director at the
Burkinabe television network Radiodiffusion-Télévision Voltaique (RTV).
Serving as General Secretary of FESPACO from 1982 to 1984, she oversaw the
eighth edition in 1983. Madame Salambéré was also Minister of Information
in 1987 and Minister of Culture from 1987–1989. During a tribute by
UNESCO in 20199 for the ensemble of her work in the promotion of culture
in Burkina Faso and Africa, she responded in this way: “Our role as an elder
is to transmit our knowledge to the younger ones.” Regarding the release of
the book during the same period, Alimata Salambéré / Ouedraogo: itinéraire
et leçons de vie d’une femme debout (tr. Alimata Salambéré / Ouedraogo:
the journey and life lessons of a woman of principle) by Yacouba Traoré, she
comments: ”I am very happy to see that I am a model for the youth and espe-
cially for young girls. . . .”10 Hence, Madame Salambéré invokes the vital role
of the elder, projecting to the future generation of girls and women, having
already forged the path, and having set the example—as role-modeling is
fundamental to doing womanist work.
Anne-Laure Folly describes her approach to filmmaking as a meditation
on women’s point-of-view experience:
I have always been interested in [African] women’s discourse, because I think it

is an alternative discourse. I have always treated my themes from the perspec-
tive of women . . . their perspective does not simply analyze things; they live
them. . . . I think it is a discourse on values, of other values than those that have
been advanced. . . . I think that at this moment in the evolution of humanity,
certain human beings, notably women, sense those things that are important
and express them, and these things are different from what has been previously
communicated.11
Her reflections describe the womanist theoretical framework that is an

essential feature of African women’s filmmaking practice: valorizing women’s
perception of the world.
Najwa Tlili relates a woman-affirming approach in her discussion of
feminism and activism which entails taking charge of one’s own destiny:
I think that it is time to stop saying that others are responsible for our prob-
lems, that others are speaking for us, or that it is the media that is distorting the
image of women. There is a space that we have to fill ourselves. We are not in
a period of mass militancy, but we are at a particular moment in time—I don’t
want to call it ‘feminist militancy,’ because it is often viewed as aggressive to say
feminist today, it has become like a bad label—perhaps it is a modern form of
feminism: to go forward, to simply express oneself, to say things the way they
are lived and felt by women. This is in itself an act of life.12
Hence, she proposes a type of womanist advocacy by claiming one’s agency

and creating realistic images by drawing from women’s lived experiences.
Director Marthe Djilo Kamga and producer Frieda Ekotto, the makers
of Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters (2017, Belgium and
US), center its focus on the role of women as artists and cultural activists
in the context of knowledge production. The conceptual framework of this
womanist work places African women as the “primary sources” of their study
and research. The women’s voices and the relating of their experiences inform
their project. They elaborate on the significant role that African women play
in the production of knowledge.
Marthe Djilo Kamga had this to say: “For me, this documentary . . .
expresses this desire to redefine myself as an African through the experience
of other African women. What all our trajectories have in common is the
refusal to abide by the norms that were imposed upon us. We made the
choice to open up and, in doing that, to give other women a chance to realize
that they have the power to create meaning, knowledge.”13 Frieda Ekotto
continues:
African women filmmakers rely on the power of images to bring about a so-
cial conscience. They insist that the visual remain on the side of minorities,
particularly women, and all disenfranchised. With direct interventions, they
create fractures within unspoken traditions that oppressed them. Their subtle
images are sensitive to the unseen, to what remains invisible within the po-
litical realm, to the silence that keeps women in the shadows. In addition,
they can speak of intimate matters. They can question the ongoing suffering
of women within religious systems, address the psychiatric illnesses that stem
from economic exploitation, which alienates women and young people in par-
ticular, as well as shed light upon women’s sexual lives, a highly taboo topic.
Critically, this work is beginning to address the fact that the experiences of
African women conform neither to African heteronormative discourses, nor
to those established by Western LGBTQ+ communities and scholarship. Here,
too, storytelling and visibility are keys to understanding the beauty and variety
of women’s lived experiences.14
As director of the Newtown Film School in South Africa, Masepeke

Sekhukhuni was mentor to all her students, at the same time, she stressed
the importance of reaching out to the women:
I always say that women are the best storytellers in Africa. That is where I start,
and in trying to encourage young women I say to them, ‘It does not matter
whether you call those stories gossip or chit chat or whatever.’ Women have
them; they have those stories. Then you move further than storytelling. Women
are producers, they control the budget at home, they direct. When they come
they have those natural skills, they have those skills already and our men should
recognize that. They should know it, and help us in this battle to ensure that
there are more women. When women are here, they are given that opportunity
to use those skills that they have. 15
Emphasizing that cinema has long been a medium where the principles of
filmmaking are formulated within a male frame of reference, she is interested
in how women are able to understand how to express themselves freely as a
woman within it, how they are touched by the moving image, and to what
extent they can discern film language and speak through it in their own
voice. For Masepeke Sekhukhuni, the demystification process of filmmaking
begins with men confronting the role they play in it: “This whole thing of
mystifying the difficulties of making films, I think that it is all male games,
it is about power, basically. Men just like to be in a position of power all the
time, to mystify everything. They have to sort of confront themselves to say,
‘We know how women are, I know my mother, I know my sister, I know the
kinds of skills that they have, and so I have to make sure the opportunities
are there for women.’”16
Agatha Ukata, a professor at the American University of Nigeria,
completed her doctoral studies at the University of Witwatersrand in 2010.
Her PhD thesis, “The Images(s) of Women in Nigerian (Nollywood) Videos,”
examines female representation in Nigerian cinema. She has published widely
on the topic of gender and Nollywood. Dr. Ukata is among a growing cohort
of African women scholars doing womanistic research on African women
in cinema. I asked her what inspired her to focus on the representation of
women in Nollywood:
What informed my interest in the study was borne on the fact that the depic-
tion of women in one of the first Nollywood videos that I watched, which
was Glamour Girls, typified women in very outrageous ways that tried to feed
on the stereotypes of women in Nigeria and by extension African societies. It
seemed as though women have nothing good to contribute to the society other
than destroying moral values, which I strongly have a problem with. With such
a portrayal I began to interrogate the rationale behind such representations of

women.17
In 2011, Joyce Osei Owusu contacted me to say that she was doing her
doctoral research on women filmmakers in Ghana at Swinburne University
of Technology in Australia and to tell me how much my work was useful
to her study. We continued our scholarly exchange right up to her disserta-
tion defense in 2015 on the thesis entitled, “Ghanaian Women and Film: An
Examination of Female Representation and Audience Reception.” My intro-
ductory comment to her in our first interview: “I am excited to see the emer-
gence of a visible African Women in Cinema Studies and scholars dedicated
to it. Please give some reflections on this field of study and the role that you
would like to play.” She responds:
To tell you the truth, I am equally excited and thankful to pioneers like you
who have led the way. Gradually, more scholarly studies are paying attention
to African Women in Cinema though we cannot deny the fact that more have
been done in the area of women’s representation by male filmmakers. It is impor-
tant that we take stock, examine, and explore the films and images constructed
by our African sisters both at home and abroad to become aware of their nar-
ratives, ideologies, leitmotifs, images, aesthetics choices and styles, influences,
experiences, production conditions, constraints, successes and failures among
others. Studies from different approaches will ensure our broad appreciation
and give new directions in African women’s films. More research in the area
will also enhance the research base and wholeness of African cinema studies
and see to the establishment of departments and faculties dedicated to women
studies and African women in cinema studies among others.18
She is applying these womanistic principles in her teaching as she has

returned to the faculty at a university in Ghana since the completion of her
doctoral studies.
Anne-Laure Folly describes her approach to filmmaking as an investi-
gation into women’s point-of-view experience:
I have always been interested in [African] women’s discourse, because I think it

is an alternative discourse. I have always treated my themes from the perspec-
tive of women. . . . Their perspective does not simply analyze things; they live
them. . . . I think it is a discourse on values, of other values than those that have
been advanced. . . . I think that at this moment in the evolution of humanity,
certain human beings, notably women, sense those things that are important
and express them, and these things are different from what has been previously
communicated.19
Her reflections describe one of the womanistic beliefs intrinsic to African

women’s filmmaking practice: valorizing women’s perspectives of their
world.
The Womanist Work of Sisters of the Screen, African Women in

Cinema—Forging Onward
In 2016 I assisted in the curation of the Sisters in African Cinema-

themed focus of the fourteenth edition of the Afrika Film Festival, organized
by FilmInitiativ and held in Cologne, Germany.20 In addition, I was invited
to discuss my film Sisters of the Screen, African Women in the Cinema (2002),
subtitled in German. I was delighted that it coincided with the twenty-year
mark since the conception of my Sisters of the Screen Project, which began
in 1996.
The focus theme conjured the presence of kindred spirits converging on
a shared experience—cinema. A key feature of the edition was the Sisters in
African Cinema Roundtable, which I moderated, featuring Leyla Bouzid of
Tunisia, Françoise Ellong from Cameroon, Judy Kibinge from Kenya, and
Belgium-based Monique Mbeka Phoba of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The nearly two-hour dialogue with simultaneous translation in German for
the audience and in French and English to the panelist, with me speaking
directly to them in either language, enhanced the spontaneous exchange
among “sisters” enabling a rare in-depth cross-continental/trans-diasporic
discussion. My endeavor as well was to provide a “sister circle” reminiscent
of womanistic spaces that ensure a welcoming, friendly, safe environment
in which to share and dialogue. I began with the question, “Exploring the
notion of a sisterhood in African cinema, where do you position yourself
in the context of a ‘sister in African cinema’? Does it exist for you? To what
extent is it a reality or an idea? What could a sisterhood in African cinema
be, in an ideal situation?” Excerpts from the responses:
Judy Kibinge:
The term invokes an idea, something that we are heading towards. I feel a sense
of sisterhood every time I meet an African female filmmaker. You are joined in
purpose. But having said that I don’t feel the existence of a big network because
I feel that things keep us from that network, language for instance. I wish that
we could take this translation booth and headphones to breakfast even. Because
there are so many things that you want to say and there is a distance caused by
language, at festivals for instance. But despite that, when you speak with sisters,
with filmmakers, who create these pieces like you, there is definitely an imme-
diate kinship.
Françoise Ellong:
The first time that I felt this sisterhood [was when participating in an African
women Facebook group]. In this group I could connect with many, many
women who were filmmakers. And then I became aware, because before then
I had not had a vision of the notion of a sisterhood. This discovery aroused my
interest to know more about a woman’s perspective in filmmaking. They come
from diverse countries, with different backgrounds, different experiences. I had
the sense of belonging to a group that protects and supports. Where we learn
about each other’s projects and experiences.
Leyla Bouzid:
For me this notion is rather abstract. I am not sure if it actually exists. I am

