April 13, 2003

Every two years, on the last Saturday in February, the West African city of Ouagadougou hosts an extraordinary event. Under a haze of red dust and a relentless sun that tips the thermometer to 40 degrees Celsius most days, 50,000 people from one of the poorest countries in the world pack into the city’s main stadium to celebrate the beginning of one of cinema’s best-kept secrets: Fespaco, a two-week festival of African film.

From 8am till well past midnight for 14 hectic days this year, actors, actresses, directors, producers, writers, financiers, distributors, critics and cinephiles from across the continent met in Ouaga, Burkina Faso’s capital city, to watch almost 400 African films. In the streets, speculation centred on who would win the Etalan de Yennenga, Africa’s equivalent of the Oscar, which rewards “the feature film that best portrays Africa’s realities.” Winning the Etalan may not be a ticket to instant fortune since the prize is worth only pounds sterling 5,000, but it’s African film’s highest honour and guarantees much-needed audiences throughout the continent and across the world.

Also up for grabs were gongs for the best actor and actress, the best documentary and best TV production. And alongside the festival, Ouaga hosted a film market where industry movers and shakers gathered for a rare opportunity to buy, sell, deal, pitch and gossip. Among this year’s films at the market were two from directors in the UK: Kim Longinotto’s documentary about female genital mutilation, The day I will never forget, and 100 days, Nick Hughes’s drama about the Rwandan genocide.

Fespaco — which stands for La Festival Panafrican du Cinema et de la Television de Ouagadougou — has transformed Burkina into the undisputed capital of African film. Locals say that their country is to black film what Jamaica is to black music. All the more remarkable, then, that it takes place in a country the United Nations rates as one of the five poorest in the world. A one-time French colony that was studiously ignored by its former master except when it needed slave labour, Burkina has few natural resources, an unforgiving environment that ranges from sahel in the north to savanna in the south, and a crippling national debt. Ninety per cent of the 11.6 million population are farmers for whom life is extremely hard.

Such chronic poverty makes film production extremely difficult. “It’s not an easy task to make films in Burkina because there are serious financial problems,” says one of the festival’s organizers, Idrissa Ouedraogo. “Money is scarce and all the materials we need have to be imported, which is costly and can take a lot of time.” Nevertheless, there has been a film industry here since Burkina gained independence in 1960, when several directors trained in Moscow and returned to make films with Marxist themes — mainly the exploitation of the masses by colonial rulers and later governments.

Today, in the midst of parties in air-conditioned hotels, a world away from the choked streets of downtown Ouaga, it would be easy to conclude that these early influences have died away. But contemporary film-makers still have a deep-held conviction that cinema is one of the continent’s most potent tools. The winners at this year’s festival reflected daily realities for hundreds of millions of Africans: the Etalan de Yennenga went to Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako for his film Hermakono, which follows its central character as he prepares to leave his home and emigrate to Europe; Senegalese director Alain Gomis took the prize for best director with his film L’Afrance, also about emigration and national identity; and Malian Alassane Kouyate’s film Kabala examined the impact of a village well drying up in the small village of Mande.

“Film is not just for the rich,” says Ouedraogo. “Watching films and TV is a way to sensitize poorer people to important issues. About half the films I have watched this year have been about female genital mutilation — so cinema is a good way of exploring issues that are important for ordinary people, and discussing both the good and bad aspects of our culture.”

Money from the festival has also been used to buy a mobile cinema which tours rural areas. “That allows the people who normally can’t afford the 1 pound (sterling) to see films the opportunity to do so,” he says.

Surprisingly, for such a young democracy, there’s no censorship system in Burkina. When, in the 1990s, a government minister became popularly known as “Ten per cent” because of the large kickbacks he allegedly took on finance deals, a Burkinabe director was able to make a biting satire on official corruption, with a character called “Six per cent.”

Indeed, strong backing from the government has ensured that the festival has thrived for more than 30 years. It started in 1969, when a small group of film enthusiasts decided to screen some films in Ouaga. It was a huge success, and quickly grew into an annual event drawing people from across Africa. One politician in particular — the charismatic, popular leader Thomas Sankara who came to power in a bloody coup in November 1982 — gave Fespaco his full support. “He is the main force behind the success of film-making on Burkina and the continuing success of the festival,” says Ouedraogo. Sankara had an unconventional approach to politics, making ministers work in the field for weeks at a time. He was overthrown in a coup in 1987 and shot.

But despite government support and the indisputable success of Fespaco, film-makers are pessimistic about the future of African film. Burkina’s most famous film-maker, also called Idrissa Ouedraogo (who won the 1990 Grand Prix at Cannes for his film Tilai) recently declared that “African cinema is very sick” and called for radical changes in distribution. Finance and distribution are serious problems in Africa: with tiny audiences and revenues, the industry remains dependent on foreign donors — some 80 per cent of funding for African cinema comes from Europe. The Burkina government can afford to finance only two feature films a year, produced on extremely tight budgets — Burkina producer Danny Kouyate’s next film, Ouaga saga, will be shot in just five weeks.

This shortage of funds and films means that after the festival, when 400 films are shown in two weeks, Ouaga can only afford to screen one African film a month. Which may explain the enduring popularity of Fespaco in Africa — and its continuing obscurity in the rest of the world. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

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