thinking about it in the context of today’s reality. I am not sure if it is relative to
the situation in the Maghreb, in North Africa. I am thinking about the many
women filmmakers in Morocco and in Tunisia. I am lucky to come from a
country [Tunisia] where there is a tradition of producing a significant number
of women filmmakers. And where cinema is also considered important. I am
not sure if there is a ‘sorority,’ but I do know that there is a female sensibility
that is very strong . . . and if it did exist what should it be: a possibility to view
these women-directed films, to be able to be influenced and nourished by them,
that they be part of our personal film archive and that we are able to discuss
among ourselves. . . .
Monique Mbeka Phoba:
I was close to those who worked in the 1990s, during a very activist period.
Militant in the sense that we were sisters and brothers in solidarity and support.
Militant is a term that is now a bit outmoded, but this is what formed me. And I
see my profession as one that allows me to make films and projects but also one
in which I must communicate as it relates to the existence of an African produc-
tion, within which there is women-produced works. It is not that I just decided
to do this one day, but rather it came naturally. When a newly arrived woman
appears on the scene, I immediately connect with her, go to see her film . . . and
as soon as I am able to, I reach out to them. Hence, in addition to dealing with
my own work, I reach out to others. And in this little space in which I navigate
I transmit information about them as well.
Monique Mbeka Phoba, among the first voices of my Sisters of the Screen
Project, recalled the journey that we have taken together, both of us con-
tinuing to do womanist work, in the footsteps of Alimata Salambéré, “to follow
what the elders are doing and to then discover arriving talents.” Therefore,
during the screening of Sisters of the Screen in Berlin, I was delighted to find
a new generation of viewers discovering my work. Organized by AfricAvenir
and moderated by Peggy Piesche, an Afro-German scholar and activist also
doing womanist work. The screening was particularly fulfilling, as this was
the first time in my many years of participating in a public screening of the
film with a Q&A with a large audience of womanists of African descent. They
engaged enthusiastically with the women in the film and the issues that they
brought out. I was especially excited to discuss it with young millennials in
search of African women elders as role models, which is how they referred to
these amazing sisters of the screen! One young woman talked about seeing
in the women her aunt and even great-aunt! I also realized the extent that
the terrain of African women of the screen had expanded to encompass the
many young Afro-German women who are using the camera and the screen
to tell their stories, explore their identities, and to problematize their social
location.21 For instance they were especially intrigued by the thorny issue
raised in the film, around the “who-is-really-African identity” between some
of the African and Diaspora women at FESPACO in 1991, a theme that I
hope to explore in the future.
The notion of “sisters of the screen” continues to be relevant, perhaps
even more so today as the evolving screen culture navigates beyond the tra-
ditional movie and television screen, encompassing computer screen, tablet,
mobile phone, and whatever device of the future, hence enabling a growing
glocal dialogue between the African continent and its ever-expanding dias-
poras. And above all, the Sisters of the Screen Project has evolved into a veri-
table African Women in Cinema Studies, gathering the requisite tools for
building a womanist historiography, methodology, criticism, all of which
contribute to the creation of a womanistic canon for research and study.
Let Me Tell You What I Do When I Make Films
Since I first embarked on my journey toward a genuine discipline in

the study and research of African women in cinema twenty-five years ago,
my methodology and scholarship have been informed by the many African
women practitioners with whom I have traveled this path, during inter-
views—in person, by email, telephone, video-conference—conversations,
collaborations, conferences, panels, café chats and sister circles—and in many
other instances, from getting to know them through their Twitter feeds,
Facebook pages, personal websites, and written publications. In most cases,
they are not aware of their impact, the influence that their work and ideas
have had on my process, my way of thinking about knowledge production
and validation, and perhaps more importantly, my motivation to forge

onward toward an African Women in Cinema Studies, in theory and praxis—
which for the most part has sustained itself outside the academy through
activism. So, my approach has been to listen and learn during their story-
telling of process, practice, successes, restarts, courage, probing, searching,
and questioning.
Fundamental to my approach is the direct engagement with women’s
voices as primary sources, first and foremost: having them tell me who they
are and what they think about their work. In the same way that Safi Faye’s
approach to filmmaking privileges the voice, lived experience, and the per-
spective of the interlocutor, letting them do the talking while she and the
camera listen, my research approach similarly privileges this practice. In so
doing, this section is a selection of leçons du cinema, a masterclass of sorts,
where women tell their stories about filmmaking, their decision-making
and lessons learned. Within these voices we discover their interrelation-
ship with their work as scholars, researchers, activists, journalists, artists,
and organizers, bringing an interdisciplinary approach to their filmmaking
and hence, actively contributing to the development of a African womanist
discourse in film theory and criticism. And what I find especially compel-
ling in so many of these stories is the biographical details that are inscribed
in their journeys.
While it is not possible to present the voices of all the women that I have
interviewed/followed in the past twenty-five years, it is beneficial to share a
selection of excerpts spanning the continent and diaspora in order to portray
the diversity of their experiences and the range of themes that they probe in
their filmmaking. Whether shorter reflections or longer elaborations, this is
what African women do when they make films:
Safi Faye’s entry into cinema evolved from her work in ethnology. Using
film as a means to convey certain ideas became an important element in her
approach to ethnology:
I did not come to cinema by chance, I studied ethnology at the Sorbonne. We

had access to cinematography equipment once a week and learned how to use
it. I realized that in order to be more efficient I should go to film school. Thus, I
went to L’École Louis Lumière, one of the best film schools in France, in Paris.
I learned like everyone else—I was the only African woman—how to handle a
camera, and I became familiar with how to use the cinematography equipment.
At the end of the first year I dared to make a little film. It was mainly to put my-
self to the test, for me to know whether I had learned it well or not. That is how
I came to learn filmmaking.22
***
“Cinema has given us the possibility of putting ourselves in the picture, seeing
ourselves in these images.”23 Cultural worker par excellence: cineaste, anthro-
pologist, ethno-linguist, Mariama Hima’s words frame her long engagement
with knowledge production in Niger. She has held positions as museum conser-
vationist at the National Museum of Niger, as National Director of Culture and
the Niger ambassador to France. She filmed her doctoral research under the
direction of Jean Rouch and has long been interested in environmental issues
and recycling, recurrent topics of her films. Summarizing her doctoral film,
Baabu Banza / Nothing is Thrown Away (1984, Niger) she states:
Through a series of films, I attempt to address a subject that affects many Third
World countries, particularly those of the Sahel. The phenomenon of recycling
makes us witness to the birth of an ingenuity generated by necessities of all
types. With the overabundant surplus from the West at its disposal the creative
genius of these recycle scavengers is brought forth. So I did not hesitate to plunge
my camera into the garbage bins of the city of Niamey, passing through the sto-
ried market of Bukoki where everything is bought, sold, recovered, and trans-
formed. I saw a tire turn into a sandal; a tire which, in industrialized countries,
is rescued, recycled or quite simply destroyed. In Bukoki it is given a thousand
and one faces. Therefore it is not surprising to see a Coca-Cola can transformed
into a pot, or a metal barrel into a trunk.24
***
Asmara (Beraki) Marek, whose repertoire of eclectic stories reflects her

equally diverse background, including African Studies and architecture, elab-
orates the ideas that frame her cinematic philosophy:
Filmmaking gives one an opportunity to explore and synthesize basic human

themes of existence. What tools you use to express those themes vary from
filmmaker to filmmaker. In my work it’s true that I use architectural symbols
or sometimes elements from Africa. . . . Themes are subjects, like jealousy or
betrayal or desire, and those give life to a story, not a certain location or a
prop. A person from a certain place in a certain time is reality and filmmakers
work with the real.
In her film Anywhere Else (2012, Czech Republic & US), she relates the dis-
parate cultural experiences of a divorced Eritrean father who drives a taxi,
his two US-born teenagers, and the newly-arrived European international
student who has been welcomed into his home. I asked her to talk about the
autobiographical elements of the film, the theme, and why she chose to tell
the story in that way:
Even if the basis of a story is autobiographical the process of making a script

and a film destroys, re-conceptualizes, and re-temporalizes the experiences that
I only see those characters as themselves. I wanted to tell my father’s story, how
I saw it in a particular moment, and I wanted to explore characters who feel
displaced. It is a feeling that I will probably return to in future films. I am in-
terested in floating people, and in uprootment: a sense of feeling acutely the ac-
cident of birth and place.25
***
Rahel Zegeye recounted to me the extraordinary story of how she came to

make Beirut (2012, Lebanon), a feature film about the experiences of Ethiopian
domestic workers in Lebanon. Her experiences give a glimpse of the formi-
dable efforts of a womanist worker to get her story told in order to help others.
My main aim with the film was to show a different perspective on the lives of
Ethiopian workers in Lebanon. We often hear stories of abuse and bad treatment
of Lebanese employers towards their foreign domestic workers (maids). Most
media and organizations working to help migrant domestic workers (MDWs)
in Lebanon portray the worker as a helpless victim, her fate ruled by evil agen-
cies and bad madams. Although this often does happen and is definitely an issue
that needs attention, reality is much more complicated. I want to shed light on
the inner lives and thoughts of a domestic worker, an aspect which is usually
hidden from the Lebanese and foreign public. . . .
Many Ethiopian MDWs who come to Lebanon decide to run away from
their employers. Some do this due to real reasons of mistreatment, others don’t.
They might be tempted to leave the boring household chores and duties at the
employer’s house for a ‘freer’ existence. Once they leave the employer’s house
and break their contract they do not have any documents and are illegal to stay
in Lebanon. More than often they will choose to sell their bodies for a living
whilst enjoying their freedom. They live life on the fast lane: drinking, smok-
ing, partying and sleeping with many men usually without any form of protec-
tion. The film tackles sensitive topics such as morality, prostitution and HIV/
AIDS. These are important issues that need to be brought into attention to both
Ethiopian women in Lebanon but also back in Ethiopia, before they decide to
go work in Lebanon.
. . . I started working on the film in 2004 and it was finished a few months
before the July 2006 Israel War. Before making the film, I showed my script to
the church as well as the Ethiopian embassy in Lebanon and they approved it.
The editing and finishing was done in Ethiopia with the support of Alem Tilahun
(Haile Gebrselassie’s wife). Alem was very supportive of my project and would
have liked to help me distribute it. However, once I returned to Beirut with the
finished film the embassy did not want to give the final approval for distribu-
tion. This has stopped the process of showing my film to a wider audience back
in Ethiopia, which is my main target audience for this film. All the actresses and
actors in the film are migrant workers from Ethiopia and Sudan. Both my sister
Hiwot and I have attended drama and acting school when we were younger. As
domestic workers we only have Sundays off, so we could film only on Sundays. It
took two years to finish the filming. During this time I put in all my earnings
to produce the film . . .
The film has not been seen by the public because I do not have the means
nor anyone to assist me in Lebanon as the country is in continuous strife and
war. After the failed attempt of getting Beirut to be approved for distribution,
I encountered my own troubles. I had a residence problem for some years be-
cause my boss left the country during the 2006 war, leaving me homeless and
without any legal documents. Now I have a new boss and I am legal. And I have
found a good employer who supports my filmmaking. 26
The backstory of this interview is equally remarkable. In 2011, Alex Shams,

cofounder with Janie Shens of the Migrant Workers Task Force (MWTF),
sent me a Facebook message telling me about Rahel’s work and her interest
in creating a dramatic, fictional web-series about the lives of a group of
Ethiopian women in Lebanon, inquiring about suggestions for funding
sources as well as possibilities of connecting with Ethiopian filmmakers.
I immediately thought that a written interview on the African Women in
Cinema Blog would be a good way to get visibility and as I query people I
know, I could refer them to the link on the Blog.27 Alex Shams put me in
touch with Rahel and suggested that I include Janie in the message, as she
would be able to assist us with our English-language correspondence. Her
story became instant Internet buzz with a “maid as filmmaker” tag. Rahel,
the MWTF and I would rather the focus center on her experiences and her
intentions as she does womanist work for the cause of women as domestic
workers.
***
Horria Saïhi, feminist and activist who uses diverse mediums of commu-
nication to address social and political issues, is best known for her inde-
fatigable work as journalist, reporter, and filmmaker against government
censorship and religious fundamentalism. In the 1990s as a politically
committed radio and television journalist she journeyed a perilous path to
document witnesses giving testimony to the atrocities of Islamist fundamen-
talism whose sole objective was to wipe out all cultural activities. In 1995 the
International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) acknowledged her work
with the “Courage Award.” In our interview at FESPACO in 1997, she told
me about her film that was screened during that edition:
Algérie en femme [1996], resembles the title of a film that was made by René
Vautier, which is called Algérie en flamme, it was about the war of liberation. In
Algérie en femme, I speak of the struggle of women. [The film] relates the pres-
ent situation in Algeria. As you know, it is a very dramatic situation, very dra-
matic. Because each day has its lot of assassinations, of destruction, of massacres.
I speak about the women’s role in this struggle. There are women of different
social categories; peasant women who are illiterate, intellectuals and artists,
and women who take up arms to defend their own lives and those in the vil-
lage. There are women in arms and those who fight peacefully, so that life con-
tinues, so that Algeria continues to stand on its feet. . . . 28
She lives in exile in France where she continues her struggle against polit-
ical violence against women and religious extremism. Unable to show
her films in Algeria, she wrote the book Voix sans voile (tr. voice without
veil, editions Helvétius 2016). In her autobiographical work Horria Saïhi:
Une femme algérienne. Au fil de la résistance, j’écris ton nom (An Algerian
woman, throughout the resistance, I write your name, editions Hémisphèrès,
2022), like the women that she has followed in her storytelling, she too is
witness—“at the same time a life journey, a testimony, a call to resistance.”
***
Mame Woury Thioubou’s inquiry into practices of beauty probes women’s

self-fashioning and the qualities that embody notions of elegance.
Problematizing aesthetic choices and expressions of beauty, she investigates
the reasons why women resort to artifices to feel beautiful, and in so doing,
to what need they are submitting:
In my film, I investigate the practices of feminine beauty in St. Louis (Senegal).

How do they express it? What are its characteristics? To find an answer to
these questions, I pose my camera in various locations. In a hair salon where
ladies come to get made up and their hair done; at a shop where they buy
beauty products. Moreover, at their homes, I talk to the elders so that they
can tell me about the traditions of elegance in the city. And through the met-
amorphosis of someone in traditional dress and hairstyle, participating in the
carnival “Takussanu Ndar,” organized as part of the St. Louis Jazz Festival. In
order to have a cross-generational perspective: then and now, what are the
practices of beauty, what are the changes that have occurred? How do they
adapt to the mutations of fashion? Beyond the simple matter of aesthetics
that traverse the film, I want to investigate the societal practices as it relates
to beauty.29
***
Branwen Okpako, currently a professor at the University of California-Davis,

has focused much of her work on Afro-European identities, a theme that
several Europe-based Afro-descendant women have addressed in their films.
She reflects on this subject as it relates to her own work and to the broader
issue of how Europe is dealing with its identity in an evolving multicultural,
multiethnic continent. She also, touches on the experiences of the Afro-
German community. I asked her as well, how she locates herself within these
identities:
I focus on experiences that resonate with me. Filmmaking is hard work and
spiritually demanding work too. So for me it is key that I get some new under-
standing out of it for my own personal growth. I am not making films one to one
about my situation. But I know what it means to feel “other ,” I felt that grow-
ing up in Nigeria too, so when I came to Germany and started to get to know
the culture and the people, I was fascinated by the culture of the Afro-Germans
and how they were working towards building an identity for themselves in an
uncharted territory. The courage and resilience was inspirational and I found
many universal themes to talk about that resonated with me . . . I locate my-
self where I am geographically and spiritually. My films are my witness to life
as I see it. It is a great honor to be able to make films so I use every opportunity
seriously. It takes so long to gather and order experience and then to translate
what one has learned into a piece of work to share with others, it takes years.30
***
“You can make a difference” has become Musola Cathrine Kaseketi’s leit-
motif, by showing that women with disabilities are in fact, no different from
anyone else; given the chance to learn, excel and succeed:
Initially I hesitated about dealing with disability issues as the subject of my first
film because I did not want people to think that I was telling my own story.
Unfortunately or fortunately it became literally impossible to raise money for
what I thought would be my first feature, ‘Kamukola,’ since I did not have a
show reel. In 2004 I decided to shoot Suwi (2010, Zambia and Finland), which
at the time was called ‘Rejection of Reality.’ I was not happy with the sound and
camera work, so I decided to put the project on the shelf. What I appreciate most
is that this experience helped me to mull over the script and rewrite it to reflect
the life of anybody with or without a disability. I have had my own challenges
as a woman, as a woman with a disability and as a woman filmmaker, and thus
I consider every challenge as a motivation to forge ahead. Since I was not ac-
cepted in society because of my disability, but because my family helped me to
accept and appreciate myself, I sometimes turn my experiences into humor and
speak openly about my disability when I meet people for the first time. Some of
these aspects are incorporated in Suwi.31
Musola Cathrine Kaseketi launched the Shungu Namutitima International

Film Festival of Zambia (SHUNAFFoZ) with the objective to showcase
through cinema, the capabilities of people and women in particular, with
disabilities. Hence, wearing multiple hats, she does the womanist work of
disability activism.
***
Tsitsi Dangarembga was catapulted into international renown with her first
novel, Nervous Conditions, published in 1988. Later she combined filmmaking
as a mode of communication. She has become a cultural ambassador for Africa
and Zimbabwe in addition to other capacities in the area of cultural production
and scholarship. In 1992 she created Nyerai Films, a film production company
in Harare. She talked to me about its mission and some of its projects.
The mission of Nyerai Films is to produce and distribute compelling interna-

tional standard moving images product on issues that our societies have diffi-
culty in engaging with. Zimbabwean society is a very secretive society. People
seem to thrive on intrigue and subterfuge. This means the real problems are
rarely discussed in the open with the idea of finding solutions. Our idea is to
bring these issues to the public attention through film. For example, one film
that Nyerai Films co-produced concerns child sexual abuse. In the story in ques-
tion was the abuse of a primary schoolchild by her headmaster, with the tacit
consent of parents and other adults. This went on until one teacher started to
question the situation. The woman who played the questioning teacher said she
wanted the role because the kind of script we had, showed that anything could
be talked about, even if our societies thought the issues were ‘unspeakable’ as
Toni Morrison so often describes in her writing.32
***
Anne-Laure Folly’s film Les Oubliées (Angola) screened in the official selec-
tion at FESPACO in 1997, followed with a press conference.33 She elaborated
on her concept of women’s perspectives as alternative discourse:
I treated war not through the ordinary perspective that we have about the facts
and events, the battles and territorial gains, but rather from a perspective that
is specific. Women have a different perspective about this history, especially of
a war that has lasted more than thirty years. They experienced the war based
on personal suffering, having lost people they know, and sensing the impossi-
bility of being able to provide a future. They live this history from another point
of reference and I found this interesting. I decided to not approach this plea for
peace from an intellectual level, because we are all for peace. I wanted to hear it
from people who spoke from the guts about their fears. We respond more radi-
cally for peace, but within the reflection: ‘really this violence has to stop.’ The
film comes more so from the guts, reason should not be the basis for bringing
up the problems of the world, because reason is not sufficient to change things.
From the audience Sarah Maldoror expressed her support and

encouragement:
Anne-Laure . . . your film is outstanding, it is fantastic. Because you are a woman,

you have the respect for life, because you have courage. You could have been
blown up a hundred times in those mines, but you were not, thank God. I think
that you had courage to do this film. And it is very well done, and it gives one
something to think about. And that these women who fight and suffer, who are
hungry, could actually do a theatrical play, I find extraordinary. I regret that
there are not more women who can be here to participate in this peace effort.
Because if we women do not do it, it won’t be the other [male] African film-
makers who will do so. . . .
She responded to Sarah Maldoror: “I would like first to thank Sarah, she
inspired me to do this film. She did a film called Sambizanga, which in my
opinion is one of the masterpieces of African cinema. When I saw it, I had
a desire to make a film thirty years later, about Angola. She cleared the way
by showing the Angolan war interpreted from the perspective of a woman.
Mine is not a pioneering approach; she has already done that.”
The above exchange between Anne-Laure Folly and Sarah Maldoror
bears witness to the importance of having role models and the empowering
aspect of showing support and recognition of each other’s work.
***
Matamba Kombila explores the complexities of her multiple identities and

the cultural, geographical tensions of these positionalities in her short experi-
mental film Mundele n: blanche, étrangère (2019, Gabon). She asks questions
to her entourage, which appear to be existential, rather than a probing search
for answers. On the other hand, there are many other issues that the film
provokes. Matamba elaborates on her reasons for making the film:
The intention of the initial project was to unpack some aspects of my com-
plicated relationship with my mother and show her my love. My objective for
making the film was to draw a parallel between what’s commonly called France-
Afrique and myself, the offspring of a French woman and a Gabonese man. I
wanted to explore the juxtaposition of the complicated relationship between the
colonizer and its outposts on the continent and my identity, the mix of the cul-
tures and histories of the colonizer and the colonized.
Set in Pointe Noire the film begins with Matamba Kombila at the hairdress-
er’s salon surrounded by a circle of young women as they each take part in
coiffing her hair. A metaphor, a signifier, perhaps of her identity, as it is trans-
formed into a Gabonese hairstyle. I asked her what role hair plays for her and
why this choice in constructing the film:
I had thought about using hair as a vector of identity but wasn’t sure how. My
hair is my antenna, my connector to the universe and the cosmic forces. It is
also a shield that protects me against the cold and the heat, balancing out my
body temperature. And last, it is an element of style that allows me to tell stories
about myself and my ancestors; an ‘identifier.’ Therefore getting my hair done is
something very intimate that often leads to insightful conversations, so the salon
was a perfect setting to broach the theme of my identity. After we collected all
of the images, we came up with the structure of the mirror for the film. Its first
part, shot in the salon, is the front of the mirror, what I see and am perceived
by others; its second part, my walk in the streets of Pointe Noire, is what’s be-
hind it, what I perceive as my identity’s founding elements.
***
Zara Mahamat Yacoub, who currently works in radio communication,

has used her camera to raise the consciousness of her viewers and to
advocate against female genital cutting. After the release of Dilemme au
féminin (1994, Chad), she paid a heavy price for her self-defined role as
communicator, whose duty is “to inform people and to make them aware
of the problems that need attention.” Condemned by the Imam’s Council
on Islamic Affairs, a fatwa was issued against her, though her objective
was to present a balanced view of the pros and cons of the practice.
Zara Mahamat Yacoub told me why she chose the topic of female genital
cutting:
Born and raised in a society that practices female genital mutilation, I live the
daily suffering of women and children who are victims of this practice. This is
what motivated me to join the struggle against it. Dilemme au féminin is a film
that speaks about excision. And as you may know excision is practiced prac-
tically everywhere in Africa. But in the past, excision was also performed in
Europe and in other countries. The consequences of excision are terrible. Today
voices have been raised across the world denouncing the phenomenon of exci-
sion. It is a reality; I have seen young girls die from excision. I have seen women
who have remained infertile for their entire lives as a result of having been
excised. I have seen women who have suffered in their souls because of exci-
sion. Thus, I assert that it is more so a health problem.
Her role in African women’s struggle against female genital cutting: “I am

making a statement about the practice of excision . . . my role is to expose, to
take note, to report to people when things are not right. And I attest that exci-
sion is not a good thing. Excision is causing so much damage, and so it must be
stopped. Thus, the reason for my film, Dilemme au féminin.” After the release
of Dilemme au féminin there was a great deal of controversy: “Unfortunately,
the release of this film in my country, Chad, presented many problems for
me. However, I told myself that this was all part of my day-to-day job. When
one espouses this profession, one must expect the worse. And yes, I suffered a
great deal, and unfortunately, there are still repercussions. But still I did what
I felt was my duty.”34 Though proceeding with caution, Zara Mahamat Yacoub
has continued in her role as activist, campaigning to raise consciousness about
the psychological and physical consequences of the practice.
***
On n’oublie pas on pardonne / One Does Not Forget One Forgives (2012,
Congo and France) begins with Annette Kouamba Matondo reading out loud
directly to Sylvie Dice Pomos, her intentions for making the film: to recall the
Case of the Beach Disappearances in order to remember, because too often
there is a tendency to forget. Sylvie Diclo Pomo’s play “Janus’s Madness” is
the point of departure of the story and it is through her work and her expe-
riences that the film unfolds. Annette relates to me why she decided to focus
on the Case of the Beach Disappearances and to tell the story in this way:
Initially it was to be a portrait of Sylvie the artist, and then the film changed dra-
matically. It was not intentional. At a point during the shooting I began to ask my-
self questions and I found the answer at the end of the film. I had not mourned
my sister’s death. The Case of the Beach Disappearances is a tragedy that touched
a lot of Congolese. Many have not yet mourned and even continue to hope for
the return of their family members, others are completely devastated. But the
most depressing of all is that there was a trial, and all of the accused were acquit-
ted. Even now I cannot really say why I cried at that moment in the film. There
were emotions that cannot be controlled. I thought I had forgotten, but no, there,
all the past that I had buried away somewhere in my mind resurfaced. At first
I did not want to put this part of my life in the documentary, it is a private part
of life. But this moment expresses the real question of forgetting. Can one really
forget or does one pretend to forget, thus the title, On n’oublie pas on pardonne.35
In so doing, the film was a moment of catharsis for Annette Kouamba

Matondo, it was her duty of memory.
***
Omah Diegu (Ijeoma Iloputaife), who began film studies in the United
States in the late 1970s, was among a cohort of film students of color at the
University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) whose work evolved from
what has been called the L.A. Rebellion film movement, whose mission it
was to disrupt the dominant gaze of Hollywood:
It was of the utmost importance to a whole lot of us Blacks at UCLA then, that
we learn to use the language of film to tell our stories our own way. . . . There
was Professor Teshome Gabriel of UCLA History of African Cinema Studies
who literally nudged us along the path of finding our own cinematic identity,
which would be relevant to our unique sensitivities as children of British neo-
colonialism and post American racial-segregation. . . .36
***
Rama Thiaw’s film The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016, Senegal) is a

tribute to Gil Scott Heron, the godfather of social and political hip-hop
activism. Her camera navigates behind the scenes of the political revo-
lution Y’en a Marre (translated from French, “we’re fed up”), ignited by the
Senegalese hip-hop group KEUR-GUI and journalists Cheikh Fadel Barro
and Aliou Sané in 2011. The film shows “how one lives a revolution from day
to day, with all the dangers, uncertainties and joys that it brings.” During the
crowdfunding campaign she recounts to me the making of the film:
My film begins on 17 January 2012, at the end of the Senegalese legislative

campaign—12 years after the presidential election of Maître Abdoulaye Wade.
During this same period, Thiat and Kilifeu, members of the KEUR-GUI Band,
decided to take action where the socialist opposition failed to do so. They
mobilized and created with other friends—musicians, artists and journalists,

a peaceful and apolitical group called ‘Y’en a marre’. . . . In this atmosphere of
revolution, using direct cinema, I filmed Thiat and Kilifeu, the two protagonists
of this citizen uprising. But President Wade did not want an African spring to
happen in Sub-Sahara Africa. The rebellion had to be stopped before it spread.
Between intimidation, in and out of prison, and bribery attempts, I followed
these two musicians in their daily lives. Through interviews facing the camera,
they shared with us their feelings about their commitment and their sudden
media attention, but also their doubts after the arrests. Far from highlighting
only these moments, I wanted to understand the origins behind their actions,
which is why I decided to give an intimate portrayal as well.37
Thus, she also questions the notion of being committed, of what it means to
be a socially committed artist: “It is easy to do so when you have money and
live in a villa somewhere, but when you have nothing, that is when the act of
commitment takes on all of its meaning.”38
***
Karima Saïdi gives an intimate account of the conception and development

of her documentary Dans la maison / A way home (2020, Qatar, Belgium, and
Morocco). As she describes the evolution of her mother’s condition to Dimitra
Bouras in a video interview, how she dealt with it, the decisions she made while
caring for her—the emotions of the moment surface. Her immediate response
was to write/visualize her mother’s experiences/words before they ceased to be:
My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and at that moment I found myself
spending a lot of time with her, taking care of her, accompanying her, I began
watching her. It was strange; I looked at her, observed her. I felt that I had to
capture, to keep, everything that was going to disappear. So I started keeping
a journal. Having no other recourse, no longer able to keep her at home, I had
to put her in a care facility. Then I began to take photographs and recordings.
Taking care of her, caring for her, being responsible for her also, obliged me to
look at her, I was compelled to try to understand her . . . I was allowed to experi-
ment with everything that I could to make a film. At one moment it was about
being unafraid to find out, not arranging the truth, as I wanted it to be. Here is
where working with an editor as fine as Frédéric Fichefet was of utmost impor-
tance. Because I would have censured myself, throughout; I would have taken
out everything. In fact there wouldn’t have been a film. That is what was inter-
esting, to confront it, to see how the editor reacted to the content and how being
aware of the power of certain images, moved us forward.39
***
Taghreed Elsanhouri’s Our Beloved Sudan (2011, Sudan) documents the

breakup of the country that becomes two: Sudan and South Sudan. She talked
to me about this momentous event and her process in making the film:
Ever since 2005 when I was making All About Darfur (2005, Sudan and United
Kingdom) and the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement] was signed I knew
something momentous had been set in motion for Sudan and I felt the weight
and the importance of the times and I also felt a responsibility to be conscious
and reflective and to make my own draft of this moment as it unfolded. I began
to film two years ago when the first national election in twenty-three years took
place. I think Sudan and the Sudanese were in a state of disbelief regarding the
possible partition of their country and now we are in a state of shock and hope-
fully after the shock will come reflection, analysis, atonement, forgiveness and
a laying to rest of all the things that divided us as a people and made the parti-
tion of Sudan inevitable. . . .40
What would she like the viewers to get from the film? “I think I would like
viewers to get an insight into the complexity of the dynamics at play in Sudan,
I mean the racial, political, religious and economic dynamics. Also I hope
viewers will feel compassion for this very difficult situation. The breakup of
a nation is like the breakup of a home. Sometimes the only healthy option is
for people to go their separate ways but there is always regret and the ques-
tion, what if and if only. . . .”41
In January 2013, Taghreed Elsanhouri launched the Cultural Healing
Festival in Khartoum which was conceived to carry on the legacy of the
Cultural Healing project that she had created, the diaspora edition was held
in London later that year in October. She had this to say about the initiative:
The objective of the diaspora edition is to bring people of the two Sudans to-
gether in a spirit of cultural exchange. I think in diaspora the people of the par-
titioned Sudans experience their differences from a more expansive vantage
point, here they are both ethnic minorities and may experience marginaliza-
tion and discrimination. On the positive side they live in free democracies and
have the opportunity to express themselves openly and without fear . . . There
is a Sudanese proverb that says ‘words are more beautiful when they are spo-
ken out of the mouth of the person they concern.’ In diaspora a new genera-
tion is emerging which has the education and the self-knowledge to facilitate
the peace back home and it is time that they are mobilized and empowered to
make their contribution.42
***
Beatrix Mugishagwe, founding chairperson of the Tanzanian Association

of Independent Producers (TAIPA) and co-founder of the Tanzanian
Screenwriters Forum, produced the documentary project Unsung Heroines
(2010, Tanzania), putting a spotlight on women and leadership throughout
the African continent. She tells me why she undertook the project:
It’s a fact that people on the continent of Africa today continue to survive be-
cause of women: if there are no women who till the land for food, fetch water,
collect firewood, bear children, run the market stalls, the continent would have
long perished given its history. Yet when you look in the top decision-making
positions of governments, companies and the likes throughout the African con-
tinent women hardly feature therein. Is it a wonder then that a young African
girl looks around for a role model and all she sees is men and if women then
non-African. Today we have gone so far even as to negate figures like Winnie
Mandela—a woman who if for twenty-eight years had not kept that torch/fire
burning for her Nelson, the world would not have gotten its much revered and
adored Nelson Mandela—so the question was what happened to her? From there
I started looking into the absence of the visibility of great African women, not
only in Africa itself but the entire world. Who do our children look up to as role
models when they are growing up?43
***
Neveen Shalaby, cineaste, activist, participant and witness on January 25,

2011 with camera in hand followed the extraordinary events that unfolded
right up until the day of the Egyptian revolution. I asked her what was the
“agenda” that this film invokes in its title and her process as participant,
witness and filmmaker. She relates to me her experiences in making the film
The Agenda and I (2011, Egypt): “Well, the story behind the name is that I
met an undercover policeman on the night of 25 January 2011, when police
forces stormed Tahrir Square. The policeman helped me get out and told
me that I should not return because the protestors were actually supporting
foreign agendas to bring down the regime. This became the starting point
for me to find out the real agenda, and thus the title The Agenda and I shows
that I was not only the director of the film, but I was one of the characters
in the film . . .” I asked if there were difficult moments for her. “The difficult
moments were seeing all the martyrs, but I was not afraid, as I faced death
many times when I was filming. Because I believe in God very much and I
felt that God would protect me.” 44
During the film screening at the Luxor African Film Festival in 2012
the person next to me was crying by the end of the film, moved by the
emotions that the film invoked in him. I reached out and held his hand.
Afterward, he thanked me for my gesture and we hugged. He told me

that he had been waiting for this moment for a long, long time. For all
of us non-Egyptians in attendance we were very touched by the reac-
tions of the Egyptian audience: “Yes there were great reactions which I
didn’t expect.” And yet, the euphoria was short-lived. I asked her about
her feelings regarding the elections that followed having participated in
the Egyptian revolution from the beginning: “One word: ‘disappointed.’
Due to ignorance, poverty and lack of awareness the radical Islamic parties
won all our elections and there is still a long way ahead to succeed in this
revolution!”45
***
Jacqueline Kalimunda told me about her transmedia project on love and

resilience in Rwanda for which she launched a crowdfunding campaign in
2014:
Single Rwandan / Celib Rwandais (2015, Rwanda) is an exciting adventure. A

transmedia documentary project, including television, Internet, art and lit-
erature. This is a project dear to my heart for two main reasons. First, because
it is my third project in Rwanda—my country of birth. We will show how
the new generation, using the tools of the time, takes charge of its destiny
in order to move forward, despite the weight of the past and the challenges
of the present. To talk about love in Rwanda is to be able to tell stories that
people hold dear, that are poetic and funny while at the same time posing
a fundamental question: How do we love each other after a genocide? This
project is also important because it allows me to propose a non-linear, inter-
active writing. New technologies are in the process of transforming the world
in which we live. Since I write a lot of stories about Africa, this is a turning
point that I cannot afford to miss. I would like to tell stories on screens that
engage people organically: initially for mobile phone, but also for television.
I still, of course, am committed to cinema, but for me it is like attending a
live concert while there is also the possibility of listening to music every day
on the computer, on my phone, on the radio. I love cinema but I especially
love to tell stories and reach a very large audience. Single Rwandan is an im-
portant project for me but I hope for others as well. This is the first trans-
media project that proposes to talk about Rwanda in another way, through
love and new technologies. . . . Africans are invested in new technologies;
the creators and producers of African stories must also invest in this area.
With the knowledge and skills that I am acquiring, I hope to contribute soon
to this movement of creativity.46
Jacqueline Kalimunda’s words are evermore a reflection of the current reality

as African women makers engage with the ubiquitous New Media tech-
nologies and its empowering and expansive influences on their work.
***
Jacqueline Nsiah embraces new media to explore the Sankofa return-to-the-

source storytelling of Ghanaian Diasporas. She talked to me about her moti-
vation to focus on this theme for her final master’s thesis project in Visual
and Media Anthropology at Freie Universität, Berlin:
Returning from Exile is about the second-generation Ghanaians born in a

European country or in the USA to Ghanaian parents, who decided to ‘return’
or rather to live in Ghana. People like me, my tribe so to say. What inspired me
to do the visual/audio website is partly my story but also I wanted to create a
digital archive to register this moment. In Ghana we don’t have a tradition to
archive moments in time but in this digital era it is much easier. The idea is to
continue to collect stories of the diasporas who are returning. I came up with the
idea when I visited Ghana again after four years not being there in December
2013. The minute I left the airplane and drove around Accra, the capital city, I
felt a sense of vibrancy. During my four-week trip, I met many Ghanaians like
me who had ‘returned’ and opened up bars, arts spaces, working on the govern-
mental level or freelance journalists and bloggers telling a different story of life
in Ghana. I knew I wanted to be part of it and decided to move to Ghana in May
2014 and do wider research. I termed my research, which is part of an academic
thesis, ‘Returning from Exile,’ because the motivation for most of the Ghanaian
diaspora is to return on behalf of their parents and build this great nation, some-
thing that most of our parents were not able to do for various reasons.47
***
During the 2nd African Women Film Forum in Accra, I was a privileged
spectator at the screening of Anita Afonu’s film Perished Diamonds (2013,
Ghana), a documentary about the history of Ghanaian cinema. Touched by
her in depth research and her tremendous will to get it made, I asked her
what moved her to make the film:
While working with the films I saw how dilapidated the Information Services
Department was and how the film reels had been left to go bad. I also realized
that I had not seen most of these films. I thought, ‘Here I am, a film school
graduate calling myself a filmmaker.’ I thought that it was rather ironic, asking
myself what had happened. Why had the film reels been left to go bad? And it
broke my heart to personally discard some of the films because they had gone
moldy, in an almost soup-like state. I felt that if I could trace the origin of the
problem and find a way to repair the damage, things could improve. I knew that
if I made a film about these conditions people would wake up. And that’s what
motivated me to make this film. . . .48
In addition to making the film to tell the story of the evolution of the
Ghanaian film industry and build awareness about the state of these films,
Anita Afonu’s goal has been to raise funds in order to restore and digitize the
films, which highlights the role that African women film practitioners play
in safeguarding African cultural heritage and the production of knowledge.
***
Zulfah Otto Sallies, fascinated by her daughter Muneera’s development, set

out to document it. In Through the Eyes of My Daughter (2004, South Africa)
she focuses the lenses on her family in the Bo-Kaap community of South
Africa. During the filmmaking adventure she rediscovers her daughter as
well as aspects of herself. The cross-generational response to contemporary
society is the thread running through the film, sometimes showing differing
perspectives regarding the realities that the current generation confronts. The
evolving story contrasts the apartheid-generation of Zulfah with teenager
Muneera’s experiences in a democratic South Africa. In full view of the
camera, one has a glimpse of the strong bond of the mother-daughter rela-
tionship. Zulfah Otto-Sallies invites the viewer into their world with all of
the unpredictability that comes as a result. In retrospect, she describes her
experiences while making the film, relaying it to the present:
[It] was a phenomenal experience. It turned the lights onto my daughter and me,
and zoomed into our world for one year. My daughter at the time was 15; today
[2011] she is 23 and always threatens to turn the camera on me now. She her-
self completed her degree in filmmaking at AFDA. . . . Through the Eyes of My
Daughter gave us the foundation to work together and that to me as a mother is
a great honor as today we still are able to work together. Sometimes it is really
hard and complex but both of us know the professionalism required to deliver
a quality product and hence we are able to put emotions aside, get our hands
dirty and do the job.49
Muneera Sallies, a witness to her own generation, has taken up the torch that
her mother, who joined the ancestors in 2016, has passed on.
***
Reflecting on Iman Kamel’s story of the making of Beit Sha’ar (2010, Egypt),
I am reminded of Assia Djebar’s words, that her camera would lift the veil
and become the vehicle for expressing women’s experiences. This is what
she told me:
The film took almost five years to make. It had to do with the fact, that Sinai,
where the Bedouins have settled, is a military area and filming is strictly prohib-
ited. So when we finally decided to do the filming I went with a small camera,
only with my camera women and worked on a very small scale. But when we
arrived, we were confronted with the taboo of filming the Bedouin women.
Although Selema my main protagonist agreed on the filming process, there was
a lot of anxiety about our filming from the women around her, and we had to
be very patient. The women and girls told me their stories but we did not film
them. And step by step, the veils fell. But filming was a very sensitive process,
where my own story in the mirror of the encounter with Selema the Bedouin
became increasingly clear. It is very evident that my story is also part of this film.50
And like so many of her cohorts of cinema, her journey, its meanderings,
rests, and questions, are interwoven into her filmmaking process.
***
Claude Haffner’s autobiographical story is about her place “in between”:

black and white as a racial-ethnic-cultural signifier, Africa and Europe, their
contrasting beliefs and customs, class, status and gender, and what she repre-
sents as an Alsatian and its contradictions as a Congolese. One also discerns
her desire to redefine herself in relationship to her father and mother—a lib-
eration, as she calls it, and finally as an expectant mother, her research on
the formation of identity and how she will transmit her own multiple iden-
tity to her daughter with the hopes that the child will be able to find, as she
has between black and white, her own color. She shares with me her reflec-
tions on how the film evolved:
Initially, I wanted to make a film that focused solely on the diamond operations
and the turmoil that I discovered the first time I went to the Congo. I saw the
poverty in which my mother’s family lived, and I wanted to talk about this heart-
breaking reality in a different manner than that presented by the media, that is
to say without the tendency to dwell on the sordid side of life, which I hate. I
looked for a way to educate and at the same time not bore the viewer, but also
that she or he may be able to identify with the story, whether the person is black,
white or any other color of the rainbow. I knew that to bring it to the screen, I
had to enter into the story. But I did not at all imagine that I would talk about
myself, my history, my bi-raciality. . . . The issue of culture, of being mixed-race,

the place between father and mother, the transmission of identity to the child,
none of these themes were written. They emerged during the filming. I had not
planned to talk about skin color with my cousins for example. . . . At least that’s
the way I love films and how I would like to make them. Not knowing every-
thing in advance about how the film will look, not forcing situations in order to
relate the story, but rather leaving room for unanticipated situations. The film
should redefine itself as the shooting unfolds in the same way that the filmmaker
redefines herself in relation to her initial idea and to her subject. . . . This is evi-
dent in the fact that in 2004 I could not have foreseen that I would be expecting
a child after having filmed in the Congo, and that I would actually include my-
self, while pregnant, during the scenes in Alsace. Somehow, the film helped me
to define my identity and my place between Europe and Africa and to become
aware of the richness that I possess to have come from a double culture or per-
haps I should say, multiple.51
***
Ngozi Onwurah introduces an important element to the discourse on the

visual representation of the African female body in cinema as she brings
into question the motives behind the production and financing of Monday’s
Girls (1993, Nigeria and United Kingdom). The documentary film that she
directed about the Iria initiation ceremony, traces the rites of passage among
the young Waikiriki women from Nigeria. During the five-week ritual, the
girls are confined to “fattening rooms” where they receive lavish care and
pampering. An important part of the ritual is to present the girls bare-
breasted before the community to prove their virginity. At the end of the
ceremony, the girls proudly dance with nude breast as they celebrate their
passage into womanhood. Because of its cultural significance, Ngozi explic-
itly visualizes the ritual. Yet, she is concerned about the western consump-
tion of these images:
I think it is brilliant that there are these ceremonies, there is nothing wrong
with African women dancing naked. European women have far too many
hang-ups about what should and shouldn’t be covered. . . . What I am saying is
that the European is willing to finance films that show Africans in that context
because, in their eyes, that is the only part of Africans that they see. That is the
area in which they are most easily able to absorb the information. The Discovery
Channel kind of programs or the National Geographic kind of programs, these
are how they expect to see, or are interested in seeing Africans. Whether they
are liberals and they are looking at it as the noble savage kind of thing: ‘these
simple people know things that we don’t know, with our complicated lives’ or
whether they straight up expect to see African women naked; so when they see
them naked, it completely meshes in their mind that this is how it should be. . . .
But for me there are all kinds of other things that if I had the choice to make,
if I had the amount of money given to me to make something else rather than
Monday’s Girls, there are at least ten or fifteen other subjects that I would have
chosen way before I got to making a film like Monday’s Girls.
. . . I am a professional filmmaker, so I am quite used to the notion that
there are certain programs that the programmers want and that they don’t. So
even if they had given me a brief that says we want a film about African women
or Nigerian women going from adolescence into womanhood, it would still
not be a brief that I would choose as first choice. But since we were going to be
disciplined and professional about this, this was the brief of the program. . . .
What was interesting to me was the way those girls/women were dealing with
the fattening rooms, the generational gaps in terms of what the elder women
wanted from them, what they wanted to do, how they interacted with me as
an African British woman coming over to them. Naomi Campbell popped up
in their everyday conversations, and it was quite a visual juxtaposition to see
these girls in their completely traditional African dress, sitting talking about
how Naomi Campbell puts on her makeup. It was a scene you could have shot
in Brixton or you could have shot in Brooklyn. These black women were sitting
around basically “dissing” the way this girl puts her makeup on [Ngozi sucks
her teeth to mimic the girls]. . . .
In the context of the fattening rooms in Monday’s Girls, there could have
been a lot of parallels made. Even in terms of how a lot of them were reacting
with the camera. A lot of them knew what to do in front of the camera. When
you turned the camera on, they were one thing; when you turn the camera
off, they were something else—which is exactly the same thing it would be in
Europe. . . . There were all these things about how they thought people were
viewing them when they were being watched in Britain, outside of Nigeria,
because a lot of them were aware. A lot of times these girls played African for
the camera because a lot of times they knew what people were expecting from
them. There were a lot of interesting dynamics in that. But the brief wasn’t
that. The brief was that they wanted to see some girls go into a room and come
out fat.52
Ngozi’s assertions are especially significant for discourse on the African female
body in that at the same time that she is the film director, she brings into
question some of the assumptions that the film divulges. Ngozi Onwurah’s
own response to the way the film was eventually edited and narrated, which
she has stated that she did not consent to, is an example of how a filmmaker’s
cinematic vision may not be the determining factor on the finished product,
which also brings into question the real authority of the filmmaker.53 At the
same time it shows that while the film has been viewed as “feminist film-
making” in that it was assumed that Ngozi Onwurah was giving an insider’s
view of an “authentic” African woman’s experience with her body, in fact it
was ultimately constructed for the consumption of an outside gaze.54
***
In her film Asylum (2007, United Kingdom), Rumbi Katedza wanted to delve
into the psychological effects on African women who experience the trauma
of displacement. I asked her what inspired her to make the film, what were
her experiences in the process:
When I made Asylum I was a doing my Masters in London and I saw a news
piece on refugees in the UK. What struck me about the stories was how so
many of the people still experienced fear every day of their lives because they
were still haunted by the experiences they went through. Unfortunately, no one
seemed to be helping them psychologically. The assumption was, if you are in
a ‘safe’ country, then all is fine, but to be honest, you are never safe from the
prison that your mind can create for you. Making the film with no dialogue was
a very deliberate choice, because I felt no words had to be said to convey the
war that continued to be waged in the character’s mind every day. I spent time
with Sudanese refugees in London who were very generous with their stories,
and they appreciated the film once it was made. The film has traveled to scores
of festivals now and won a couple of awards, and wherever it goes, it resonates
with audiences. The character in the film could be from anywhere because her
experience is a universal one.55
***
Hachimiya Ahamada, diasporian of the Comoros and French of Comorian

origin, embraces both her cultures, while at the same time in search of
an identity she knows only from her parents’ stories and images that she
has seen. It is through cinema—the lens of her camera, that she finds her
Comorian roots and the dreams from the Comoros:
I want to show a different Comoros than preconceived ideas of it . . . Ashes of

Dreams (2011, Comoros, Belgium, and France) is a film written in first person
singular and then first-person plural. I wanted to go back to the Grande Comore,
to the family, without the label of ‘I’ve come from . . .’ to measure the temperature
of the family bond. But time creates a fracture even with those with whom there
are blood ties. I remember a comment by someone who said, ‘I come back in
order not to stay.’ It’s a rather difficult acknowledgement to make. Then also in this
film, I wanted to break the image of the idyllic island of the Comoros by meeting
the residents of the other islands in order to get the secrets of the real Comoros.56
***
Fanta Régina Nacro took direct action in order to debunk the perceived
notion that women lack the competence necessary to succeed in filmmaking.
She states:
At the time when I made the film (Un certain matin [1992, Burkina Faso]), I
was a diehard militant feminist. In cinema schools women were directed to-
wards careers that were considered ‘for women’ such as editor or script super-
visor. Under the pretext that we have the aptitude only in these specific areas.
Directing and cinematography were designated, even reserved for men. For my
first film, I wanted to bring together a women-only crew to show that when a
woman chooses this profession she invests in it all the way. And women are just
as competent or even better than the guys!57
***
Sisters Khady Sylla and Mariama Sylla, who collaborated on seven films
together, were in many ways “children of African cinema.” Their mother
worked at the secretariat of the Actualités Sénégalaises under the direction
of Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, a breeding ground and site for the development
of the young Senegalese cinema of the period. Nicknamed “Katanga,” it was
the venue of hot debates about cinema and other cinematic trends—realism
versus Soviet, Italian neorealism, New Wave, Brazil Novo Cinema. . . .58 Djia
Mambu, also doing womanist work as a journalist/film critic, asks Mariama
Sylla about her experiences working with her sister Khady Sylla, who passed
away in October 2013, and to what extent her passing influenced the ending of
the film A Simple Parole (2014, Senegal). Mariama Sylla responded in this way:
I started working with my sister at the age of 17; she is the one who trained me
and introduced me to cinema and scriptwriting. The person I am today is the
result of this long journey with Khady, the first-born of our family. I am the
youngest and she and I often laughed about being at these two ends, despite the
difference in age and education, we were able to come together . . . Khady’s pass-
ing greatly influenced the final voice-over in the film but the visual editing is
the same, as we had completed it just before her death. There are two voices in
the film. The first is Khady’s, which was done in her presence, and the second is
mine, which I wrote while finalizing the film. I went through a moment of shock
and anger, then slowly, the phrase in Césaire’s work Notebook of a Return to My
Native Land (1939) was constantly in my thoughts, and all this anger turned
into a desire to write about my sister, to tell her a final goodbye, and this is how
my voice was laid down in the film.59
The film A Simple Parole was completed after Khady’s death. In spirit, the
two sisters continued their work together.
***
Nadia El Fani has been unrelenting in her personal, political, and cul-
tural commitment as an artist, activist, and advocate, as her films attest.
Her long list of accomplishments includes short and feature documentary
films, all of which direct the camera at the intersection of social, cultural,
and political issues of Tunisian society in general but also issues as it
relates to gender and equality. Nadia El Fani’s 2011 film Laicité, Inch’Allah!
(Tunisia) poses the question, what if the will of the people, of a predomi-
nantly Muslim country opts for a secular constitution? It is an issue that
has broader implications for the world as it relates to religious freedom,
freedom of expression and the rights of religious minorities in society.
Following a television interview about her film in May 2011 during which
she expressed her secularist views, she was the object of a vicious attack
campaign on social media by those who considered the film to be anti-
Islam. The title of her documentary was changed from Ni Allah ni Maître
(Neither Allah nor Master) to minimize the controversy. The reactions by
extremists regarding the film were personally and professionally perilous
for Nadia El Fani. Her next film released in 2012, Même pas mal / No harm
done (Tunisia and France), co-directed with Alina Isabel Pérez, is an inti-
mate response to her ordeal relating her dual struggle: fighting against these
extremists at the same time that she was battling cancer.
Nadia El Fani had this to say in her artist’s statement:60
I was not always a “loudmouth,” as a child I was rather timid. My fighting spirit
evolved indeed from my family history—it is not a trivial matter to be the daugh-
ter of communists—but also from my deep need, or rather desire, for freedom.
I think my films have always spoken about it: FREEDOM.
When I went to film Laicité, Inch’Allah! in August 2010, it was with my
rebellious spirit and the idea that it was time for me to assume my voluntary
exile in France. Even if it meant to never be able to return to Tunisia. I decided
to attack head on Ben Ali’s dictatorial regime that exploited religion, but also to
denounce the social hypocrisy surrounding religion, and which (already!) per-
vaded the daily life of Tunisians . . .
I was not aware that the revolution was brewing in Tunisia at the same
time that a cancer was developing in my body. The two matured almost simul-
taneously. The revolution brought me out of my torpor and gave me even more
strength to fight. During this time, the Islamists and their violence had in store
for me a metastasis that I had not detected.
Fortunately, faced with adversity I was not alone.
In this film that I co-direct with Alina Isabel Pérez, I put aside my mod-
esty, which was necessary because the fight against obscurantists also involves
denouncing their inhuman methods, as a reminder of the worse moments of
the Ben Ali dictatorship.
Why make a film to talk about the consequences of a film? It is to say, once
again, [in the words of Victor Hugo] “those who live are those who fight.”
***
While African women filmmakers are willing to come together under the
umbrella of “women in cinema,” there is some resistance toward stating cate-
gorically that there exists a “women’s cinema.” I asked Jihan El Tahri if she
feels as a woman that she works within a gendered perspective, is she treated
as a “woman filmmaker”:
As a woman? Of course I am treated as a woman and you have to prove your-

self three times round before you are considered anything of worth and you
have to be three times better to be equal. It is something that I refuse to fall
into. I do not want to be in a ghetto of any form or space. And being labeled
‘African filmmaker’ is already a kind of a ghetto. Because, I am a filmmaker,
yes, I am African, but ‘African filmmaker’ sort of puts you in a niche. It has its
own implications, fine. And ‘woman African filmmaker’ is yet another ghetto.
A ghetto that has its advantages and if one slips into these advantages you
could go through life very easily just being part of this and survive quite well.
I don’t want to be limited by my gender, or my space, or my identity to do and
express what I want. I always get the question: why do most of your films not
have women in them? Most of the films that I deal with do not justify having
women in them. My political films are about the decision makers. I want to look
into the decision makers’ minds. The reality is that women have not been deci-
sion makers in this area. And I always get people who say: well you could have
interviewed this or that woman. I am not going to make the excuse to stick a
female face in a film just to have a woman. I think that women have a funda-
mental role. I am a woman, I am completely a woman, and that is who I am. I
find it repressive to be bottled up, to bottle your imagination, and bottle your
expression. For example, [at] most of the African women filmmaker events—
which I do go to because that is who I am—people want you to do films about
Africa and about women or about social conditions that involve women. It has
to be in that space. I want to find my wings. I want to talk about anything that I
feel like talking about. If I want to do a film about middle-aged men in Poland
tomorrow, I should be able to do that. And I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to
do that, because I am a female and African? Nobody tells that to other people.
Why should we be kept in that space? Questions like: but what about all the
work that the suffragist did for women? Yes, though the reality of what it is that
women need to find their equality and find their space today is quite different.
We need to carve out our own niches by proving that we are just as good. And
we are, so where is the problem?61
Hence, while many women perceive a “female sensibility,” pinpointing, local-

izing, and defining it becomes more difficult. Their pause in naming it comes
from the simultaneity of their experiences as woman and African, where
the issues within these two identities are intertwined. However, having said,
“I am, African, woman, filmmaker,” going beyond the male/female binary,
there still remains simply, the human being, with all the conditions, issues,
problems that humanity reveals—and the multitude of human stories that
all filmmakers want to tell.62
***
As cultural activist/film festival organizer, Mahen Bonetti expresses the

essence of womanistic thought, of doing womanist work:
I think Africa is a woman and everything that is working in Africa is because

women are behind it. They also have a sensitivity and the rhythm. Women are
more three-dimensional, they are deeper, and in Africa, that complexity comes
from a woman. . . . You feel their passion, you feel their confusion, you share
it with them. No aspect of African cinema is more miraculous than the most
unbidden emergence of female filmmakers on the continent. What makes film
the most immediate, the most direct of all art forms is its ability to transport,
to place one instantaneously in someone else’s situation. Their films sometimes
focus on the challenges of adjustment and this is why audiences can identify.
Whether they are depicting upheavals or celebrating life, they show ‘little people’
trying to ‘do the right thing’ . . . I believe the female African filmmaker has a
defined perception of her world and because of this her films translate. It can
move from one language into others. They have tenacity, resourcefulness, and
buoyancy. Their situation requires all these qualities . . . I also believe that, in
using the cinematic medium, we find that in their films, women are best able to
recapture, help define the true essence of African culture and African people.
They address issues in a sense that are taken away from imposed colonial values
or colonial distortions and point of view.63
Her signature project, the New York African Film Festival, in existence since
1993, traverses medias, platforms, and physical realities, visually transporting
its participants into the lived experiences of Africa. Whether highlighting
women in particular or African people in general, the goal of her womanist
work is to show realistic images “through African eyes.”
Reflections on a Womanistic Conceptual Framework
Developing a womanistic African-women-of-the-screen conceptual

framework during the past two decades in a transnational, progressively
diasporic space has become increasingly challenging when discerning posi-
tionalities on the move, of the many women who lead peripatetic lives as cul-
tural producers and intellectuals. The term “transnational” incorporates the
interconnections across national boundaries that have been part and parcel
of the experiences of Afro-descendant women of the screen, while postco-
loniality discourse, in view of Omah Diegu’s affirmation, frames both the
time period and the social-political context of the formation of African and
Afro-diasporic cinematic practices. Thus, navigating within multiple posi-
tionalities, in transnational communities, negotiating cultures, languages
and geographies.
The conceptual framework of so many African women of the screen,
from their pioneering works during the nascent period of African cinema
history to the present, engages an intersectional approach to race, class,
culture and geography: giving voice, fostering empowerment, probing the
complexities of gender—concerning women and men—embracing the
boundaries of gender/racial/ethnic/class parity that examines the multiple
inequalities in all spheres of society and beyond and the manner in which
gendered individuals live under all forms of oppression and domination;
how both women and men respond to migration, dislocation, socio-territo-
rial belonging and the politics of identity. At the same time, drawing from its
capacity to embrace humanist concerns such as the sustainability of the rural
sector, of the environment, the preservation of cultural heritage, concern
regarding the effects of climate change, the manifestations of globalization.
Womanistic film criticism/screen activism is perhaps an imperfect term.
Though the intentions are to outline the precepts of an extant practice of
engaging with the screen in a critical way, from a woman-empowering stand-
point, as cultural producer and cultural reader. While “film” and the con-
comitant use of “cinema” continues to connote the medium of production,
the process and the product, “screen” proposes a continuity of imaging—

from movie theatre and television to contemporaneous screen devices: com-
puter, laptop, tablet, mobile phone—and beyond.
Within this diverse African women’s storytelling there is a convergence
of reasons that African women make films: to tell their own history; to
transmit knowledge to other women who have not had the chance to go to
school; to contribute to the development of women and Africa in general;
to communicate and reveal the problems and issues in African societies; to
materialize one’s thoughts and to make sure that they are clear and commu-
nicable; to make sense out of one’s surroundings; and to speak the unspeak-
able, to show realistic images of Africa by portraying the humanity of the
continent and its people, to express oneself, or quite simply, from the desire
to tell a story.
In Search of a Conclusion, Beyond the Researcher’s Gaze
I have sometimes wondered if so much of all of this, in fact, has to do with

my researcher’s gaze, mining so-called womanist thoughts, excavating acts
and gestures that appear to share my notion of womanistic experiences. . . .
Scholars and critics are notorious for naming things, for proposing tenden-
cies and trends, putting events on a timeline, categorizing them. I some-
times ask myself how much of all of this is perhaps my own projections of a
so-called continuity, the evolution of a tradition . . . my perceived notion of
some womanist sisterhood?
And yet, I carry on, I continue to seek out women to ask them about their
cinematic stories. I continue to write about it, to do research and share my
womanist thoughts. Perhaps, quite simply, in my own way, I am committed to
the womanist work that I have proposed at the start of this project: gathering
the voices, the lived experiences, the journeys, of the cohort of women who
have influenced me, as woman, Afro-descendant, researcher, artist/cultural
worker, and in so doing, I am “spreading the word(s),” so that as others read
them, they too will share (men, too!). And perhaps join the circle, adding to
the womanist practice of empowering, supporting, and above all, listening
to their/our stories and cinematic journeys. And to return to a quote, while
reformulating it: When we are doing womanist work, we’re happy, and if we
don’t do womanist work, what will people do?
I wanted this project, above all, to be about the women who speak about
their work, the women’s own voices, their own words, them telling their own
stories, beyond my interpretations and analysis, as they are quite capable of
naming themselves, of expressing their own thoughts, of explicating their
own work.64 I ask them questions, I share with them my research goals, and
then I listen. They share, they feel, they question, they postulate, they explain,
they theorize, and they propose solutions. The results of this inquiry are pre-
sented in their own words; they have the final say. Though I do hope that
the triangularity of this exchange between the women film practitioners, the
readers and me—at this intersection of three actors—invokes a dialogic rela-
tionship that makes of us all, discerning individuals, with the objective to see,
understand, make connections, and benefit from lessons learned.
Beti Ellerson is the founder and director of the Centre for the Study
and Research of African Women in Cinema and publishes extensively
and lectures widely on African women and the moving image. She is
the author of Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film, Video and
Television (Africa World Press, 2000) and maker of the documentary
Sisters of the Screen: African Women in the Cinema (2002). She has jur-
ied at international film festivals, notably FESPACO in 2013 and the JCC,
Carthage Film Festival, in 2018. She has authored the African Women
in Cinema Dossier since its inception in 2015.
Notes
*The article as a whole draws from work that I have presented or published, assembled
here to elaborate and deepen my ideas around African women in cinema and womanist
work. The majority of the citations are from the Sisters of the Screen Project which includes
the book Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film, Video, and Television (Africa World
Press: Trenton, NJ, 2000), the film Sisters of the Screen: African Women in Cinema (2002),
and the African Women in Cinema Blog (https://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/).
1. Safi Faye, Alassane Cissé, and Madior Fall, “Un film en Afrique, c’est la galère.”
Sud Week-end (Dakar, Senegal), 12 October, 6–7 1996.
2. Safi Faye and Fad’jal, lI Cinema Ritrovato Festival, https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato
.it/en/film/fadjal/.
3. Ibid.
4. Mossane, by Safi Faye, promotional brochure, 1996. Translation from French by
Beti Ellerson.
5. Interview with Sarah Maldoror by Jadot Sezirahiga in the revue Ecrans d’Afrique
(1995). Some text retranslated for clarity.
6. Sarah Maldoror, Sisters of the Screen. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
7. Annette Mbaye d’Erneville: “Une femme de comunication/Annette Mbaye
d’Erneville: A Lady with a talent for communication by Rokhaya Oumar Diagne an
Souleymane Bachir Diagne,” Presence Africaine 153 (1996): 93.
8. Assia Djebar and Benesty-Sroka, Ghila, “La Langue et l’exil,” La Parole métèque, 21
(1992): 24, cited in Sada Niang ed., Ousmane Sembene et Assia Djebar (Paris: Harmattan,
1996). Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
9. Alimata Salambéré, UNESCO 2019.
10. Yacouba Traoré, Alimata Salambéré / Ouedraogo: itinéraire et leçons de vie d’une
femme debout (Burkina Faso: Céprodif, Ouagadougou, 2019).
11. Anne-Laure Folly, Sisters of the Screen. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
12. Najwa Tlili, Sisters of the Screen.Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
13. Marthe Djilo Kamga, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2019.
14. Freida Ekotto, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2019.
15. Masepeke Sekhukhuni, Sisters of the Screen.
16. Ibid.
17. Agatha Ukata, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
18. Joyce Osei Owusu, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
19. Anne-Laure Folly, Sisters of the Screen. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
20. Roundtable recording by journalist Martina Backe, transcription and translation
from French by Beti Ellerson, Afrika Film Festival Cologne 2016.
21. Report on the Sisters in African Cinema—Afrika Film Festival Cologne 2016,
African Women in Cinema Blog.
22. Safi Faye, Sisters of the Screen, no. 1054 1(2 October 1996): 6.
23. Mariama Hima, quoted in June Givanni (ed.), Symbolic Narratives/African
Cinema: Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image (London: BFI, 2000).
24. Ibid.
25. Asmara Beraki, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2012.
26. Rahel Zageye, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
27. The purpose of the African Women in Cinema Blog is to provide a space to discuss
diverse topics relating to African women in cinema—filmmakers, actors, producers, and
all film professionals. The blog is a public forum of the Centre for the Study and Research
of African Women in Cinema.
28. Horria Saihi, Sisters of the Screen. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
29. Mame Woury Thioubou, “Filmmaker’s Intentions of the film Face to Face,” Regard
Émoi Afrique, 7 December 2011. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
30. Branwen Okpako, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2010.
31. Musola Cathrine Kaseketi, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
32. Tsitsi Dangarembga, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
33. Anne-Laure Folly’s film Les Oubliées screened in the official selection at FESPACO
in 1997, followed with a press conference, published in Sisters of the Screen, transcription
and translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
34. Zara Mahamat Yacoub, Sisters of the Screen. Translation from French by Beti
Elllerson.
35. Annette Kouamba Matondo, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2012. Translation
from French by Beti Ellerson.
36. Omah Diegu, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2014.
37. Rama Thiaw, African Women in Cinema Blog. Translation from French by Beti
Ellerson, 2013.
38. Ibid.
39. Interview by Dimitra Bouras for Cinergie.be. https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=xPDJErQO75Y. Transcription and translation from French by Beti Ellerson,
2021.
40. Taghreed Elsanhouri, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
41. Ibid.
42. Taghreed Elsanhouri, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2013.

43. Beatrix Mugishagwe, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2010.
44. Neveen Shalaby, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2013.
45. Ibid.
46. Jacqueline Kalimunda, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2014. Translation from
French by Beti Ellerson.
47. Jacqueline Nsiah, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2015.
48. Anita Anofu, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2013.
49. Zulfah Otto Sallies, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
50. Iman Kamel, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2011.
51. Claude Haffner, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2012. Translation from French
by Beti Ellerson.
52. Ngozi Onwurah, Sisters of the Screen.
53. Ngozi Onwurah, Q&A after the screening of Monday’s Girls. African Literature
Association Conference, Michigan State University, USA, 1997.
54. See Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian
Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1997).
55. Rumbi Katedza, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2012.
56. Hachimiya Ahamada, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2012. Translation from
57. Fanta Nacro. “L’espoir au féminin par Bernard Verschueren,” Le Courrier le
magazine de la coopération au développement, no. 190 (January 2002). Translation from
58. Cited from Baba Diop.Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
59. Djia Mambu interview, 2014. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
60. From press kit Même pas mal. Translation from French by Beti Ellerson.
61. Jihan El Tahri, African Women in Cinema Blog, 2010.
62. Text drawn from Visualizing Herstories, Centre for the Study and Research of
African Women in Cinema, 2004.
63. Mahen Sophia Bonetti, Sisters of the Screen.
64. That African women filmmakers are quite capable of explicating and analyzing
their cinematic choices and experiences was in stark relief at the Colloquium-Meeting
“Francophone African Women Filmmakers: 40 Years of Cinema (1972–2012),” Paris, 23–4
November 2012. A particularly memorable example occurred during the panel “Women’s
Fictions and Documentaries: Creations, Politics and Aesthetics,” while Sheila Petty of the
University of Regina examined the work of Franco-Tunisian Nadia El Fani. The next day,
at the filmmakers’ roundtable, Nadia very eloquently discussed her own work.

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Je ne suis pas du tout féministe. Je suis féminisante. Je defends

Womanist Work: Defending the Cause of Women

I introduce Safi Faye’s words as a point of departure in the exploration of the

often prioritizes gender rather than integrating its intersectional relation-

Therefore, her womanistic act of defending the cause of women is con-

African Women Everywhere: Womanistic Voices behind the

I begin with a selection of voices of African women of the screen that

I have always been interested in [African] women’s discourse, because I think it

Her reflections describe the womanist theoretical framework that is an

Hence, she proposes a type of womanist advocacy by claiming one’s agency

As director of the Newtown Film School in South Africa, Masepeke

a portrayal I began to interrogate the rationale behind such representations of

She is applying these womanistic principles in her teaching as she has

I have always been interested in [African] women’s discourse, because I think it

Her reflections describe one of the womanistic beliefs intrinsic to African

The Womanist Work of Sisters of the Screen, African Women in

In 2016 I assisted in the curation of the Sisters in African Cinema-

For me this notion is rather abstract. I am not sure if it actually exists. I am

Monique Mbeka Phoba:

Let Me Tell You What I Do When I Make Films

Since I first embarked on my journey toward a genuine discipline in

and validation, and perhaps more importantly, my motivation to forge

I did not come to cinema by chance, I studied ethnology at the Sorbonne. We

Asmara (Beraki) Marek, whose repertoire of eclectic stories reflects her

Filmmaking gives one an opportunity to explore and synthesize basic human

Even if the basis of a story is autobiographical the process of making a script

Rahel Zegeye recounted to me the extraordinary story of how she came to

The backstory of this interview is equally remarkable. In 2011, Alex Shams,

Mame Woury Thioubou’s inquiry into practices of beauty probes women’s

In my film, I investigate the practices of feminine beauty in St. Louis (Senegal).

Branwen Okpako, currently a professor at the University of California-Davis,

Musola Cathrine Kaseketi launched the Shungu Namutitima International

The mission of Nyerai Films is to produce and distribute compelling interna-

From the audience Sarah Maldoror expressed her support and

Anne-Laure . . . your film is outstanding, it is fantastic. Because you are a woman,

Matamba Kombila explores the complexities of her multiple identities and

Zara Mahamat Yacoub, who currently works in radio communication,

Her role in African women’s struggle against female genital cutting: “I am

In so doing, the film was a moment of catharsis for Annette Kouamba

Rama Thiaw’s film The Revolution Won’t Be Televised (2016, Senegal) is a

My film begins on 17 January 2012, at the end of the Senegalese legislative

mobilized and created with other friends—musicians, artists and journalists,

Karima Saïdi gives an intimate account of the conception and development

Taghreed Elsanhouri’s Our Beloved Sudan (2011, Sudan) documents the

Beatrix Mugishagwe, founding chairperson of the Tanzanian Association

Neveen Shalaby, cineaste, activist, participant and witness on January 25,

Afterward, he thanked me for my gesture and we hugged. He told me

Jacqueline Kalimunda told me about her transmedia project on love and

Single Rwandan / Celib Rwandais (2015, Rwanda) is an exciting adventure. A

Jacqueline Kalimunda’s words are evermore a reflection of the current reality

Jacqueline Nsiah embraces new media to explore the Sankofa return-to-the-

Returning from Exile is about the second-generation Ghanaians born in a

Zulfah Otto Sallies, fascinated by her daughter Muneera’s development, set

Claude Haffner’s autobiographical story is about her place “in between”:

myself, my history, my bi-raciality. . . . The issue of culture, of being mixed-race,

Ngozi Onwurah introduces an important element to the discourse on the

Hachimiya Ahamada, diasporian of the Comoros and French of Comorian

I want to show a different Comoros than preconceived ideas of it . . . Ashes of

As a woman? Of course I am treated as a woman and you have to prove your-

Hence, while many women perceive a “female sensibility,” pinpointing, local-